A lot of users of Telegram are those who lost WhatsApp for few hours and was looking for alternative btw... I'm not sure about values honestly.

Its not years behind. That's a lie. In fact Id say it's ahead because you don't need to use a phone number (huge liability), you can choose to use e2e if you want and theyre not storing your data in plaintext!

Oh and all of matrix is totally open source! Wow. That's how you know you can trust it. If they decide to pull a WhatsApp and move to Facebook, you can just fork and get on with your life.

I like that the telegram client is open, but the sever isn't. Which means I don't really trust them. Same problem as Signal.

I used to really like ICQ's floating usernames and email-like modal. A message came in and a little icon appear beside the username (which I used to float in the unused part of my menu bar) along with an audible notification "uh oh!" You double click it, a small chat window opened up with your conversation history and a place to type. You then typed and send your message and the window disappeared until they replied. It was great because you could see who the messages were from without having to use any screen real estate.

Then things like MSN Messenger got popular. Protocols got locked down and screen real estate got consumed. For some reason everyone wanted to use Google Talk (which was horrible but at least spoke XMPP so folks on Pidgin could still chat with their friends). BB messenger taught a few tricks to Apple. Then facebook messenger happened, whatsapp, wechat, etc.

In the background, there were programs like teamspeak and mumble that were trying to do voice chat for gaming reasons. In a way, these were the precursors to Discord who now, for some reason, dominates what people consider a good chat UI. I personally think it's a bloated mess. In my opinion, ICQ had the best chat UI. Because it stayed out of the way.

It's too bad it turned out to be spyware! Hah