As you might have realized by now, Telegram is pretty popular as a place to host a cryptocurrency or ICO community. Members can shoot the bull within reason (obviously, within the rules of each group), interact with any admins who are semi-active in their respective groups, and get first crack at new announcements from their favorites. It’s also super convenient for company teams who want to be able to coordinate with a private chat but whose members do not want to create and remember yet another Slack login.

Some Flaws in Telegram

Of course, Telegram does have its flaws. If users want to silence noisy channels, their choices are basically to mute or leave them. They can pin chats, but not more than five, which can get annoying if you have a lot of important chats that might get lost in the shuffle of the many groups and channels you generally keep an eye on for work. There’s no way to mark favorites or sort by category. That means either scrolling through your list of chats or doing a search every time you want to drop a line to somebody on your team. Telegram may occasionally crash, which is aggravating when you’re tapping out a long-ish message or reading the important post of a co-worker. DASH lost its Telegram group to scammers that hacked into one of their admins’ Telgram accounts and kicked the rest of the admins out not that long ago, so security is definitely a concern.

So Telegram isn’t perfect, but the good part is that the developers have made the code open-source and capable of being forked and built on if somebody feels like they could do better.

Bettergram Is Like a Better Version of Telegram

Bettergram is a new fork of Telegram that has some features that Telegram doesn’t have and enhances some of the ones that Telegram does have. Users could pin up to 50 messages instead of 5, view real-time crypto prices pulled from Live Coin Watch’s API, mark favorites, and sort by their choice of favorites, DMs, groups, and announcements.

If you already know your way around Telegram, you could jump right into Bettergram without much of an issue beyond learning how to use the new features, which should take about five minutes tops. They even look similar enough that anyone who uses both may want to switch one to Night Mode just to tell them apart.

Bettergram’s open-source code can be audited and has already passed some third party audits. Of course, one should always be careful with installing new software, especially on a device that you already keep your crypto on. (Why d’ya think I bought the Ledger?) New users may need to add an exception in their anti-virus software in order to install it, but Bettergram is theoretically safe to use.

Bettergram is currently available for Windows and MacOS. It doesn’t take up a ton of CPU or RAM like some similar software can. If you already like Telegram, Bettergram is very similar. Just better.