Legend goes Telegram was created out of a necessity of Durov brothers to securely communicate with each other.
But, instead of creating open protocol that would set some standards others would follow and be able to evaluate, they created de-facto closed source version of just another messaging platform, no different to WhatsApp or anything else.
They open-sourced their clients, so most of tech folks would never understand the issue and would genuinely believe the whole thing is open-source. Which was never the case.
By willing to make their messaging platform available for everyone, they allowed everyone to send any number of files of any size. (First 8 years, before they introduced limits, still very generous limits.)
Million of users generating gigabytes of data? Sure thing, this design aligns with the ‘For everyone’ vision. Billions of users? Our messaging platform would gladly help them to accommodate! Everyone is welcome to garbage our servers!
Instead of making the messaging platform secure by design, and implementing things like automatic removal of all the history within, say, month, no exceptions.
Enough time to not care about that history too much for your typical normie.
Instead of that, they allowed everyone and their dog to garbage the servers with lots of unnecessary data that would live there for ages.
They were unprofitable for a decade, only to pursue the dream of a Russian oligarch. His vision to build a secure (sic!) messaging platform for everyone. A right of secure communication for everyone. And Russians are famous about human rights, right?
And people believe all that. And tech people believe that too.
Of course some plot to build a platform to influence masses of people isn’t Russia even remotely interested in doing. They never meddle with other countries, and they have no history of this. They are very busy building their own country and people. Been like that for ages.
I’m waiting for someone to build a messaging platform which would be unable to read messages and keep them on servers by design. So we could call it a social network or something.