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I( completely agree with whatever you have listed here and the reason why the app is up for bashing is because of the antecedents of the owner.

How does everything which has its origins in US is touched up with fairy duust while anything that may have a remote link with Russia is garbage?

Signal is garbage. They are riding on the coattails of marketing (and that's what investment money does)

When it first started getting popular I was curious about whether they were trustworthy, so I chatted with the devs and they said it was 100% open source. I looked through the source and found a pre-compiled binary blob buried deep in the folder structure, and they came up with some strange excuse that I can't recall and then it disappeared after a while.

Also, the evidence that it's not end to end encrypted by default for many operations is out in the open.

> I have to wonder if part of why this is mostly brought up is due to the origin of the app being a group with a Russian nationality.

I think it has more to do with the fact that there is no known reason for the organisation behind Telegram to provide it. It doesn’t make money from users, it has large operating and development costs, it keeps access to a lot of personal data without regulation, it is not a non-profit funded by donations and being open about their operation…

So most realistic hypotheses about that organization is that it’s shady. There are very few other possible explanations.

Telegram is about as private as facebook messenger or discord is the basic assertion. FB messenger is a much nicer client than the more private chat messengers, but telegram is essentially a client you can't assume is private, much like FB messenger itself, even if it has an E2EE chat mode that nobody uses.

But people are deluded that it's as private as Signal or Matrix, which is laughable.

This is one of the API entry points with which the apps communicate: http://149.154.167.51/

Nginx is currently at 1.21.0

Why wouldn't you care about your load balancer being so outdated? That's over 15 years.

There could be an explanation for this, but I'd have to put some unnecessary trust into it before I get the valid explanation. It is http and no https is offered on that server, which probably indicates that there's no need for TLS, that the communication is secure enough for it not to rely on TLS. But anyway...

They roll their own crypto and group chats can't be end-to-end encrypted anyway. It's even worse security than WhatsApp, let alone Signal.

> Care to qualify that speculation with some evidence?

This is a weird way to respond to someone using a metaphor to describe how an app makes them feel.

Does Telegram even offer server side searching?

I agree, but where are you getting that number from? They said "group chats", not "massive group chats". I would certainly want group chats with less than 20 people to be end-to-end encrypted, if it were possible.

I think a decent compromise would be just enabling it by default for private group chats, since it'd be costly and pretty pointless for public ones.

From a defensive perspective, I agree, but from an offensive perspective it's way easier to, say, download the contents of the 500 largest channels in the country than having to join those channels yourself.

This doesn't say anything about encryption.

XMPP would be the local electrician with a mustache and a calm tone that can fix anything for you pennies.

We used to have them in Hungary. I miss them. "Szaki"

This is news to me. I assumed that they had presence because of outreach but this could hold true for most other governments.

Indian government has official channels in Telegram, too.

Facebook doesn't really get a strong advantage in keeping keys to read your messages on its own servers. Intelligence services would benefit from this, so would fraudulent or corrupted employees. For Facebook, storing keys to your message is more a burden, if anything.

Facebook derives valuable data about you through WhatsApp in three channels:

- analyzing the content of your discussions before they get encrypted and sent,

- the app acts like a Trojan horse into you smartphone. It collects data such as your device model, geolocation, contacts, text messages with all activation/verification texts from third parties, the list of apps you installed, when you wake up or go to bed, when you sleep or do other things in bed (thank you gyroscopic sensors), etc.

- Through the correlation of real-time data collected from other smartphones, Facebook also acquires who you met, spend time with, where and when.

As you can see, you don't get end to end encryption for philanthropic reasons but because that's simply not where the money is and that's what gullible customers ask for.

end to end encryption is like when you get offered tap water at the restaurant: for many customers, it provides then with a feeling of self satisfaction.

But it doesn't improve the quality of the food at all...

Hope I brought some light in the topic :)

Facebook works directly with oppressive central governments to implement censorship against their citizens.[1] Some might consider that getting screwed over.

[1] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/May_2019_Jakarta_protests_and_rio...

They hold the decryption keys. Isn't it?

It Just Works(TM). Easy onboarding, doesn’t complain if you don’t let it vacuum up your entire address book, simple and usable interface, syncing is flawless, native desktop client, first party library for integrations and support of third party clients.

If you’re not willing to sacrifice too much UX for privacy, it kicks the pants off of a lot alternatives while still, ostensibly, not being the worst offender privacy-wise.

It wasn’t a roll-out - it was the announcement of the first public beta. Spaces has lots left to do: not just iOS but private spaces etc too.

Telegram does have E2EE in secret chats. WhatsApp does NOT have E2EE because it backs up your private keys to cloud storage by default. Even if you don't, your contacts might. Therefore WhatsApp is less secure.

The Telegram Apps are all great and have so many awesome features that are crucially also extremely well implemented. Everything seems so well thought through!

It's just incredibly scary not to know anything about who these developers are, where they are located and most importantly how this is all financed!

I understand Pavel Durov is a very wealthy man, but developing and hosting a popular global messenger service can't be cheap.

Same. This has been my frustration with Signal lately. They've had a large growth in a userbase but feels like they aren't growing their team fast enough to become real contenders with Telegram and WA. You don't have to move fast and break things, but you do have to move.

> whinces at telegram for not having e2e encryption by default

On desktop* there is no e2ee even among the options.

* where "desktop" includes GNU/Linux phones.

I use Telegram as a daily driver and I don't find any reason to be constrained about whatever you mention. I use Telegram on iPad, Windows, Android and they sync perfectly- that's why it's cloud messenger. Data migration isn't an issue at all. No one's asking you to use a non-e2ee client. But find reason and merit in those who do- try it for the convenience and then uninstall it if it doesn't serve your purpose.

Yes thats right.

1) it's incredibly trivial and intuitive to mute a channel. i see no issue with receiving notifications by default to a channel you just subscribed to

2) hamburger menu is right here. the avatar-as-menu implies account details. the menu presented instead makes sense and has the stuff you'd expect.

3) magnifying bar makes sense since the real estate saved is used for useful information

4) there is a big fat qr scan icon. it's just not "first page material", which is the correct decision here. if abd when you need it, telegram tells you where to find it.

In any case, you are entitled to your assessment. I just completely disagree with it.

That's pretty much how any group chat works on any platform, it's just a simple click to mute it except for direct mentions.

Why do you need your profile instead of a menu? Why a QR icon? Why a search bar?

Those are very minor things on an app that functions extremely well.

Save some, I turn the notification off from all groups and channels. I just check them when I want. This has worked for me well.

Exactly. WhatsApp has everything that Telegram has and they look up to them for "inspiration".

I feel like Clubhouse looks a lot more polished as an app though. Telegram feels like a CS 101 "hello world" messenger app demo. Yeah I know it has more features than that, but it looks like it has no features.

When you go into Clubhouse you know you're in Clubhouse. They don't need to write "Clubhouse" at the top of the app. There are no generic buttons such as hamburger buttons. It's obvious which account you're logged into just by looking at the icon at the top right. Almost every use has a profile pic. There is attention to negative space and typography.

I believe the owner/founder was kicked out of Russia. It was also banned in Russia for a while, at least they tried banning it.

Can you please at least read the first paragraph of wikipedia before making allegations? Russian government hates telegram with a passion

Any strong evidence of this? I mean actual links or investigations proving that?

Or are you deliberately spreading unsubstantiated claims?

Be nice if Americans could make something this good again. Have you seen WhatsApp lately? It's a pure travesty.

This is kind of loaded. I do think Telegram does an excellent job at ephemerality from a practical standpoint. Without being able to audit their server though, we have no clue if 'disappeared' chats and messages are actually scrubbed from their server.

I was once banned from the service for playing around with very old clients and had a back and forth with them over email for a week or so (it was re-enabled and they apologized for the inconvenience). They are prickly and refuse to give any details over how data is managed.

_And_ ephemeral? Does that mean this is end-to-end encrypted?

The secret chat- one-to-one has ephemeral option. You can set up auto delete in groups now.

"Secret" groups are in the works, I believe

I'd flip that around and say that server-side chat history, large group chats and multiple clients are hard to implement in the context of an E2EE chat service. What I mean by that is: E2EE is a necessity, not some nice-to-have feature.

Building a chat service with server-side chat history but without E2EE is like building a car with very nice headlights that doesn't actually move.

Signal has server-side chat history, no? And the protocol is open. So that part of the argument is moot.

As far as I know, one-on-one chats are not E2EE by default (there's a "secret chat" opt-in) and group chats cannot be encrypted at all. Has that changed?

Pavel Durov is a billionaire and this is his (and his brother's) pet project. He made his money starting VK (Russia's Facebook)

They raised a billion a few months ago.

It's still encrypted over the wire. And Pavel Durov isn't exactly a bootlicker (see his history with Russia).

That said, who knows who has access to Telegram servers.

Even mobile Telegram is so small and efficient despite being feature-packed. Just compare 67Mb of the Telegram installed Android app with 156Mb of Discord, 623Mb of WeChat, etc.