It's a lot easier to get a telegram account. I use telegram for its API and automated notifications, not impossible to do that with signal, but difficult to the point of serious impracticality. Telegram groups also don't really have anything that compares with Signal.

For person to person communication, its signal every time though.

Not an excuse but Telegram is pretty, and full of colors and animations. Signal is ugly (which is a feature for a small number of users).

But yes it's shady since their custom encryption is weak and they hold the keys.

it got big in people's minds earlier. my experience over the last 5 years has been that the only people still using telegram are fascists and cishet eastern europeans. queer folks in eastern europe mostly moved to signal (again. this is my experience. it's purely anecdotal)

I've had it installed for a while. Didn't use it much, but it was fun to see the pop ups from people out of address book joining telegram.

There were some usual suspects of kind of 'sceptical' folk, but also some surprises like my aunt.

The novelty wore off quickly though

Because there is nobody who has signal, and everyone is using telegram. I could switch to signal, but there is nobody to chat with. Telegram users and group chat owners wouldnt switch to signal, because they dont care, and nobody else in chat does so. So unless telegram will be legally banned by government, nobody is going to do anything about using it.

Not based in the US is one.