I’d take those tens of milliseconds. That shit scales and I’ve seen infra in the scale of millions more-or-less glued together by shell scripts and coreutils/busybox.

This is the way to go. I also run sshguard on all publicly-accessible hosts just to reduce traffic from bots, otherwise I just ssh over tailscale.

One thing that has always felt different about Telegram in particular was the large, public groups. I’ve never used WhatsApp but you can’t really get the same virality on something like Signal or plain SMS/RCS/etc. If you can widely share “rich” media, it kinda fits the bill for social media imo.