The FNA WhatsApp group will migrate to Telegram within the next few months.
The Facebook group will stay unaffected.
The main reason is the group size limit.
As you may know, there is a strict 257 member limit to WhatsApp groups.
At a dorm with room for ~550 people, it is not fair to exclude more than half of the community by design.
Telegram on the other hand supports groups with up to 200,000 members and gives our house speakers and tutors better administrative tools and support for bots which can help enrich the community with more features.
With the recent WhatsApp TOS change scandal, many people are already looking for an alternative messenger.
Chances are, many of your contacts are already there! There is no better time to make the switch than now.
Telegram in general has many more features and advantages over WhatsApp.
Here are some:
- Chats are not saved locally, so you don't have to worry about your storage space when joining large, spammy groups
- Much faster and better message search, e.g. you can search all messages by a specific person in a group
- You can create polls/quizzes directly in the app
- You can see past messages when joining a new group
- You can edit your messages and delete them without a trace
- You can send messages silently (so the recipient doesn't get a notification) or even schedule them ahead of time
- There is a "Saved Messages" chat for your personal notes - no need to create a group with someone and kick them again ;)
- Combine that with the edit/delete functionality and scheduled messages and you have a very powerful tool!
- Better formatting system:
- bold: **bold**
- italic: __italic__
strikethrough: ~~strikethrough~~monospace/code: `monospace/code`- Hyperlinks <- see that link for instructions
- Since you use two symbols for formatting, you are free to use single symbols normally *sips coffee*
- Per-chat full notification controls
- You can use public bots to add functionality, like @giphybot to easily find gifs, or even create your own bots!
- Animated stickers, searchable hashtags, and many other small enhancements
Telegram doesn't use end-to-end encryption (E2EE) by default for 1-on-1 chats and never uses them for groups. This is of course worse in terms of privacy when compared to other messengers - most notably Signal. We find that the group, due to its large size, can be considered public and as such has no reason to use encrypted messages (what's the point of encryption if everyone can see it?).
The advantages in terms of usability and administration tools (Signal does not have many of the aforementioned features, it is still lacking in this regard) make Telegram a better choice for the group chat. For your private chats, you can either use Telegram's E2E-encrypted "secret chats" or simply use a different messenger.
The screenshots below are from the Telegram X app instead of the official Telegram app. It looks a bit different but both are very similar feature-wise.
