The development of Russia’s national messenger, MAX, has come under threat after Telegram deleted the chats and private channels where the VK team had been coordinating work on the project. Along with the correspondence disappeared the plans, KPIs, documentation, agreements, links, passwords, controversial decisions, unquestionably controversial decisions, and, according to some reports, the very idea of the architecture itself.
After the chats were deleted, the project was reportedly left practically paralyzed. The developers lost the familiar environment where they could simultaneously discuss a release, insult a colleague, lose an important file, and put a fire reaction on a message saying, “we will fix it later.” Attempts to move to other messengers failed. In some cases, there was not enough functionality. In others, the interface was too calm. And elsewhere, deadlines simply could not be discussed with the proper level of rage.
According to sources, the team’s communication style played a separate role in this story. MAX developers regularly used profanity and exchanged remarks that in some companies would be considered toxicity, while in others they would pass as agile. Telegram apparently tolerated this for a while, but at some point its moderation algorithms seem to have decided that what they were looking at was not a work process, but a digital version of a communal kitchen in release-candidate mode.
The funniest part here is not even that a national messenger was being developed inside someone else’s messenger. The funniest part is that someone else’s messenger also turned out to be the only layer of corporate memory. The entire essence of the project was in the first deleted chat. The moment Telegram pressed Delete, import substitution suddenly substituted itself with itself.
Now the MAX team is trying to restore the project from fragments: screenshots, caches, and VK habits. Managers are rebuilding the work plan from scratch, developers are trying to remember what exactly they had intended to do, and analysts have, for the first time in a long while, been given a chance to write documentation before it is once again replaced by high-volume chat exchanges.
According to the latest reports, the MAX project has not been shut down, despite Telegram quite literally putting a spoke in the telega’s wheel.