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I don't understand the love for Telegram.
In the short period of using it I had so much BS come through by scammers/spammers - both as DMs and group messages. I've rarely had that with WhatsApp.
In my eyes WhatsApp is far better than Telegram. And Signal is far greater than WhatsApp. The only thing I wish Signal had was inbuilt GIFs; it's not that much of an issue on mobile but it's a pain on desktop.
I've had way more scam calls, groups and texts on whatsapp than on Telegram.
So I definitely don't understand why anyone would like whatsapp.
With Telegram you can easily limit any communication requests to only come from your list of contacts while that is impossible with WA. The only way you can get out of getting scam calls is by turning on "mute unknown calls" and "limit groups to contacts" but the calls will still pop up and you will still get chat requests so you will have to block and delete each one of them manually.
Instead of just limiting all communication to your contacts like on telegram.
I believe the same settings are also in WhatsApp.
No in whatsapp you can't limit requests to only your contacts. It's only with groups. I've checked and googled.
Telegram is more user friendly than Whatsapp, it's clients are open source and has a decent desktop app.
It's way better than Zuck's trash.
Why does anyone choose Telegram or WhatsApp over Signal which is encrypted and audited? (Probably features I donβt care about, but they do)
People don't choose, people use whatever most people around them use. Whatsapp and telegram are both centralized, and shouldn't be trusted because, by the nature of it, they can (and eventually will) turn user-hostile.
Messengers come and go, if we really want to make some progress in this area, we should embrace federated and p2p protocols as the logical evolution. Anything else is just wasting time and user privacy.
Matrix protocol messengers amiright?
I'd rather push for XMPP personally, the matrix protocol has been ~~a dumpster fire~~ in an "almost ready, trust me bro" state for as long as it has existed, and failed to justify its own weight and complexity. But that's mostly irrelevant since they are open protocols and can somewhat bridge with one another.
I'm selfhosting a Matrix server and have all my Chats from other apps also bridged to there. For just text chat I don't feel like Matrix is missing anything, the thing preventing me from getting my not so technically minded friends on it is the missing support for good group voice chat.
It XMPP better for group VC? Is the option available to bridge Messenger like Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, iMessage to XMPP?
Iβm selfhosting a Matrix server and have all my Chats from other apps also bridged to there.
Same here, but with XMPP in place of Matrix. For historical context, XMPP was invented about 25 years ago on the premise that people were already tired of having their instant messaging scattered over multiple protocols (rather than Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, iMessage now, it was Yahoo, MSN, AIM, ICQ, β¦ then), so bridging is very much front and center in the XMPP world. Over time, people also realized that bridging sucks in general (you either dumb down your client to the lowest common denominator which sucks for yourself, or your client isolates itself from the source protocol enough that it sucks for everyone else).
To add insult to injury, most modern protocols also forbid, by their ToS, the use of alternative clients (which very much includes bridges), and to the best of my knowledge WhatsApp, Signal and Discord will eventually suspend your account on this basis.
Matrix is still trying to carve a niche for itself in this space, and is failing IMO (judging by the quality/security of the bridges they have come-up with, and the recent libera.chat fiasco). I'd say that the situation in this regard in XMPP is only marginally better due to the fact that XMPP had a decade headstart to fail and try over, and I would not recommend using bridges on either of them if that can be avoided.
It XMPP better for group VC?
I'd say "it depends". Fun fact, Matrix uses jitsi-meet under the hood (which is XMPP + a media transcoding/multicasting component that doubles as a relay), and jitsi-meet is my recommendation for this use-case: as long as the central server has good bandwidth, you can really scale up your VC to many attendees. On top of that, XMPP has support for peer-to-peer group VC, with the benefit that hosting is simpler, it doesn't require any central component/relay (but the bandwidth cost is incurred on all participants and you won't go beyond a handful of attendees that way).
To add insult to injury, most modern protocols also forbid, by their ToS, the use of alternative clients (which very much includes bridges), and to the best of my knowledge WhatsApp, Signal and Discord will eventually suspend your account on this basis.
Good thing that I'm in the EU and the big chat platforms will be forced to open up their API to third-party clients soon with the DMA.
But from my point of view bridging with matrix works well and I have all my chats in one place. And for me that is the only reason I'm sticking with matrix as only one other person I know is using matrix directly. While it would be ideal to get everyone on one decentralized chat platform that is also rather unrealistic... so I'm doing my part using Matrix and getting friends on it when it makes sense but not actively trying to get people on there that don't have a good reason to use it. And using XMPP mostly sounds like it is just around longer but not that much better, so switching now dosen't seem to make sense.