Topic: Why do so many artists use Telegram?

Posted under General

Why do so many artists use Telegram, while virtually none use libre and decentralized alternatives like Matrix?

The only artist who uses Matrix i know of is myself, but i have not drawn anything worthy of being shared yet.

Is it too complicated or inconvinient for the average person? (I mean inconvinient for reasons other than the lack of other users).

Is it something else?

electricitywolf said:
Why do so many artists use Telegram, while virtually none use libre and decentralized alternatives like Matrix?

The only artist who uses Matrix i know of is myself, but i have not drawn anything worthy of being shared yet.

Is it too complicated or inconvinient for the average person? (I mean inconvinient for reasons other than the lack of other users).

Is it something else?

Probably the same reason some artists only use twitter. It's the one most people are on and use for now.

leotheairwolf said:
Probably the same reason some artists only use twitter. It's the one most people are on and use for now.

You mean "most"? "Some" is for Instagram and thankfully enough for that I'm not missing out on much.

electricitywolf said:
Why do so many artists use Telegram, while virtually none use libre and decentralized alternatives like Matrix?

The only artist who uses Matrix i know of is myself, but i have not drawn anything worthy of being shared yet.

Is it too complicated or inconvinient for the average person? (I mean inconvinient for reasons other than the lack of other users).

Is it something else?

Besides the movie, never heard of Matrix

Telegram has many more options than other messaging services, apart from having greater communication to interact

leotheairwolf said:
Probably the same reason some artists only use twitter. It's the one most people are on and use for now.

This is it. It doesn't matter how cool a platform's features are if nobody's on it. Artists rely on people seeing their work

I believe it's because a couple of reasons:
-Tends to be more "secure" than most other social media.
-It gives artists just enough functionality without becoming obnoxious.
-It's better for hosting files than discord by miles.
-Simple layout but not too basic.

Those are just a few reasons I could think of.

Telegram stickers have been a big cash cow for many artists, people will invest thousands into their own sticker pack. I imagine many artists would sign up to try and get a slice of the pie.

Why it was popular with furries in the first place? Probably because everything else at the time was pretty bad, when Telegram started to become popular Discord didn't exist yet and people were still using Skype of all things. Apps like WhatsApp required sharing your phone number, which you obviously don't want to do with random strangers in a furry group. Telegram's claims of being secure were also much more believable, especially considering the Facebook buyout of WhatsApp was pretty recent news at the time. Things people had previously been fine with, like IRC, had just become too inconvenient with the lack of good mobile clients, inability to easily send photos, files or rich text, and requiring a BNC to be able to protect your IP and keep chatlogs while you're offline.

Other apps like Kik or whatever people used before Telegram were just garbage, didn't have a desktop app and limited group size to something ridiculously small like 20 members. Due to not requiring a phone number to sign-up, a lot of those apps are also just flooded with kids who can't sign up to Telegram and then the sexual predators that are there to find them.

And then there's the Telegram stickers - a built in feature to flex your furry wealth over other people.

Regarding Matrix, the average user probably doesn't even know what decentralization is or why they should care. Privacy? In their mind, other apps (which they already have friends using) already offer them that, why sign up for something else? Telegram is just what happened to be around when people had a niche they needed to be filled - somewhere to be a degenerate furry with just enough privacy that their parents don't find out and disown them. In a way, Telegram just got lucky, in the same way Zoom got lucky that everybody for some reason decided to use them during the pandemic despite much better options existing.

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