Telegram is a bad IM program (deleted no warning no crime no appeal)

Wasn't sure where to post this, just the rant of the moment.

I personally hate the Telegram IM messenger program.

The reason is really simple - I was randomly and without warning or appeal banned. My entire phone number got banned so no creating new accounts either. I didn't engage in any kind of illegal activity that i'm aware of, I didn't do anything but talk to six close friends intensively for a period of a year or so. I never even set foot in any kind of forum, let alone posted things to a public forum that someone could find questionable, literally 100% private conversation and I got banned.

Worse than that, there's no backlog or backscroll, even the files on one PC were toasted. Scorched earth. I can't refer back to important links we exchanged or things we discussed even if I was banned from further usage.

Emailing the "support" team is nonexistant, you can search the internet and nobody else ever hears back either. I have from more than one email.

Who runs an IM program like this? Not told why, cant access your logs (even my FILES directory seemed missing on one of the two computers I had it on when I was banned in realtime while using it, I dont know if thats intentional or a bug as when I tried to log in from another computer that directory was intact), cant even appeal because nobody ever answers.


Call this a warning - if you use this messager and you have any conversations you care about export them now. I cant tell if this is a glitch or intentional behavior or hacker-enabled behavior (could I have been targeted because of political activities elsewhere? That's literally my only possible guess because it wouldn't be the first time) but it really gave me a What The Fuzz reaction.

 

"it is too late if you can not recover your data, but you could have stored your data on your local disk"

Months late response here because was busy with school and RL problems, yes there's an export function, but who in the world designs a program to use an online lockout to prevent you from even accessing your local stored data of previous discussions? Based on mere accusation without appeal (somehow I was flagged with no reason given, when I only talk to six people and never set foot in a chatroom to engage in any kind of questionable behavior) and then 100% of all emails of complaint or anything sent to the company ignored going straight to the garbage without response?

Thanks to other posters for a few suggested alternatives though. I just wanted my rant to warn off other potential users of an unexpectedly crappy program violating what I would think are rules of reasonable design... i've never seen a "scorched earth" policy for data already on your local backscroll (because it caches many things locally up to some amount) let alone merely upon accusation of what had to be someone who never met or talked to me once since I never paged someone I didnt know or set foot in a chatroom. (as opposed to say being proven guilty of doing heavily illegal things or something, and yet that itself would have to mean someone is reading your private logs to prove anyways so even then would seem questionable unless you're engaged in something truly truly shady)

Yeah if someone needs to use the program it's clear it's incredibly poorly designed by default.

Other than the mentioned Signal and Briar and perhaps that encrypted Discord, does anyone know of encrypted chat that works across the Great Firewall of China? (I havent tested any of those three offhand but Telegram has never worked since I first tried it for them, and VPN's arent legal) I have chinese friends literally from Wuhan who have to be careful what they say or you get disappeared. Of course even using the app is probably suspicious even if not blocked... I cant even imagine what to suggest some do to get word out.