A question I often get–especially from cryptography experts:

What is it with furries and Telegram?

No, they’re almost certainly not talking about that.

Most furries use Telegram to keep in touch with other members of our community. This leads many to wonder, “Why Telegram of all platforms?”

The answer is simple: Stickers.

Telegram was the first major chat platform that allowed custom Sticker Packs to be uploaded and used by its users. This led to the creation of a fuckton of sticker packs for peoples’ fursonas.

How many furry sticker packs are there? Well, my friend Nican started a project to collect and categorize them all. You can find their project online at bunnypa.ws.

As of this writing, there are over 230,000 stickers across over 7,300 sticker packs (including mine).

With that mystery out of the way, I’d like to share a few of my thoughts about Telegram as a platform and how to make it manageable.

Don’t Use Telegram As a Secure Messenger

Despite at least one practical attack against MTProto caused by its poor authentication, Telegram refuses to implement encryption that’s half as secure as the stuff I publish under my furry identity.

Instead, they ran a vapid “contest” and point to that as evidence of their protocol’s security.

If you’re a cryptography nerd, then you probably already understand that IND-CCA2 security is necessary for confidential messaging. You’re probably cautious enough to not depend on Telegram’s MTProto for privacy.

If you’re not a cryptography nerd, then you probably don’t care about any of this jargon or what it means.

It doesn’t help that they had another vulnerability that a renowned cryptography expert described as “the most backdoor-looking bug I’ve ever seen”.

So let’s be clear:

Telegram is best treated as a message board or a mailing list.

Use it for public communications, knowing full well that the world can read what you have to say. So long as that’s your threat model, you aren’t likely to ever get burned by the Durov family’s ego.

For anything that you’re not comfortable with being broadcast all over the Internet, you should use something more secure. Signal is the current recommended choice until something better comes along.

(Cwtch looks very good, but it’s not ready yet.)

Enable Folders to Make Notifications Reasonable

Last year, Telegram rolled out the ability to collect conversations, groups, and chats into folders. Most furries don’t know about this feature, because it doesn’t enable itself by default.

First, open the hamburger menu (on desktop) or click on your icon (on mobile), then click Settings.

Next, you’ll see an option for Folders.

You should see a button that says “Create New Folder”.

From here, you can include Chats or general types of Chats (All Groups, All Channels, All Personal Conversations) and then exclude specific entries.

Give it a name and press “Create”. After a bit of organizing, you might end up with a setup like this.

Now, here’s the cool thing (but sadly doesn’t exist on all clients–use Telegram Desktop on Windows and Linux if you want it).

Once you’re done setting up your folders, back out to the main interface on Desktop and right click one of the folders, then press “Mark As Read”.

Finally, an easy button to zero out your Notifications. Serenity at last!

Note: Doing this to the special Unread folder is congruent to pressing Shift + ESC on Slack. You’re welcome, Internet!

Make Yourself Undiscoverable

In the default configuration, if anyone has your phone number in their address book (n.b. queerphobic relatives) and they install Telegram, you’ll get a notification about them joining.

As you can imagine, that’s a bit of a terrifying prospect for a lot of people. Fortunately, you can turn this off.

Under Settings > Privacy and Security > Phone Number, you can limit the discovery to your contacts (n.b. in your phone’s address book).

Turn Off Notifications for Pinned Messages

Under Settings > Notifications, you will find the appropriate checkbox under the Events heading.

A lot of furry Telegram groups like to notify all users whenever they pin a message. These notifications will even override your normal preferences if you disabled notifications for that group.

Also, you’re probably going to want to disable notifications for every channel / group / rando with very few exceptions, or else Telegram will quickly get super annoying.

Although Telegram isn’t in the same league as Signal and WhatsApp, its user experience is good–especially if you’re a furry.

I hope with the tips I shared above, as well as resources like bunnypa.ws, the Furry Telegram experience will be greatly improved for everyone that reads my blog.