youOn a day like today, ten years ago, Pavel Durov gave the start signal for Telegram, a service that gradually but steadily added more and more users until it became the third most used service of its kind in the world, behind WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, which are in first and second place. position. You can view last year’s data in the following interactive infographic.

This would already be remarkable in a service offered by a large corporation, It’s more remarkable when you consider that Telegram is getting these users despite not having much financial backing, because he was also not one of the first to do WhatsApp, which at least partially explains his dominance in this market. So there is a huge merit to his success which undoubtedly deserves recognition.

Although it is not the most secure service as others like Signal have an advantage in this regard, one of the main reasons why it has become popular is that started offering some security features like end-to-end encryption, long before WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger started doing it. To this day, it maintains a very good image when it comes to privacy. But of course this is not enough to compete in such a contested market.

So Durov hasn’t stopped adding features during these 10 years. Along these lines, it was announced in June that it would start offering the popular Stories feature in July, which it did, but only for paid users. But that has since changed Telegram has officially launched the Stories feature and you no longer need to be a paid user to use it. The said launch was announced on Durov’s channel, which is usually a medium used to announce news and also reflects a birthday.

Regarding its operation, we can confirm that it is identical to the function of this feature in other hundreds of services that already have it. However, Yes, there are differences between how free and paid users can use it.. These are exclusive benefits for the latter:

• Priority order: Get more views when your stories appear first.
• Stealth Mode – Hide the fact that you’ve seen someone’s story.
• Permanent Watch History: See who viewed your stories, even after they’ve expired.
• Custom expiration options: Keep your story current for 6, 12, or 48 hours.
• Save Stories to Gallery: Save all unprotected stories to your gallery.
• Better Captions: Unlock 10x longer captions in your stories, as well as links and custom formatting.
• More stories: Share up to 100 memorable stories every day.