配图 / Living Mountain

配图 / Living Mountain POEM Day and night come hand in hand like a boy and a girl pausing only to eat wild berries out of a dish painted with pictures of birds. They climb the high ice-covered mountain, then they fly away. But you and I don’t do such things We climb the same mountain; I say a prayer for the wind to lift us but it does no good; you hide your head so as not to see the end Downward and downward and downward and downward is where the wind is taking us; I try to comfort you but words are not the answer; I sing to you as mother sang to me Your eyes are closed. We pass the boy and girl we saw at the beginning; now they are standing on a wooden bridge; I can see their house behind them; How fast you go they call to us, but no, the wind is in our ears, that is what we hear And then we are simply falling And the world goes by, all the worlds, each more beautiful than the last; I touch your cheek to protect you Louise Glück #诗歌

配图 / Andrew Macara

配图 / Andrew Macara Children's Song We live in our own world, A world that is too small For you to stoop and enter Even on hands and knees, The adult subterfuge. And though you probe and pry With analytic eye, And eavesdrop all our talk With an amused look, You cannot find the centre Where we dance, where we play, Where life is still asleep Under the closed flower, Under the smooth shell Of eggs in the cupped nest That mock the faded blue Of your remoter heaven. R. S. Thomas #诗歌

配图 / Gordan Hunt

配图 / Gordan Hunt To the Sea Sometimes when you start to ramble or rather when you feel you are starting to ramble you will say Well, now I’m rambling though I don’t think you ever are. And if you ever are I don’t really care. And not just because I and everyone really at times falls into our own unspooling which really I think is a beautiful softness of being human, trying to show someone else the color of all our threads, wanting another to know everything in us we are trying to show them but in the specific, in the specific of you here in this car that you are driving and in which I am sitting beside you with regards to you and your specific mouth parting to give way to the specific sweetness that is the water of your voice tumbling forthlike I said I don’t ever really mind how much more you might keep speaking as it simply means I get to hear you speak for longer. What was a stream now a river. Anis Mojgani #诗歌

Telegram now has significantly over 1 billion monthly active use

Telegram now has significantly over 1 billion monthly active users, becoming the second most popular messaging app in the world (excluding the China-specific WeChat) User engagement is also rising. On average, each user opens Telegram 21 times daily and spends 41 minutes on the app every day. Meanwhile, our revenue growth has exploded, with $547M in profit in 2024 Ahead of us stands WhatsApp a cheap, watered-down imitation of Telegram. For years, they’ve desperately tried to copy our innovations while burning billions on lobbying and PR campaigns to slow us down. They failed. Telegram grew, became profitable, and unlike our competitor retained its independence We are just getting started

配图 / Sergey Neamoscou

配图 / Sergey Neamoscou First Time Brushing Teeth Next to You When I say first time, that implies there will be a second, a fourth, a ninety-ninth. From far away our teeth must look like Tic Tacs, Chiclets, moons of a faraway planet. Nocturnal animals can smell better at night because scent lingers when the air is still, and so I smell the mint of our mouths but also the spill of peppers from the salsa dropped on your shirt. The greasy sidewalks we walked an hour earlier. Hotel soap freshly bubbled and wet in the dish. When I root through the thicket or the brush pile, my fur turns electric striped and tail-tumbled. I foam at the mouth. The mask on my face means bandit. Turns out I love the dark. My little paws want to grab everything and wash it. Aimee Nezhukumatathil #诗歌

Thanks everyone for your support and love!

Thanks everyone for your support and love! Last month I got interviewed by police for 4 days after arriving in Paris. I was told I may be personally responsible for other people’s illegal use of Telegram, because the French authorities didn’t receive responses from Telegram. This was surprising for several reasons:  1. Telegram has an official representative in the EU that accepts and replies to EU requests. Its email address has been publicly available for anyone in the EU who googles “Telegram EU address for law enforcement”.  2. The French authorities had numerous ways to reach me to request assistance. As a French citizen, I was a frequent guest at the French consulate in Dubai. A while ago, when asked, I personally helped them establish a hotline with Telegram to deal with the threat of terrorism in France. 3. If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself. Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach. Building technology is hard enough as it is. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools.  Establishing the right balance between privacy and security is not easy. You have to reconcile privacy laws with law enforcement requirements, and local laws with EU laws. You have to take into account technological limitations. As a platform, you want your processes to be consistent globally, while also ensuring they are not abused in countries with weak rule of law. We’ve been committed to engaging with regulators to find the right balance. Yes, we stand by our principles: our experience is shaped by our mission to protect our users in authoritarian regimes. But we’ve always been open to dialogue. Sometimes we can’t agree with a country’s regulator on the right balance between privacy and security. In those cases, we are ready to leave that country. We've done it many times. When Russia demanded we hand over “encryption keys” to enable surveillance, we refused and Telegram got banned in Russia. When Iran demanded we block channels of peaceful protesters, we refused and Telegram got banned in Iran. We are prepared to leave markets that aren’t compatible with our principles, because we are not doing this for money. We are driven by the intention to bring good and defend the basic rights of people, particularly in places where these rights are violated. All of that does not mean Telegram is perfect. Even the fact that authorities could be confused by where to send requests is something that we should improve. But the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue. We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day. We publish daily transparency reports (likeor). We have direct hotlines with NGOs to process urgent moderation requests faster. However, we hear voices saying that it’s not enough. Telegram’s abrupt increase in user count to 950M caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform. That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard. We’ve already started that process internally, and I will share more details on our progress with you very soon.  I hope that the events of August will result in making Telegram and the social networking industry as a whole safer and stronger. Thanks again for your love and memes