Now that you mention it, I _did_ fail to explain why I brought up Telegram. My bad, thank you for calling me on that. I mentioned Telegram particularly because in my social circles, Telegram is number one by a long shot in terms of "people just want to be where their friends are and not feel left out." I should have actually said that, rather than jumping to the next part of the idea.

(I am not here to defend Telegram's portrayal of itself as a secure messaging service — Telegram is grotesquely bad on that axis)

That’s interesting. Do you live in a country where Telegram is particularly popular? Here in the US I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of someone using it. I don’t even know what the app icon looks like. My social circles are on some mix of Messenger, iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, and if you count coworkers as social contacts, Slack.

not op and aware this may not be representive, but i share the preference for telegram as a just-works, "fun" and high-penetration messenger with whatsapp as a first and sms as second compatability fallback. this beeing in germany.

tg is light on resources like phone storage and bandwidth (and hence money) and has excellent multidevice support.

apart from that i don't belive one can have a seriously private conversation involving a device running popular versions of android/ios.

> WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger offer the same level of security as Telegram.

If you look only at encryption, WhatsApp is even better.

Once you factor in the fact that all your metadata is vacuumed into Facebooks data lake and that it might very well end up in Google Cloud if either you or someone you chat with activate cloud backups.

Telegram has optional E2E encryption (as does WhatsApp) which puts it ahead of Facebook Messenger. Unlike FB Messenger and WhatsApp, the company behind Telegram so far doesn't have a history of selling your personal data. I'd say it's fairly competitive, though obviously not ahead of Signal

> Telegram has optional E2E encryption (as does WhatsApp)

WhatsApp, for all its faults is E2E-encrypted by default and all the time.

Not that it helps much unless you avoid activating backups and convince all your contacts to avoid backups.

I don't like WhatsApp (anymore), but we should stick to the facts.

Thanks for setting the record straight. I actually thought you needed to opt in (was that maybe how it worked when they first added it?) but I'm glad to hear it's always on

Facebook Messenger also has optional E2E encryption in a feature called Secret Conversations which is very similar to Telegram's Secret Chats. A big difference though is that Facebook uses the Signal protocol while Telegram rolled their own.