Telegram Stories arrive for paid Premium users

Telegram's new Stories feature is here as promised, but it's only available to Premium users for now, the company said in a Tweet. Last month, CEO Pavel Durov revealed the upcoming feature that offers more granular control than Stories on other apps, letting you select who can see them and how often they last before disappearing. Multiple users on Twitter reported seeing the new feature as well.

Telegram's Stories resembles the same feature on Facebook's Messenger, showing up as expandable bubbles at the top of the conversation list. Users can choose to make them viewable to the public, along with a range of other options: contacts only (with exceptions), selected contacts or Close Friends. You can add captions and links and tag others as well. Users can also share photos and videos captured by the front-facing and the rear cameras simultaneously, similar to posts found on BeReal.

If you don't want to see posts from a certain contact, you can move them to the "Hidden" list in their contacts section. On top of that, users can choose when their Stories expire. You can set them to disappear in 24 hours like other services, but also make them disappear within 6, 12 or 48 hours. Stories can even be permanently displayed on your profile page — while still choosing the privacy settings for each post.

Everyone can see Stories, and users can send reactions and replies. However, you'll need to be a Telegram Premium subscriber to Post Stories. To do so, you'll need the latest version of Telegram (it may not have rolled out to your region yet), and must pay $4.99 per month for a Premium subscription — with a discount available by the web. Premium, which arrived last year, also offers perks like 4GB uploads, faster downloads, unique stickers, voice-to-text transcriptions, double the follow limits and more.