It happened to channels and groups that were inactive for a long time. Durov did mention this in a message a few months ago that username squatters were becoming a problem.

And I was mad at first but it was equally my fault for leaving my public group inactive for more than 10 months, which is probably why the username disappeared.

It's a real problem on other social media websites too. For example, a totally inactive account on GitHub claimed an org name and it has no repositories, no information, It's totally empty and I can do nothing about it. Not even report it so that GitHub can look into it and unfreeze the username.

EDIT: I just checked the dates and the channel was inactive from November 10, 2021 to August 26, 2022. So basically 9-10 months. Previously, I wrote 3 months but time flies I guess.

I've successfully taken a username from a squatter by reaching out to github support. As long as the user doesn't have active private stuff they might be willing to help you get the username.

That's not an option any more. GitHub used to offer this, but as of about 12 months ago, the policy changed and they will not release a name that is inactive regardless of how long it has been inactive.

Using recent activity as a metric seems like it would age finished projects out of the github platform. Active projects that have switched version control several times in their history might refer to previous versions on github without github itself being aware of the connection.

At the free level I could see unmodified forks and anything marked private disappearing over time, then culling empty accounts. If I created an account, forked a project, and then left, how many months would need to pass before I'd be surprised that my account hadn't been recycled without my active consent?

I don't like calling them squatters if you don't know what they're doing and I'm pretty sure you can't actually tell if they're 100% inactive. For example at a time I had zero public activity on bitbucket but was using it for private repos and unlike github this wouldn't show. Then at some point someone kinda demanded I give up the name because I was obviously not using it. Same with Twitter. Just being logged in and reading has huge benefits since they broke the logged-out user experience.

Also archival purposes exist, especially for code repos.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll give it a try.

Three months seems like a rather short time. Twitter gave me 5 years of never having sent a single tweet before telling me they were closing my account.

Yeah sorry, not 3 months. I checked the dates again, the last post was on November 10 and I lost the username in August, so 9-10 months and around the same time as Durov's announcement about 70% of telegram usernames being inactive.

My issue is that any external links to my channel now no longer works. Luckily I can update some of the links, but I can't do that with tweets.

I'll just have to be better at uploading so this hopefully won't happen again.

Yeah it's definitely an inconvenience. I hope Telegram team listens to the feedback.

It's not gaslighting if they have analytics to back the claim.

https://t.me/durov/195

> Until recently, 70% of all Telegram usernames had been reserved in inactive channels by cybersquatters from Iran. This created a graveyard of dead usernames that cluttered search results and prevented millions of Telegram users from selecting appropriate public addresses for their accounts, groups and channels.

Like with every other social media platform, this is not an actual issue.

If the username that I would like to have is taken, I can pick another name that is not taken.

It is not unreasonable to take a 3 month break from a messenger app.

Search results don't have to prioritize inactive channels.

Just pulling the rug on people for money makes Telegram look very unreliable.

Compare this to how it works on reddit: people can request to take over a dead subreddit as a mod, but it requires that the subreddit has been dead for at least six months and they will try to contact the previous mod first and only transfer it to the requester if that fails. At no cost.

That's not gaslighting

Having inactive usernames is not an actual issue when people can just use other names. He is just trying to make more money by selling them and he is blaming it on the users. "See, they did not use the names in the artificially short period that I defined. I had no other option than taking them away and selling them to the highest bidder."

Obviously he's not only selling Iranian names.

Regardless of whether you consider this action just, it is not gaslighting. Gaslighting has a specific definition, and this isn't it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting

> manipulating someone so as to make them question their own reality.

That's what he did. Telling users it is their own fault that he had to take their names and sell them. You were causing issues, because you did not log in for three months.

Ironically, what you are doing is gaslighting by trying to redefine it and say that’s what it’s always meant.

I am not redefining it. I took that quote from the wikipedia page that GP linked.

Justifying your actions isn't gaslighting. Blaming someone isn't gaslighting.

Gaslighting involves presenting a false history of things that did not happen. There is real data here that there are a huge number of inactive accounts.

From your link:

> The term may also be used to describe a person (a "gaslighter") who presents a false narrative to another group or person, thereby leading them to doubt their perceptions and become misled, disoriented or distressed.

A false narrative is not necessarily including a false history of things. He is spinning a false narrative by using facts, but presenting them in a way that is misleading. like a politician. He is inventing a problem ("dead accounts are a huge problem that is causing my valued users many issues") and presenting a solution for that new problem that is mainly benefitting himself. All social media platforms have a huge number of inactive accounts, but that's for some reason only an issue sometimes. For example when Elon Musk takes over Twitter. Generally these platforms welcome inactive accounts, because it is inflating their numbers. Now Durov wants more money and he is inventing a problem and pointing at the users as the culprit.

He is achieving two (edit: tree) things with that:

1) He is gaslighting users into believing that it is their own fault that they lost their account name, because they have not logged in for three months, when stealing account names is actually just an arbitrary decision that he made.

2) He is incentivizing occasional users to log in more often, so they can keep their name. I guess he can then later use these numbers to sell ad space: "Unlike on other platforms, our users are much more engaged.

Edit: 3) Money

Ultimately, they are looking to raise money for Telegram.

Durov has been funding it with his own savings for more than 8 years, which is great but a project as big as Telegram eventually needs more funding, especially when it's literally Messenger + Google Drive + Social Media + Privacy Respecting. It's hard to make money when the world runs on selling data and obviously, Telegram Premium has not been very successful.

I do not mind the auction of the usernames to be very honest as I understand why they're being auctioned in the first place.

Arbitrary or not, I'm a Telegram super-user, out of the 20 public groups and channels that I have, only one had its username take away and only because it was inactive. Could be a glitch, could be intentional but I do know that it's partly because of me that the channel looked like a dead one.

Interesting how many green accounts are in this thread describing the same problem with the exact same typing style. All of them made within the last two hours.

People using throwaways, because they don't want to connect their HN identity to their TG identity?

Those people should at least bother to learn HN rules then, because some of these comments are... yeesh.

That said, how mad can you be about some username that you'd sign up for an extra account just to complain?

They may also just be new here, spreading news to HN

Then my advice about sticking to a dignified tone and knowing the rules still applies. Happy to have more people sharing but there's a reason HN isn't the same vibe as Reddit.

And there's also a reason lobsters isn't the same vibe as HN.

What's the vibe of Lobster?

as far as I can tell it's supposed to be basically a clone of HN (it has many of the same posts as well), but more exclusive (invite only) and more strict moderation with all of the moderator actions logged publicly.

Certainly

Almost certainly it's a cybersquatter upset his cache of squatted names is being seized and is attempting to manufacture dissent. Recommend the site owner look at IPs and see how many HN accounts he has as well and flush those, too.

I'm one of the guy in charge of https://kissfm.md and the channel @kissfm was waiting to be integrated with this site. So tell me more about your certainty!

> Until recently, 70% of all Telegram usernames had been reserved in inactive channels by cybersquatters from Iran. This created a graveyard of dead usernames that cluttered search results and prevented millions of Telegram users from selecting appropriate public addresses for their accounts, groups and channels.

https://t.me/durov/195

now they cannot select "appropriate public addresses for their accounts, groups and channels" as well because most of the names are listed for sale on auction!

> We noticed this problem and therefore have found a very profitable solution to sell everyone

They have to pay for servers somehow. Selling long dead channel handles is better than privacy invasion.

It's not better when it comes at the cost of taking some of those handles away from people that were using them.

But they weren't using them. That's the whole point.

There are a number of situations I'm personally aware of where users had usernames revoked for channels they were actively using.

One common case where this occurred is when users used a channel as a "bio" or "blog", and posted to the channel infrequently to update it.

@pg hasn't posted on HN for two years. Can I have his username?

@pg is paying for the servers

But he does not need the account name, right?

However, Aaron Swartz is not paying for reddit servers anymore, can I have u/AaronSw then? Has been inactive for 10 years.

You can't claim reddit usernames but you can claim inactive Subreddits by contacting the mods.

I know several users who've had their names and channels stolen by this absolutely fucking asinine idea from Durov

It comes off the back of him trying to fuck over users with NFT's of all things, which received something like 30K "thumbs down" emojis (to about 800 "thumbs up") before having the counter removed

I don't know why Durov can't just do what Discord does and offer Premium. Premium garnered a less than stellar reception, but comes with actual features that users might want (increased GIF cache, bigger file download limits etc)

Telegram has had Premium for a few months already: https://telegram.org/blog/700-million-and-premium

Can you prove your channel was active and not dead just for squatting?

For what it's worth, I couldn't find any links anywhere on the net (Google, Bing...) to "https://t.me/kissfm". I've searched for even small Telegram channels I follow, and they all show up in search results.

I'm one of the https://kissfm.md developers and the channel @kissfm was supposed to be integrated with this site in the upcoming year.

Fair enough! However, if the channel was inactive, I guess it's hard to distinguish an upcoming project with a squatted channel. Maybe contact Telegram?

Already dropped them a message, but not sure they'll ever get back to me.

the channel was in pending state, waiting for a project to be ready, to integrate it with the site https://kissfm.md

Can we invest in getting our friends on the independent XMPP standard?

one XMPP server gets big and usernames get squatted and dealt with at the discretion of the server admin.

Only solution is something like how Farcaster does it where you at least get to keep your public key the same and usernames are optional.

https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol#3-identity

Or go the urbit route and make the addresses totally user owned.

Federate messaging servers and make addresses domain specific. Works fine for email.

People lose their gmail accounts all the time for weird reasons. Maybe you are specifically talking about a world where everyone self hosts their own servers?

Gmail sucks, but not for any reason caused by email the protocol.

It is the fault of email, the protocol, yes.

If email was better designed, it would not allow these situations to happen. For example, if server operators didn't own your account, there would be no problem.

It is a protocol issue.

That ship has sailed

Not if we don't want to.

To catch on, the next solution must be better than the last.

It’s too cumbersome for average folks.

This is terrible, they stole the name of a channel that was active in 2021! It's not because it's inactive, it's just because it has a unique and business name!

Telegram is a social network delivered through a messaging front end, which is confusing when you expect it to behave like a messaging service. It isn't one any more than Facebook or Twitter are.

Telegram now is more akin to Discord and Twitter with bots, channels and public groups. It's been some time Telegram has moved from personal chatting app as WhatsApp.

Exactly. And when talking in a public space that is privately owned, it should be expected that others would listen to your convos or that the owner can throw you out at will.

The problem is just that Telegram still advertises itself, and people expect it to be a messaging app.

I am interested to hear telegram's side of this - they generally have a decent track record, i wonder if this is the case of someone screwing up and not intentional malice

He talked about this a month ago: https://t.me/durov/195

> Until recently, 70% of all Telegram usernames had been reserved in inactive channels by cybersquatters from Iran. This created a graveyard of dead usernames that cluttered search results and prevented millions of Telegram users from selecting appropriate public addresses for their accounts, groups and channels.

Only inactive usernames were taken away by them (and not the active ones). While it's good to have a memorable one, you'd run the risk of "spam attacks". I am not sure how the proposed blockchain (TON) will work (it's claimed to be immutable), but then this is their prerogative to earn money.

Same for me, one of my channels usernames: lasezatoare also is gone. The same story, channel now is private without a username!

Had two channels. One last activity 2018 another June 2021. I lost the 2021 channel.

This is fucking crazy interesting. Can't wait for this drama to unfold.

Saying that it happened to channels that were inactive is misinformation!

Telegram allows editing post, some of those"stolen usernames" were of channels that were active; i.e. posts were edited, and links were replaced, comments were enabled so channel masters can keep connected with their audience.

Those channels were also compensating for the absence of advanced bio, status, and as introduction methods where their links were posted on the profiles' "about me" section.

Those channels, as many of Telegram users who were affected say that they did nothing wrong, their channels, though have no new posts, were actually "active and alive", and that their only fault was that they were using some Telegram features that Telegram itself did not respect.

if you are not paying, you are a product

I am paying.

How many inactive channels did you have?

How are public usernames related to privacy or security?

There are no such guarantees. People failed to choose a protocol that is trustworthy and fell for pseudo sometimes-on encryption. He is trying to make money while the market is going down.

I wanted to object (as a happy Telegram user) that I want to preserve message history for all my devices, but then it occurred to me that iMessage is end-to-end-encrypted and also has pretty transparent message history sync.

So now I think that yeah, Telegram should adopt E2E by default.

Another thing that would be lost with the switch to E2E is server-based search, but honestly I can live with that.

  >I wanted to object (as a happy Telegram user) that I want to preserve message history for all my devices...

Telegram is already useless on that score. Since the other party/ies in a conversation can delete their messages from everyone else's devices as well as from their own. I stopped taking any of Telegram's privacy and security claims seriously when i discovered that gem.

I still use Telegram to keep in touch with a load of family and friends but I have no faith in whatsoever any of their self-righteous privacy & security claims and comparisons with other messaging services. For a very long time now, evey update has focussed on adding moronic cutesy junk like animated emojis and stickers. So it's quite clear that their focus has moved away from being a private & secure messaging service and towards appealing to the TikTok generation.

That's fine. It's their project. They can do what they want with it and [as I said] I still find it useful. I just wish they wouldn't keep on trying to convince people it's a serious secure commmunication tool.

Nothing, they took away usernames which were holded by squatters.