> now you can’t restrict who can send you a message unless you have a premium.

And before that you just weren't able to restrict that at all, there was no such feature. They didn't remove this feature for free users - it never existed. They just added it right now only for paid users.

> premium users can bypass non-premium users privacy setting “last seen and online”

That is absolutely not what the feature is. If you hide YOUR OWN last seen time, you won't be able to see last seen time of other users, even when they have it public. Now, premium users will be able to see public last seen times of other people if they hide their own. But they obviously still can't see last seen time of people who set it to private, that would've been very dumb.

As someone who for some time created and moderated fairly popular chat (200+ people) for anti-war Russians, I have very long and complicated history of relationship with this service and have a lot of different grey-zone stories where it is hard to understand whether it is a mistake from users and whether it is a leak from the service.

Hence I have a little low expectation and overreact on their recent changes

I generally agree with you that Durov makes a lot of incredibly stupid decisions. I think pretty much everyone in the "Telegram community" (eg. channel administrators, bot/client developers, etc.) would agree that the changes Telegram is introducing are often bad.

The issue, though, is that there isn't any alternative right now - Telegram is the best messenger out there in terms of general usage. So while I do hate what they're doing sometimes, I still use the product and even pay for Telegram Premium. It's bad enough to be mildly annoying, but not bar enough to actually make people leave the platform.

Edit: just as I was writing this, Telegram introduced a new feature. I'm not sure if I love it or hate it to be honest, it's a smart way for them to save money, but it is pretty weird: https://t.me/tginfo/3942

Restricting of incoming messages existed (cloned from Facebook as usual).

Restricting of "last seen and online" existed in third-party clients. Later on VK started to actively destroy this functionality, by moving manual "is online" management from designated API into all data-fetching APIs.

Not to mention that VK and Telegram are now actively fighting with third-party clients. In which world they would not fight Ninjagram/AyuGram/Plus Messenger/other forks, which allow to add multiple accounts, hide online/reading (to some extent), show message editing history and so on?

This is a really basic security feature though that every single platform should support. If Telegram didn't support messaging restrictions before, that doesn't mean they're not currently gating a basic privacy/safety feature behind a paywall. It just means they should be embarrassed that they used to be doing something even worse, ie not even offering a basic privacy/safety feature at all.

Correct that this would not technically count as removing a feature, but I feel like that's possibly a distinction without a difference. I'm not coming out of reading this explanation feeling more charitable about Telegram's security or willingness to gate off security features. It's a bad look for a company to put basic blocklists behind a paywall, that is not a company I trust not to start degrading security for free users.

This could be a long conversation. The short version is there are plenty of articles online by marginalized groups talking about the consequences of having no ability to block arbitrary groups from harassing them online. If someone is calling that "just an annoyance" they've likely never been the target of an extended public harassment campaign.

A slightly longer answer is that the consequences to privacy and security are in a practical sense -- in the sense that someone coming into my house is a violation of my security and privacy. Privacy is not just about hiding information, it's also about why we hide information. It's about the ability to be private; to not be forced to constantly listen to a bunch of people shout at you. Similarly, security exists for a reason, we have security in our homes in the sense that people can't just walk into them and start yelling at us and harassing us. And DMs should be thought of as analogous.

Your DMs are not secure if you have no way to turn them off or restrict them.

> The ability to block users was always there and it still there for free.

If you recognize that is important to privacy and security to be able to block individual users, it's not too hard to recognize that the requirement to individually block users leaves a huge gaping hole in security for a network that supports open registrations.

I use disposable email addresses rather than just blocking individual spammers in my email client. The reason is because there are a near-infinite number of spammers and blocking them one-by-one is ineffective. Being able to turn off a leaked email address is much more valuable to me. It's something that actually cuts down on spam.

And the same is true on social media -- being able to go private and turn off messages or restrict messages to certain subgroups is critically important for people who are stuck in the middle of public harassment campaigns.

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Regardless, the lack of a feature that is pretty much standardized across most other platforms, and that is pretty widely recognized as a safety feature -- it doesn't make me feel better about Telegram's willingness to gate these kinds of features behind paywalls.

You're saying that the ability to block users is free, but there is no bright line between blocking users and setting general messaging restrictions. That is the same category of safety feature. There's no reason to believe that Telegram wouldn't make blocking users into a paid feature in the future, especially since it has demonstrated that blocking/moderation/lockdown features are something it is willing to monetize.