Break free from Facebook, use Telegram !

Following the last Facebook global outage, that sent their main services (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and Whatsapp) unresponsive, I was surprised by the sheer number of people who were unable to reach their contacts. The non tech-savvy people even thought that the problem was their own, thinking their data plan expired, or their own system broke, going as far as reinitialize their smartphones.

All this happened when we know there are good alternatives to the Facebook ecosystem. For the messaging part, there is Telegram, Discord, Slack,...etc. People can use these as alternatives to their main Facebook messagings apps, or migrating to them altogether.

In this post, I will share some tips about Telegram, a very good messaging service, with more than half a billion users worldwide.

  1. To install Telegram on Android, go to Play Store, search for 'Telegram', the following screen will be displayed, install it and give Telegram the necessary permissions.

  2. Use your phone number to subscribe to Telegram, you will need it to authenticate Telegram on your other devices (Tablet, Laptop,..)

  3. Your contacts who already have Telegram will sync automatically, they will appear on the main Telegram chat screen, as follows :

4. You can join groups by their invite links, their links are generally like this : t.me/groupe_name_here. You can discuss, share content, mute conversation, or choose to exit it when you're done with it.

5. You can create groups and invite members as follows :

  1. Slide right on the app to display the menu, and click on New Group

2. Select the members you want to invite to the group

3. Give a name to your group

4. When members are select, click on next button to create the group

6. Telegram have a handy feature of channels. A channel is a one-to-many communication medium, where one party will broadcast its messages to its audience, whose number is illimited by design. Create a channel, give it a name, and invite subscribers directly, or send the channel link to people that want to subscribe, and start to share your content with your subscribers. The following screen captures explain this process :

  1. On the main Telegram interface, click on the Pen button

2. Choose New Channel

3. Give your channel a name

4. Select the subscribers you want to add to your channel

5. Select the type of your channel, when Public anyone can search it and join it on Telegram, if Private only people with the invite link will be able to join.

6. The channel interface, add your messages and files. They will be delivered to your audience.

8. Telegram have chatbots too. They are automated chat accounts, who will respond to your requests depending on what purpose they were programmed to serve. For example, I have a covid bot that will send me different Covid-19 data, related to a request I send to it in the chat.