Telegram is adding the “Stories” feature to its app in July

Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov announced on Tuesday that the instant messaging service is a new feature called “Stories” from the beginning of next month.

First introduced by Snapchat in 2013, the “Stories” feature was later largely popularized by Meta social media apps such as Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp.

Telegram is adding the “Stories” feature to its app in July

Announcing the feature on his Telegram channel, Durov says that users have been asking for Stories to be implemented in Telegram for years, noting that more than half of all feature requests received by the platform are related to Stories. So the company decided to launch its own version of Stories.

“For years, our users have been asking us to implement Stories in Telegram. Initially, we were against this, as Stories are already everywhere. However, Telegram wouldn’t be Telegram if we didn’t listen to our users and innovate on existing formats,” he said.

The upcoming Stories feature on Telegram will make this possible users to have control over who can see their stories with ‘granular precision’: everyone, just your contacts (with exceptions), a few selected contacts or a list of close friends.

Further, Stories are placed in an expandable section at the top of the chat list, making them easy to access without taking up valuable space.

In addition, Telegram allows users easily hide stories posted by a contact by moving them to the ‘Hidden’ list in their Contacts section instead of the main screen.

In addition to using a range of photo and video editing tools, Telegram users can do that too with captions for their stories to add more context or links and tag other people. They can too post photos and videos taken by the front and rear cameras at the same time.

Finally, Telegram adds an ephemeral setting for users to choose when a story should expire – in 6, 12, 24 or 48 hours. They can also pin it to their profile to show stories permanently on their profile page, with individual privacy settings for each.

“The ability to save your stories on the profile page makes Telegram profiles more informative and colorful,” added Durov.

“Not only will you be able to explore more content from your closest contacts, but you will finally discover more information about users you connect with in groups or channel comments. Speaking of channels, they will benefit from more exposure and subscribers: once we launch the ability to repost messages from channels to stories, going viral on Telegram will be a lot easier.”

Currently the The “Stories” feature in Telegram is in its final testing phase and is expected to be available early July. Durov believes the feature “will usher in a new era on Telegram where it will become even more fun and social than it is today.”