For years, our users have been asking us to implement Stories in Telegram. More than half of all feature requests that we receive are related to Stories. Initially, we were against this since Stories are already everywhere. However, Telegram wouldn't be Telegram if we didn't listen to our users and didn't innovate on existing formats. So we will be launching Stories soon – in the Telegram way: - Privacy. You will be able to define who can see each of your stories with granular precision: Everyone, only your contacts (with exceptions), a few selected contacts, or a list of Close Friends. - Compact UI. Stories will be placed in an expandable section at the top of your chat list, which makes them easily accessible without taking away valuable space. - Flexibility. It will be easy to hide Stories posted by any contact, moving them to the 'Hidden' list in your Contacts section instead of the main screen. - Captions. In addition to making use of dozens of powerful photo and video-editing tools, you will be able to provide captions for your stories to add more context or links and tag other people. - Dual Camera Support. Building on the success of Telegram's Video Messages, we're adding the option to post photos and videos taken by the front and the rear cameras simultaneously. - Optional Ephemerality. You'll be able to choose when a story expires – in 6, 12, 24, or 48 hours – or permanently display stories on your profile page, with individual privacy settings for each. - More suprises! 🤩 The ability to save your stories to the profile page will make Telegram profiles more informative and colorful. You will not only be able to explore more content from your closest contacts, but 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 become a lot easier. Overall, following our internal tests of Stories, even the skeptics on our team started to appreciate this feature. We can no longer imagine Telegram without it. Stories are in their last testing phase and will become available in early July. This will herald a new era on Telegram, where it will become even more fun and social than it currently is. Check out a preview of Telegram Stories in the next post.