Flotilla: A Telegram Alternative for Community Owners

Part of our guide to running an online community you actually own.

Telegram is excellent at some things. If you run a community there and want structure, moderation, and a community you own, Flotilla is built for that in ways Telegram isn’t.

What Telegram is, and what it’s good at

Telegram is a centralized, cloud-based messaging app founded by Pavel Durov and headquartered in Dubai. It has grown past a billion monthly active users. Its two core building blocks are Groups (many-to-many chats that auto-upgrade into “supergroups” scaling to 200,000 members) and Channels (one-to-many broadcasts to an unlimited number of subscribers).

For reach and speed, Telegram is hard to beat:

• Distribution is hard to match. Public channels are easy to share and find, and a channel can grow to unlimited subscribers.
• It scales. Basic groups auto-convert to supergroups that hold up to 200,000 members.
• The apps are fast and polished. They handle media well, the bot and automation ecosystem is mature, and the clients are smooth across platforms.
• The core product is free. There are no member caps, and starting a channel or group costs nothing.
• Creator monetization is built in. Channels with 1,000+ subscribers can earn up to about 50% of Sponsored Message ad revenue, paid in TON.
• Light organization exists. Supergroups support Topics (forum threads), slow mode, pinned messages, and comment threads on channel posts.

If you’re a creator, a media outlet, or a marketer whose job is maximum reach and viral distribution, Telegram is a strong tool and you probably shouldn’t leave it.

Where Telegram falls short

Telegram was built as a messenger, and that shows once you treat your group as a community you’re responsible for rather than an audience to broadcast to.

It has no real community structure. A supergroup’s Topics are threads inside a single chat, not separate rooms with their own membership and permissions. The role model is flat: owner, admin, and member, with per-admin permission toggles and up to 50 admins per chat.

Native moderation is basic. Captcha gates for new members, keyword filters, and advanced anti-spam usually mean adding third-party moderation bots. Telegram does include a native admin action log and a built-in anti-spam toggle for groups.

Your community’s messages sit on servers Telegram controls. Groups and channels are never end-to-end encrypted, and default “cloud chats” are stored on Telegram’s own servers under keys Telegram holds, so Telegram can access them. End-to-end encryption exists only in manually enabled, one-to-one Secret Chats tied to a single device, never for the group or channel your community uses.

After Durov was detained in France in August 2024, Telegram updated its policy in September 2024 to share users’ phone numbers and IP addresses with law enforcement in response to valid legal requests across a broad range of crimes, up from a narrower, terrorism-focused standard. By Telegram’s own transparency reporting, the number of user-data requests it fulfilled from US authorities rose sharply afterward, from a handful in the first nine months of 2024 to hundreds by year’s end.

The community you build there is hosted on Telegram’s terms. Its Terms of Service let it restrict, ban, or delete channels, groups, and accounts. Chat history can be exported, but only through the Desktop app, and that export can’t be re-imported into another account or migrated elsewhere. There’s no mechanism to move your members or your social graph off Telegram.

Your members also see ads you can’t turn off. Sponsored Messages appear to non-Premium users in large public channels. Telegram Premium (about $4.99/month) hides those ads, but only for the person who pays for it. You can’t remove them on your members’ behalf.

How Flotilla is different

Flotilla is a platform for building and running online communities — chat, voice, video, threads, and events in one place. It’s closer to Discord or Slack than to a messenger, except that you own the community you build. It’s built on the open Nostr protocol, though you never have to think about that to use it.

Here’s what that ownership buys you as an organizer:

• Real structure. Your community lives in a “space,” and conversation inside it happens in “rooms,” separate channels that each have their own name, icon, and purpose, like Slack or Discord. A space can also hold threads, a calendar of events, a library of pinned links, polls, and voice rooms.
• Roles and moderation tooling. You can create custom, color-coded roles and assign them to members, manage the member list, and ban or restore people. Any member can flag a post, and admins review every report in one place to dismiss it, delete the message, or ban the author.
• You own your identity and your community. Your identity is a key you hold, not an account a company issues and can revoke, so it can’t be taken away the way a Telegram channel can be deleted. Keep a backup and your content and social graph are safe too. Because your identity isn’t locked to Flotilla, you can move to another Nostr app and bring your people and history with you. See self-hosting a space for how that works.
• No ads, no surveillance. There are no ads in your members’ feeds, and no business built on watching them.
• Your data lives where you choose. Your space runs on a server you control, either managed hosting or one you run yourself, rather than on Flotilla’s own infrastructure.
• It’s free to use and join. Using Flotilla and taking part in communities costs nothing. The only cost is optional, on the owner’s side, for hosting.

Telegram vs Flotilla at a glance

When Telegram might be the better choice

Stay on Telegram if your primary goal is reach and viral distribution: a large public broadcast channel with unlimited subscribers, easy sharing, and announcements that travel fast. Flotilla spaces are closed by default and built for communities where people know each other.

Telegram is also the easier call when you want to meet people where they already are. Around a billion people have it installed, and asking your audience to adopt a new app is friction a broadcast channel avoids.

If you’re counting on built-in creator monetization through ad revenue share, that’s a Telegram feature. Flotilla has optional Lightning “zaps” for tipping, but it won’t pay you a share of ad revenue.

Flotilla is for the smaller, structured, two-way communities where ownership, roles, rooms, and moderation matter more than raw reach.

Ready to own your community?

You can start a space in a few minutes, invite a few people, and shape it as you go. When you’re ready to pick a hosting plan — from a free tier up to a fully managed Platform plan — the pricing page lays out the options side by side.

Start your community at app.flotilla.social.