People say this app is sketchy. How and why? Please explain; I fail to understand the issue with this app. I'm a paid premium user, and I've never experienced a bad moment on this app. If you've had a bad experience on Telegram, then maybe that has something to do with your privacy settings or giving someone who turned out to be a bad person your username and has caused issues. Which, if either, of the options were the case, you do understand that's not the app's fault, correct? You did that of your own accord. There is no social media app I'm aware of that auto-generates your privacy settings for you; you have to manually set them, and if you don't manually set them up yourself, that creates problems for bots, trolls, and random people messaging you that you don't want messaging you. The same thing applies to you forgetting to turn off manually on the privacy settings toggle sync contacts off, which in that case you can't blame any app for failure to set your privacy settings in a way where things like this won't happen at all. Let me get started with Telegram.

I've been using Telegram for 2 months, with no bizarre or sketchy problems from random users messaging me, so what's the issue people are having with this app? Sounds like a user issue that doesn't have their privacy settings manually set up for random people not to message them; sounds like what's the key issue. You can't blame an app for having random people message you if you didn't manually set up your privacy settings to prevent that.

Telegram vs. WhatsApp.

Verification of your phone number. Yes to both, to make sure you're not using a burner SMS phone number/verify you're not a bot.

Manually go into your privacy settings to hide your phone number from other people. Telegram yes, WhatsApp no, not a feature. Therefore I will not use this app because that goes against my privacy settings boundaries. If this wasn't a problem, I would be more glad to use WhatsApp. But I care about my privacy online; if people have a big issue with this with me, then that's on you, not me.

Letting people add you by a username. Telegram yes, WhatsApp no. Another reason why I will not use WhatsApp. 

Now there is one app I might want to try called BlueSky, but what is this about? I don't really understand what BlueSky is and what their privacy settings are; I would like to know their privacy settings and how that works; then I might be interested. But from what I can tell, people don't use BlueSky a lot. I heard this place is ad-free, which ticks off my boxes for an app that I would be interested in. But are there reels and stories? I'm not really into apps that are reel/story-forward from random people; for example, the social media app Snapchat comes to mind, and I don't like apps that are designed like that.