Another way to describe them is people who lost the largest social network in Russia and are now Russian expats and dissidents.
> Signal, open source [...] With founders that are known to care about organizational transparency and user privacy.
Not open source, only partly, just like Telegram. And founders are known to have a radical position on trading privacy for centralizing as much control over the app as they can, tying identity to phone numbers, etc. They have exactly as much control over the app as Telegram has. But they are not dissidents or expats and who knows what they are going to do or did with covert or overt government backdooring attempts. Still, despite all the flaws both Signal and Telegram are in a bit better situation wrt privacy than Facebook owned Whatsapp, being in a business of compromising privacy and all.
Signal is completely open source. I'm not sure why you think it's only partly open source.
Quoting Wikipedia[1]:
> All Signal software are free and open-source. The clients are published under the GPLv3 license, while the server code is published under the AGPLv3 license.
They've also gone to extreme lengths to prove that the software running on their servers has not been tampered with: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/#trust-but...
I think your doubts create very unreasonable expectations for Signal.
It doesn't get much more open source than that.
Also, the owners of Telegram are not on good terms with the Russian government (its been banned before).
It does make Signal a little less usable than some other messengers, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't use Slack a lot more than Signal. But this is also why Signal is what I use when the secrecy of what I'm talking about actually matters.
Which is fine but will never work with the average WhatsApp/Telegram user. First, they have to be educated, they have to care, they have to decide if what they are typing affords that extra level of protection, if the inteded destination is on Signal, etc. It's too much.
I've tried to convert friends and family to Signal but not a single one continued to use it after a few days.
But I think it's fine that Signal is making these compromises in favor of security and privacy. Maybe we don't really need mass adoption, as long as the people that really need it know where to look.
Signal may be open source, but it's still as centralized as Telegram is. Signal.org will never federate with other servers running Signal (this is the official position). Signal also lags behind a lot in UX and convenience, when compared to Wire or Telegram.
A margin of error of about 1% is a very minor issue in having a democracy. And neither of them had over 50% anyway.
The low voter turnout is a far more important issue but even that's not a disqualifier.
It's just no polished like Telegram. It's painful to use compared to other apps.
I'm surprised more aren't using Signal, open source, and I believe funded by a non-profit organization. With founders that are known to care about organizational transparency and user privacy.