🤔
both require phone numbers, and both concentrate metadata in a central location (Amazon servers, in the case of signal).
both sort of pretend to be free open source software, and sort of are but with a lot of caveats.
telegram doesn't even have end-to-end encryption (except for some wacky not-peer-reviewed thing in 1:1 'secret chats' which are rarely used); at least signal has it beat there.
https://simplex.chat/ is a new messenger which doesn't have any of the above problems and seems quite promising imo.
Telegram probably doesn’t have E2E so that people can have always active desktop sessions
I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "always active desktop sessions" but for any definition I could imagine it is possible to do that while having e2ee. Many e2ee messengers have multi-device support nowadays.
Telegram doesn't need to have e2ee because they've pulled some trick of becoming widely perceived as being privacy friendly despite not actually offering any e2ee in most cases, and offering only some 🤡-protocol in the few cases where they do.
Another reason for them not to implement e2ee is that they're most likely monetizing their users content data as well as the metadata (and in more ways than just charging some types of police for access to it, which is presumably only a small fraction of their revenue).
E2ee doesn't have to be 2 devices. It can be for any amount of endpoints as long as they have the key to decrypt the data.
For example my nextcloud instance has e2ee for my phone, computer, and tablet.
For people I don't know or just started talking, I give them my telegram username that's not linked to my personal phone number. For friends and family, I use signal.
Lots of opensource projects have telegram channels for updates. Not to mention news and local updates as well.
People need to incorporate a social aspect of the real world. Everyone isn't as privacy conscious as you are and you can have multiple apps for different scenarios.
If you don't ever want to meet anyone new, signal is perfect.
I ”trust” Signal the most because there is 100% transparency, I can look into the inner workings of the app and see what it does at all time.
Telegram is the best (in sense of privacy) message app you can actually manage to get your friends and family to use.
In my case, the hardest app to convince my friends and family to use is Telegram.
There’s definitely the stigma that Telegram is only used by criminals
Wait what? I thought Telegram pretty much was Discord but for people who prefer phones over computers.
Wasn't there also a controversy where some people believed that telegram was private and secure, but that only was for a very limited subset of their features?
Disclaimer: I've only ever installed telegram once for one single person, but promptly removed it afterward for sending out messages to some of my contacts on its own, so I have no clue how it actually works. Feel free to correct or educate me.
I thought Telegram pretty much was Discord but for people who prefer phones over computers.
Not a bad way to look at it, although I think one-on-one messaging is much more common on Telegram compared to discord, which has its “communities” thing as its main use case.
Automatically sending messages to your contacts?? Someone might have access to your account
It was a message along the lines of "Your friend Ekky has started using Telegram, say hello to them".
Not sure if it was a notification or a message, but that was very uncanny and definitely felt scammy and abusive. It's not the first time I've seen an app behave this way, though usually the app asks first.
Wasn't there also a controversy where some people believed that telegram was private and secure, but that only was for a very limited subset of their features?
i think you’re thinking of how you have to go out of your way to start a “secret chat” for it to have the touted encryption. those “secret chats” are way less feature-rich than the standard ones though, which sucks ass
I can generally convince people to use Telegram, but not signal. Telegram is better than SMS, GroupMe, WhatsApp, Discord, Facebook Messenger, SnapChat, etc so its what I use.
If anything, I've got hopes that Element/Matrix will get enough polish to become viable.
Using signal but planning to switch. SimpleX and XMPP are my candidates.
1.- jami 2.- xmpp + omemo 3.- matrix 4.- signal
It's hard no one cares. Where I live everyone uses whatsapp, and unfortunately what comes closer, and still without enough users base is signal on my list, and it's the last. Jami is distributed, which makes it best in class, and there are good efforts trying to make it not to steal the whole battery, as opposed to briar. I which more people were interested on not using centralized stuff, not even what has been called lately decentralized, which means centralized but with several central points (only if everyone self hosts it would be decentralized, which is not the case). Currently I use Jami and signal, though I've tried all those, plus briar, plus tox, even telegram...
I've been using conversations with a friend for almost a year now, the only thing I find it lacking in is the reply feature, but other than that it works great!
I think you are taking about reactions. Dino on the desktop already has them and they will come to conversations as well, if I am not mistaken.
- Session
- XMPP with OMEMO
- a Tox, if possible (no real asynch common)
- Matrix
- Signal
I prefer using telegram but in terms of privacy? Signal no discussions.
I trust Signal more, but the main reason I use Signal is because a lot of people I know use it. I would personally love if Briar caught on more, but given that isn't really happening SimpleX is your best bet.
