I don't have anything against Signal itself, but this aggressiveness and arrogance is really putting me off.
Has this became some kind of religion? Do you people realize that you are not the exclusive bearer of Truth, and that maybe, just maybe people that use Telegram chose to do so for a reason and are not poor clueless persons that need to be indoctrinated?
To be extra clear, my complaint is about whoever insists on spreading the falsehood that Signal is objectively better than anything else [and maybe also adds a bit of compassion on top ("it's a shame") for the rest of us unenlightened].
I would have no problem, and would actually be more inclined to switch to Signal, if you tried something a bit more modest and honest. Dunno, for example something along the lines of "If you would like an alternative to Telegram that has E2E enabled by default and on all chats, you could maybe be interested in Signal!". But what kind of discussion can we have if the argument is always "Signal is so much better, it's a shame that you people don't realize it" ?
Telegram has been implicated in a number of privacy scandals, and then their responses critique the authors of the indictment rather than actually criticizing the arguments themselves. Signal, even up to the recent critiques by Cellebrite, immediately responds and them discusses the merits of the claim.
Telegram is better in every way... except security.
I use Signal on iOS, and it's pretty much flawless. Extremely rare for me to even hear friends (many of which I communicate with using Signal) talking about problems, I vaguely recall having something go wrong a long time back, but can't even recall what it was now, only that it went away and started working properly fairly quickly/easily.
(I disagree with Moxie's choice to use real phone numbers as an underlying hard requirements, and also with the choice to notify people when other people from their contact lists start using Signal - but I understand why he made those choices (to piggyback pre existing social graphs) and respect how he implanted it without needing to grab my contact list and have it vulnerable on their servers...)
On Android it's flawless.
If I open signal on my laptop sometimes it does this ridiculous “time lapse” where it strolls through messages one at a time.
Sometimes all the messages just randomly wiggle on my screen. No idea why.
I get that security verification thing all the time. All the time.
Got a new phone late last year and it wouldn’t sync.
Sticker packs will rearrange themselves at random.
I could go on for ages. It is hilariously buggy.
The way they inform which users in your contacts have signal should be opt.
(I haven't used the disappearing messages feature, though, so I can't speak to any possible bugs there.)
Thats all I need to know to make a choice given the track record of the robotic buffoon class that believe everything that momentarily scales up needs to be monetized asap to shit out one mindless billionaire here and there.
For more than 7 years since its launch, the slick app, servers that instantly synchronize non-secret chats, and basically unlimited file storage were provided for free to use. Really free, no ads, no paid services. If you think about the amount of money that it all cost, it’s _insane_. So it begs the question: are Telegram’s founders really that kind of people willing to donate hundreds of millions for people’s messaging privacy with an additional option of maybe returning some of these money 7 years later with ads, or Telegram is just an elaborate FSB honeypot?
I guess we’ll never know for sure, but I’m more cautious about services that offer too much for free, not too little.
Which is why anyone bothers with these type apps in the first place, I'd like to say I'm dissapointed with the sentiment towards Signal, especially given how many here work in tech and understand how leaky these apps are designed to be and how hard development can be with a bare bones team (I experienced this first hand), but it never fails to bank on the notion that convenience will always win against security. regardless of expectation(s).
Shrug... I like Signal more: and I think Telegram has many useless features that are not of any interest to me and only create needless bloat at the expense of security/privacy which is untenable, so while I hope some bugs get sorted in Signal as I run both I know why I side with Signal.
I also understand that Signal runs on a thin donation based hacker budget and Moxie Marlinspike's podcast on Joe Rogan is a really cool watch that made it clear to me it's just a hacker project that scaled really well and is in need of funding and staff. I think Joe revealed himself to be a part of the money-centric Corpo class to Moxie's dismay when he refused to have that rock, paper, scissor match and you could see the disappointment in his eyes when Joe reacted almost offended at the idea that Moxie had anything worth his stake and could so quickly ascribe a dollar value to it.
It reminded me that it's okay to care about the messenger (guest) that his podcast attracts rather than Joe or the brand he's created around himself, even though I agree with may of his points I struggle to think its nothing more than hook or gimmick most times. I don't really enjoy any of his standup and find a lot of his quips to be childish and immature reactions to what seem like feckless attention grabbing that can derail a guest's conversation or train of thought, much like uninvited fart jokes would amongst otherwise fascinating discussion and in depth arguments: then again he is a comedian first and foremost.
With all that said, donate to help get those fixes on Signal sorted here [0]!
For my part, I find it fully amusing when a add another parent to my contacts, and they come up in Signal. <3
What I thought was the funniest part (strangest) is that Moxie walked back to "I'll give you a suggestion of people and you don't even have to have any of them on" and Joe still treated it like Moxie could dictate who was going to be on the podcast. But what's the difference between that and any other guest being like "hey, you should check out ________!" which happens all the time. It was literally a nothing bet. I do think Moxie forcing the week's lineup is a bit much. A single person? Not that bad, but I could see it being used against Joe (though unlikely). But "hey you should check these people out" is nothing. Guests suggest guests all the time and so does his fanbase.
As far as Signal goes, they've almost completed every major feature I've wanted. Usernames look like they're rolling out in a few months or less and group calling works (just needs to scale). Only issues I have are that sometimes there's some latency (this seems to be more related to 1. specific peoples' phones' battery optimization settings and 2. when there are large upticks in user enrollment. So neither of these are that big of an issue for me) and I can't use markdown (essentially a non-issue). Only things I want are fairly fluffy and features I would use fairly irregularly anyways. I don't understand the distaste of UI and it hasn't been properly explained to me yet. UI looks almost identical to WhatsApp except WA is far more busy in the background (which I actually dislike) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Maybe, but I saw it more as a way to try to have a little fun in what had been a stalled conversation due to Joe's lack of understanding on why cryptology has become vital and the implications of its need in modern Society.
I wish Joe had done some basic research and mentioned the first crypto wars himself and the fallout with Zimmerman had with PGP and Moxie would have probably opened more about how that pertains to erosion of privacy and security on the internet and the implications of the Surveillance Economy that has grown like a deadly tumor on Society since the Patriot Act and why Signal was created in the first place. He's had Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Andreas Antonopolous on several times now, there is no excuse for not being some what informed given his general curiosity on the topic by now and making the most of those podcasts and having Moxie speak on such a large platform.
Honestly, I wish he had let him request Laura Poitras to come on as she can bring the topic to the massess in a relatable manner better than anyone I've seen so far--hell I remember first seeing CCC and Defcon videos being totally overwhelmed by the speakers so much I couldn't follow any of it. This may be because she comes from a non-technical background as a film maker that has been around Cypherpunks for decades now but has also been at the center of so much of the polemics (Assange, Snowden, Wikileaks, Intercept etc...) of it all and likely saw how valuable it is in life and death situations very quickly.
My issue is with the dropped calls and poor call quality, but given how few people use the voice based calls they because Signal knows how vital to optimize for low bandwidth things like messages given its prime demographic in places with real reasons to use this app for its intended purpose. Again, totally understandable to me and something that they will eventually get to.
Aside from that, it's really gotten pretty good. I've been running it since the red phone days or what ever that app was called before signal.
That's part of the problem, all those you listed have poor to terrible UX and are just not great chat clients, Telegram is just better - in terms of speed ( compared to FB Messenger), features such as location sharing("where are you?", "Next to Restaurant XX " or "On the corner of A and B street" sucks, you can just share precise location via Telegram - a friend even sent me the location of a beautiful lake while on vacation because i was going in the area soon after), polls ( great for groups), message editing, search, stickers, gif integration, bots. I've used FB Messenger and Whatsapp extensively and Telegram is absolutely much better than both of them.
Works on tablets and desktops too. Just set it up as a linked device.
They owned feature phones so they've been blocked. Telegram paired just fine and works on any number of devices without linking them together and worrying about connectivity/battery for the main device.
https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...
> your number is only visible to people who you've added to your address book as contacts
Means they already have my number.
There is still a tiny difference. I can pick a username and chat with people who have my phone number (without them knowing it is me). It's a very small difference.
I can’t create a new group, but my friends can.
I don’t see friends that join Signal until I search for them manually by phone number, even though I allow Signal access to my contacts.
”So much better”?!?
So yeah, @arthurcolle has used Signal, and likes it.
This should be obvious if you look at most popular chat apps:
* Facebook Messenger
It's like... a who's who of the worst privacy violators.