I want to add a funny story. When I used to live in Iran, I couldn't join any of Wikimedia telegram groups (including three or four wikimedia hackathons when I was participating in them) because my phone number had country code of Iran (duh) and Telegram banned users being able to join large groups for the whole country of Iran on the grounds that lots of spammers are from Iran which is true. I don't know if it's still the case or not but this is one of privileges people have and might not notice it (not to mention the racist behavior of Telegram).

If I can shamelessly promote my project, you can use Wikimedia Chat instead: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Chat (https://diff.wikimedia.org/2020/09/18/introducing-wikimedia-chat/)

Best

On Fri, Oct 23, 2020 at 12:09 PM Željko Blaće <zblace@mi2.hr> wrote:

On 10/22/20, Kaarel Vaidla <kvaidla@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> How to participate
...
> * Join our Telegram group [2].

It would be amazing if we could embody the values of movement strategy
whenever we can. Using only Telegram group as recommendation is NOT*.

In general please consider not to endorse commercial and closed source
software as primary communication channel. It is also bad in terms of
usability and intensity/velocity of exchanges in conditions and
context of massive cross-zone/cross-cultural event organizing. Likely
to be a cute looking mess and info bottleneck. I already have multiple
Wikimedia Telegram groups that hard to follow and take more personal
energy then they should at these times of pandemic. Please re-consider
this!

My arguments are presented on the Telegram group itself and your meta
page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Transition/Global_Conversations#Use_of_Telegram_for_working_official_communication_for_events_-_pls_NO

In Solidarity and with Care
~Zblace

*As a queer person without western privileges I can recommend its
limited use due to phone number privacy and I do also use it myself
but it should be neither only nor first option.

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