Whenever I glance at darknet forums, people there always use Telegram for instant messaging. This seems like a strange choice for their use case, considering that Telegram is neither secure nor private[1], being centralized with Russia-controlled servers[2], phone number registration, no encryption for personal chats by default in mobile client and no encryption at all in desktop client[3], etc.
So why do they use Telegram instead of actually secure and private alternatives, like Delta Chat, XMPP+OMEMO, etc.?
it’s user friendly, used by many normies, better than some alternatives (whatsapp, etc), advertised as private, etc. at least until recently they also mostly ignored governments’ request for data, so it kinda was private for criminals as well.