One thing that has always felt different about Telegram in particular was the large, public groups. I’ve never used WhatsApp but you can’t really get the same virality on something like Signal or plain SMS/RCS/etc. If you can widely share “rich” media, it kinda fits the bill for social media imo.
How do you define social media in a way that includes DMs but doesn’t include basically all communication?
One thing that has always felt different about Telegram in particular was the large, public groups. I’ve never used WhatsApp but you can’t really get the same virality on something like Signal or plain SMS/RCS/etc. If you can widely share “rich” media, it kinda fits the bill for social media imo.