Pavel Durov

A major Telegram update with 11 new features is out, just 4 weeks after the previous one. Among my favorite new features are Similar Channels and Story Reposts. Both give content creators new ways to grow their channels organically within Telegram. Check out all the features in the blog post: https://telegram.org/blog/similar-channels While our iOS users can already enjoy the new version, the Google Play version is still waiting for review by Google. If you use Android and don’t want to wait you can download the direct version of Telegram. This version offers faster updates, fewer restrictions, and more affordable Telegram Premium subscriptions.

👉Announcing a $200,000 giveaway! 🪙 To celebrate our new feature, I’m hosting a giveaway of 10,000 Telegram Premium subscriptions 🤑 In a week, 10,000 random subscribers of my channel will receive a Telegram Premium subscription for 6 months 🤱 I have already prepaid for this giveaway on Fragment with $200,000-worth of Toncoin I bought on a cryptoexchange. Enjoy! ☕️

Now every channel on Telegram can host FAIR giveaways. What’s a giveaway? ❓ It’s when someone promises to give out prizes to random followers 😏😏😏 Many giveaways on social media were scams. There was no way to prove the winner was chosen fairly 😐 Until now. Telegram is the first social media platform to natively support giveaways with guaranteed random selection + prepaid prize funds 🤑 Check out the demos here: https://telegram.org/blog/giveaways

💳TPS (Transactions Per Second) in blockchain networks. Details — https://blog.ton.org/100000-transactions-per-second-ton-sets-the-world-record-on-its-first-performance-test

🚀 TON set the record for the fastest blockchain in the world! 😎We were right to choose TON as the blockchain platform for Telegram. From a technological standpoint, competitors are years behind in scalability. Bitcoin is likely to stay, but other general-purpose blockchains look obsolete 👎 https://coincodex.com/article/33968/toncoin-ton-blockchain-breaks-record-for-worlds-fastest-network-beating-solana-polygon-visa-and-mastercard/

🔤🔠🔤🔤❗️Update Telegram to the latest version to see how replies and link previews should work in 2023. Since we invented these formats several years ago, the industry must have been waiting for us to show them the next step. The wait is over! 👿 https://telegram.org/blog/reply-revolution Bonus: you can now rewind / fast forward Stories by holding and sliding sideways (I wonder why other apps that have had stories for years hadn’t done this before 🤌 — there must be some dark secret we’ll uncover soon 🔮). Bonus Bonus: our beloved Premium users (almost 3.5 million of them already) get to choose the color of their name and quotes in chats. Go orange this Halloween! ❤️

Every day, Telegram's moderators and AI tools remove millions of obviously harmful content from our public platform. However, tackling war-related coverage is seldom obvious. Earlier this week, Hamas used Telegram to warn civilians in Ashkelon to leave the area ahead of their missile strikes. Would shutting down their channel help save lives — or would it endanger more lives? It’s always tempting to act on emotional impulses. But such complex situations require thorough consideration that should also take into account the differences between social platforms. Unlike other apps that algorithmically promote shocking content to unsuspecting people, on Telegram, users receive only the content to which they specifically subscribed. As such, it's unlikely that Telegram channels can be used to significantly amplify propaganda. Instead, they serve as a unique source of first-hand information for researchers, journalists, and fact-checkers. While it would be easy for us to destroy this source of information, doing so risks exacerbating an already dire situation.

Some people are wishing me a happy "birthday" today. But today, 10.10.2023, is not really the day when I was born. I was actually born many years ago – today is merely an anniversary of my birthday. Personally, I prefer to celebrate it as the 12th anniversary of my 27th birthday. Don’t let yourselves get misled! 🍸

Hundreds of thousands are signing up for Telegram from Israel and the Palestinian Territories. In addition to Arabic, we’ve just added support for Hebrew in the Telegram UI. Everyone affected should have reliable access to news and private communication in these dire times.

The day has come. Telegram channels can now post Stories! Stories on Telegram are more visible than in most apps, because they are displayed right on the main screen. Obviously, we couldn’t let channels flood users with Stories without reasonable limits: this would create too much noise in your Chats. This is why we designed the Boost system. With Boosts, users can give their favorite channels the ability to post stories. More boosts mean more stories per day for a channel. Every 24 hours users can reassign their boost. In the future, boosts will also unlock other features for channels, such as custom reactions, emoji statuses or custom backgrounds. We’ll also introduce more ways for channels to get Boosts. To prevent abuse, only Premium users can boost channels. It shouldn’t be hard to collect Boosts for channels with real subscribers, while those with fake followers may struggle (larger channels need more Boosts to unlock stories). Let the Boost Hunt begin! 🏹

🔍This month we changed how searching public channels and groups works on Telegram. Previously, public channels with more subscribers would appear higher in the search results. That system worked fine for a while, but was increasingly getting abused by spammers. That's why we now only count genuine subscribers of channels for ranking. For example, channels with more Premium subscribers will generally rank higher. However, if a specific Premium subscriber joins too many channels, they won't give those channels as big of a search ranking boost. Of course, the new search also prioritizes results from your country. The feedback on this change is overwhelmingly positive. Channels with an inflated subscribers count have become less visible, while useful groups and mini-apps are now attracting more users. 🚀

Years ago, we built TON – a scalable and fast blockchain technology. TON was designed to serve hundreds of millions of social media users. Since 2020, the TON technology has been maintained and improved by the open source community. Last year, we enabled our users to buy and sell Telegram usernames and IDs on Fragment – a TON-based auction platform. It was a phenomenal success. Telegram sold $120M worth of digital assets in auctions, while early buyers of some Telegram-related digital assets – such as Telegram anonymous numbers – have seen a 27x (!) increase in value after only 9 months. This success showed the potential of Web 3.0 on Telegram. For the first time in history, users were allowed to own their social media identities directly. Now we want to integrate blockchain technologies deeper into Telegram. To do that, we worked with the folks from the TON community to add their TON Wallet to Telegram as a mini-app. Starting this November, TON Wallet will be included in the settings and attachment menus for all our users outside the US and some other countries (if you added @wallet and have the latest version of Telegram, you can already see the wallet option in the menus). This step will allow developers to enable hundreds of new valuable features – similar to those pioneered on Fragment. TON Wallet, a third-party mini-app inside Telegram, will introduce a whole new dimension of Web 3.0 to hundreds of millions of Telegram users.

🕯 Happy 🥳 birthday, Telegram! https://telegram.org/blog/stories

➕ Jokes aside, this is what Telegram beta looked like in late 2012. Note the ability to add photos in profile pages (with geotags and reactions!), which is similar to the stories posts we are launching now. Although they weren’t included in the final version 10 years ago, stories have been part of the plan all along!

🎈 This is what Telegram for iOS would look like today if its design hadn't evolved since its launch on the 14th of August, 2013! 🚩🚩1️⃣0️⃣🚩🚩