It's fast because it's insecure. Would they deploy end-to-end encryption for their groups, it would be as slow as the competition.
>has native clients instead of a garbage web ui
The "native clients" are used to manage data stored on remote server over an encrypted tunnel. The data that sits on Telegram servers is plaintext. The security benefits of the native clients (e.g. handling E2EE in a secure way) don't really play out when the desktop application doesn't feature end-to-end encryption at all, not even for 1:1 chats.
>has better stickers than the alternatives,
My Signal client has 1:1 match of my Telegram sticker packs. This is a non-issue. Porting them is trivial.
>has a larger user base
Sure, which means, larger amount of your data is hoarded by the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia who will take zero responsibility if his servers are hacked.
Just a thought: You should probably refrain from advertising features of an app the glaring security issues of which you can ignore out of your privilege. There's a LOT of oppressive regimes in the world, and people living there shouldn't take your advice.
It doesn't have anything to do with the competition being unable to provide a fast _native client_ that I can use. I dislike web based apps, and I refuse to use them whenever a native alternative is available.
> It's fast because it's insecure. Would they deploy end-to-end encryption for their groups, it would be as slow as the competition.
Doubtful - it would increase the amount of compute required on their side, sure, but if done properly it will have close to 0 impact on the end users in terms of latency.
> Mark Zuckerberg of Russia who will take zero responsibility if his servers are hacked.
As opposed to _x_ from country _y_ that WILL take responsibility if their servers are hacked? Please.
I will continue to talk about what I like about the user interface and what it does better than the competition because I want to.
I’m not going to say anything else other than that this is exactly what Signal wants. They are actively hostile towards efforts to make third-party clients.
You can argue that this is for security reasons, and maybe I’d buy that.
But I would also bring up the fact that they implicitly control both ends in a binary distributed or web(thus- backdoorable) fashion most of the time. I’m not saying they do that, but since they have control of the clients, the servers and the protocol it is not impossible.
* anonymous accounts. You need a phone number to set up an account, but you don't need to share your phone to talk to people on it
* network effects. The sticker game is great on Telegram because there are so many people on it making stickers.
* the secure chat *option*. It has an option of being secure and so therefore people think it's secure and when they find out it's not secure all the time, they're still happy that it has the option of being secure.
You can check e.g. Signal is not backdoored by reading the source code. You can find it here https://github.com/signalapp/
You can vefify the client you downloaded from Play Store hasn't been tampered with. Instructions for that are here: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/tree/master/repr...
Your post is slightly ironic, considering Telegram doesn't give you any choice on using E2EE for groups or any chats for that matter, on majority of desktop clients. Know this: when you're not using end-to-end encryption, i.e. when you're using Telegram cloud chats, those chats are by definition as private as a backdoored E2EE chat would be. So one could argue they are front-doored by design.
Signal responded to the server code being outdated as well: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/11101#iss...
Also, what about the server source code?
>Also, what about the server source code?
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server There you go, last commit two days ago.
Regarding Riot, which is called Element by now, you may want to update your knowledge
"It's not a quality guarantee for clients in practice since you can't control Client Side with open source"
What? Open source native client with reproducible builds is literally the gold standard of individual control over software, it's even GPL licenced.
That's not how it worked out for email long-term; why should IM be any different?
Spectral looks promising, and so does Fractal in a sense. I've had trouble getting E2EE to work on Nheko, and everything that does work is slow and laggy compared to native chat clients.
One day I will probably get frustrated enough to hack the Matrix protocol into the Telegram app, if someone hasn't done that already by then. The lack of anything better annoys me to no end!
I currently run an irc network with these extensions.