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"will cause almost no harm to casual, not-interesting people"

Yeah same can be said for Facebook and WhatsApp that Durov vehemently claims should not be trusted with user's data. Maybe it's a ploy for the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia to get the data of people.

Also, Telegram doesn't have to sell it's users if it's an FSB honeypot.

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Well, it makes sense from a threat modeling perspective. If you're Russian, you should use Whatsapp because it is unlikely Whatsapp will cooperate with the Russian dictatorship, but in Western countries, you can assume that anything from Meta, Google or Apple that's in any way useful (and even if it's just metadata) can and will end up in the data lakes at the NSA.

Assuming you think Meta can write secure proprietary software and trust them to do so.

Well for a Russian I think there's barely a chance that Russia manages to compromise any of the US giants at large scale, so Meta is a better choice than VK, Telegram or any of the Chinese services.

False dichotomy. Nobody's forcing you to use proprietary messaging app like WhatsApp in the West. FOSS tools like Signal are the norm in privacy circles.

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