patrick.net

Telegram is skyrocketing in growth, as people are suddenly waking up to the dangers of Big Tech monopolies.

“In the first week of January, Telegram surpassed 500 million monthly active users. After that it kept growing: 25 million new users joined Telegram in the last 72 hours alone,” Telegram founder Pavel Durov wrote today on his Telegram channel.

“People no longer want to exchange their privacy for free services. They no longer want to be held hostage by tech monopolies that seem to think they can get away with anything as long as their apps have a critical mass of users.”

The ongoing showdown that corporate media and Big Tech have stepped up to the maximum with the excuse that one incident – such as the several hours of unrest on US Capitol last Wednesday – can be used handily to stop free speech and open source, has left many users of apps like Telegram wondering just how far this purge will go.

This has become an especially hot topic after Parler, which was a thorn in the side of big media ever since November’s election in the US – got thoroughly deplatformed: first Apple and Google banned it from its stores with the pretext that it was responsible for, basically, allowing free speech (it otherwise guarantees it as the selling and differentiating point compared to the tightly policed and self-censored giant social networks). If that wasn’t enough, Amazon Web services also denied Parler hosting.