As far as being able to put a timer on a message and see it disappear for both sides, how do you know that the "self-destructing" messages claim is a lie? Genuinely curious, I am likely missing something.
> This is a lie, you can even pull someones telegram message history by sim swapping them FFS.
Well, the mobile telecoms still have no solution for SIM swapping and most software uses SIMs as a way to uniquely identify users. I've heard of -- and used -- messengers like Signal and Matrix and the added inconvenience for not using a SIM is definitely off-putting even for me as a techie. So I can't blame Telegram or any other app for using SIM identification -- it's flawed, that's well-known in the tech community, but I suppose somebody made the call to risk this because they wanted adoption and didn't want to make onboarding too hard?
---
I can agree on a generally somewhat misleading marketing being a reason for negativity. Even a functioning backdoor might still mean that messages are safe from most hacker attacks though; the backdoor is only used on demand (it's infeasible to use it all the time, that would take too much server resources and would put the onus on the eavesdroppers to provide extra infrastructure I think?) and the unencrypted data is served to whoever asked for it behind closed doors. That does not mean that any hacker can get their hands on it though, right?
But even a somewhat misleading marketing can't explain the violent reaction of most of HN when Telegram is mentioned -- at least it can't explain it to me. There's so much popular and very shady software out there and somehow Telegram eats all the flak while many other software packages receive very generous benefits of the doubt.
