I think Telegram has realised they've lost the 1 on 1 personal chat fight to Signal and they're pivoting to their emergent user base. Every time I hear about Telegram these days it's in a discussion about thousand-person broadcast chats and the like. If that is truly their main area of growth a feed to aggregate that kind of stuff does make sense.
Doesn't Telegram have like 10x the number of users that Signal has? Even if channels are popular I would imagine there's plenty of 1-1 and personal usage on Telegram. Data point of one: I use Telegram with about 20 contacts for personal messaging; I don't use Signal with anyone.
Signal had a ton of users but then they disabled the ability to use it as your primary SMS app citing user confusion about which chats were encrypted vs which were not, SMS support was the killer feature for a lot of people. Since they dropped true SMS support I don't know anyone who still uses it.
Maybe in some countries they have lost the fight. But in many other countries, including India, Signal isn't even a part of the fight.
I know fewer than 5 people who have heard of Signal but almost all of my acquaintances have at least heard of Telegram. But nobody uses anything except WhatsApp.
