That comes from upstream's README.md. I've never payed any attention to it, but now that you've pointed it out, I'm seriously considering changing that paragraph, or adding a note/disclaimer somewhere.

After all these years and promises, server's code is still closed, federation is nowhere to be found, their update/commit policy for the official Android app is a joke [1] (they even closed its issue tracker), and I'm really tired of their "trust us, we're not evil" policy [2].

If you haven't switched to Matrix/Riot, do it right away.

[1] https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/commits/master

[2] https://telegram.org/faq#q-who-are-the-people-behind-telegra...

As one of the resident cryptography nerds: Matrix/Riot seems to be in every way better than Telegram. I still need to review it before I can wholesale recommend it, but it was audited by NCC Group previously.

I don't seem to understand Matrix/Riot.

It appears to be like IRC, but also integrates with Gitter, and IRC and has a identity federator called vector.im.

Matrix is a federated chat protocol. It is like IRC or XMPP but synchronizes history and uses HTTP-based protocol. There are bridges to IRC, XMPP, and Gitter.

Riot is a client. It used to be named Vector.im.