" It was founded by two brothers trying to get around Russian censorship" / "Russia is one of the countries that has banned Telegram, funnily enough." - seems like a good story to increase credibility but I ain't buying it. Why are their servers running closed source? Signal is fully open-source. They really can't spy to any extent. If you're saying that about Signal you should really provide some info. Many many have tried to find anything shady about it and failed. Everything is in the open, it's open-source, fully. In contrast to Telegram which runs an open-source frontend but a closed source backend. Why do you think that is? Just think about it. The whole story of russians fighting censoring, Russia banned it, and they run closed source. Put all of them together, what image does that really paint? The shadiest thing is people here shilling you go on Telegram. And most are saying you go to fake channels, they say they belong to proeminent people yet they're fake. If this doesn't clue you in what's happening here....