Dear Maintainer,

Telegram is a cloud messaging program.

By storing all its data on Telegram’s cloud, it takes away the user’s data, and with it their freedom, from them.

It is fortunately possible to export Telegram’s data, in machine readable format, in each conversation’s settings.  However, this is done only for whole conversations at the same time, and cannot be done incrementally.

Furthermore, a such thing cannot be programmed automatically on a regular basis.

Ideally this json storing of conversations in one directory per conversation should be automatic, and downloaded media should belong to this directory automatically, instead of all be gathered in some absolutely enormous “~/Downloads/Telegram Desktop”.

Given Telegrams seems to use json all the way ground for its protocol, I induce the way it suggests to export conversation is also a similar one to the one that it gets from Telegram’s servers, hence it would be maybe a relevant way to keep data stored, in order to share the memory conversation loading implementation.

This would especially be useful in case of sheer network connection, of gone internet access, or, for the matter, to circumvent remote message deletion.

Telegram (be for the sake of some users convenience, or for copying the industry practice of other competing social networks, that enables more engaging addiction) includes some antifeatures, that are purposedly not controllable by its users, contrarily to most of its other features.

Remote message deletion may, in some occasions, be one of them.

Although it is great for ((somewhat) coordinated) privacy, for intimacy, etc. Read receipts also allow for easy gaslighting and deceiption.

Ideally computers should work for the user and be useful to them by improving their life.  If their own biological memory do fails, storing of logs can be a remedy to that.  And beside regular export of all logs (which, by its non incrementality, is painful), is is currently impossible to conveniently do so.

The ideal would be to develop a patch adding to privacy settings the option to stop honoring deletion requests from specific contacts, group of contacts, groups, or channels.

The easiest proof of concept would be simply a patch breaking the remote deletion of messages while Telegram still has them loaded, this would at least, in the most malicious environment, ease interaction (that would be acceptable to me, and maybe to some other, in protestation for the purposedly hardening of disabling a such thing).  Possibly applied in all Debian, since unless messages are stored locally, this doesn’t harm privacy (but it does harm convenience of other people than the user… however, a user’s computer should serve them, not others, otherwise the user doesn’t truely own his computer anymore)

A middle solution would be a setting disabling live remote deletion of messages, without yet implementing local storage of them (and a step toward ideal solution).

I understand such a thing might be considered unjust by remote correspondents, but should be trivial to implement, if not already working exactly that way out of total luck, in any other implementation, such as telegram-purple, or telegram.el.  Hence, what is unjust, is that some users (actually more power users, which actually makes it elitist) are protected against such gaslighting, and can at will circumvent this privacy feature (and even break it, even if both parties would consent, since not every implementation would implement cloud storage and remote deletion at all), while telegram-desktop users aren’t.

Some people may also be mislead about how computers can and should work by believing it is possible to force others’ computer to do something else than what their owners want to do.  By the virtue of free-software, such misbeliefs should be fighted against, by education, and also by better software.  This is a such improvement.

I understand these suggestions are likely hard to implement, and am realistic and not very optimist toward that.  However, I wanted to write this for history, and at least to advertise the situation, politically, and the possible advantages of alternative implementations of Telegram.

Thank you