I love Telegram.
I’m using the Durov’s app since its debut back in 2013, and I enjoy it way more than WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and all other competitors combined for way too many reasons (here is a few).
In fact, during these 9 years, I’ve shared many fragments of my life inside Telegram.
I’ve put both important and stupid things, silly audios, “compromising” videos, games, photos…and so did my contacts.
At present time, if I don’t access my account for more than one year (six months in the default settings), everything will be deleted, lost forever.
Thinking about it scared me a little:
What will happen to my Telegram account when I’ll die?
I can make a backup of every chat or file in my HD (hoping it won’t be thrown somewhere after I’m dead), but what about my contacts?
Will they still be able to read my messages when I’m gone?
I know: it’s a macabre thought and to be honest, it’s not like I wrote anything truly memorable in my chats, but let’s think about it from another perspective:
Wouldn’t you like to hear the voice of some of your friends/relatives who are no longer in this world?
Of course, I would get depressed by the nostalgia of their absence, but it is a way to keep their memory fresh and pass it on to new generations who might be curious to know what their grandfather was like.
Since we are constantly living in a brand new technology world, we tend to not realize what will happen soon when we will be gone. Zuckerberg’s Meta environment (Facebook and Instagram) has been working on it for some years now, but from what I see Telegram doesn’t seem to have an “inheritance” feature, perhaps for privacy reasons.
Somehow, that doesn’t feel right to me.
I honestly think we should start to worry about our web legacy as a whole.
Happy new year.