Telegram has grown steadily since its launch in 2013 to become one of the most popular messaging apps in the world. Digital Trends recently listed it as one of our favorites.
There have been updates aplenty over the years, with the most recent one sporting several new features worth a mention.
Slow Mode
The first one, Slow Mode, lets a group administrator control how often members can post a message to the group. Hit the permissions page and select one of several different time periods showing how long members will have to wait before they can post again. The intervals start at 30 seconds, with additional possibilities including 1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, and 1 hour.
As Telegram notes in a blog post, Slow Mode “can make conversations in the group more orderly, while raising the value of each individual message.” It may also prompt users to think more carefully about what they want to say instead of firing off a load of thoughts without much consideration.
But no, the feature doesn’t let you target individual users that tend to post at a far higher rate than others in the group. In other words, everyone in the group is affected by the selected time interval.
Silent Messages
Another neat addition to Telegram is Silent Messages. There may be times when you want to message a friend or co-worker late at night but worry their phone might wake them with an alert (if they failed to set their device to silent). Or perhaps you know they’re in a meeting or a quiet place like a library and you don’t want to disturb them. The good news is that now you can simply press and hold the Send button to ensure the message arrives on the recipient’s handset without making a noise. A notification will still show on the phone, but without any audible sound accompanying it.
Telegram says the feature also works for group chats “should you get an urgent idea at five in the morning, but not urgent enough to wake up everyone in your work chat.”
The messaging app, which is free and contains no ads, currently has around 200 million monthly active users. Telegram CEO Pavel Durov claimed in March 2019 that 3 million people signed up in the space of a day after the worst outage in Facebook’s history temporarily knocked out its Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram services.
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