Inconvenience is often good enough. This isn't intended for state secrets, based on the language it's intended for "creators" to "protect the content they publish on Telegram". Obviously any platform can't completely prevent copying works, that's how piracy exists, and always will. If I were an artist I would prefer a platform that at least made it slightly more onerous to copy my things with high quality. A photo of a phone is worth effectively nothing in this context.

This seems like a fine change, people on HN just like to be angry.

"Inconvenience as a feature" perfectly sums up the state of the tech world right now.

inconvenience for abusers is a great feature indeed

Use is abuse now? Actually, I almost agree with that!

To ab-use something you genereally need to be using that thing.

It is impossible to prevent abuse, but it is necessary to contain it.

The issue though is that this will give the sender of a message the impression that what they are sharing will stay private, even though there are from a technical standpoint no such guarantees.

People aren't as stupid as you may think.

this is the definition of moving the goalpost (I know you are not GP)

> this only makes people to move away from Telegram to, say, Discord or alternatives

I simply do not understand why people are even thinking of moving to another closed platform like Discord. We already have an alternative and I think it's time to embrace it: Matrix

Because all Matrix clients are so terrible that they feel like beginners projects, even the official one is so slow and bloated that it's almost a bad joke.

Comparing Matrix to polished apps like telegram or discord is... misplaced to say the least.

I least expected such a response here on HN. I can understand if this appeared on other communities but here we are.

We all know how open source Software moves forward. It's us who can put up with little inconveniences of an open source app and maybe even improve it by identifying, reporting and implementing fixes. Those polished apps are polished because they have dedicated teams that get paid hefty $$$ to ensure they do not loose existing user base. In matrix case the user base is very little but I think they have achieved something remarkable: a thriving community that is developing client and server Software required for matrix to work.

I wonder if we had this kind of attitude in starting days of Internet, we probably would not have Internet today. By the way, when did you last use any matrix client?

Well, it's not just about polish. In the case of Matrix, a simple look at their "feature matrix" shows that the only client that seems to be making any appreciable effort at all to keep up with the feature sets that are touted as selling points of the protocol (encryption, modern UI, "Discord-like" experience) is the bloated Electron monstrosity, and independently I have heard from multiple sources that the Matrix server software is so heavy that it struggles to support even a three-digit number of clients on commodity hardware.

This tendency to render your project unusable by choosing inappropriate development tools (perhaps for their seeming friendliness towards inexperienced developer - maybe if the same developers were forced to write in C their code would simply crash all the time, whereas as it is it "merely" runs slowly and/or leaks memory) is manifestly not an intrinsic feature of open source. If anything, in the old days, open source projects (such as Linux itself) stood out for being more lightweight and performant than their commercial counterparts. In fact, I think the first time I remember encountering an open source project that was rendered unusable by its bloat was with Diaspora (an early attempt to make a federated Facebook/Google+ replacement, written using Ruby on Rails). Perhaps there is something to the fashionable "fix social media" sector that necessitates making development inclusive to those who are more activists than engineers, even if this comes at the cost of sound engineering decisions.

The parent comment isn't complaining about matrix, but rather telling the plain reality of WHY people use discord instead of matrix.

By not acknowledging the importance of polish, you only push to keep the status quo ... and the status quo is that the masses are not using matrix.

But here is the thing, its highly unlikely that open source app will have polish compared to Startup with all the funding in the world.

There are very few open source application (desktop or mobile) that are as polished as commercial applications.

This is unlikely to change, but I still think it's worth trying to get as many users to use open source apps, because more users an app has - higher chance of more developers - better app. Not to mention no ads or spying and other crap that commercial apps are riddled with (General opinion not just chat apps)

Feel free to keep advertising Matrix. I'm myself a strong supporter of it.

But to get it into the mainstream, it needs to compete with other messaging apps such as Telegram.

For that, it needs polish. Period. There's no way around it. So if the goal is to get it into the mainstream (and personally, I want it to be), then that is what it needs.

There are loads of ways you can contribute to this:

1. Contribute time, code, designs, general help and volunteering

2. Contribute money via personal means or via work

3. Promote the use of Matrix to individuals

4. Promote the use of Matrix to businesses, eg. at work, or as a backing protocol for messaging where it makes sense etc.

5. Purchase products that make use of or contribute to Matrix

etc. But in order for it to become popular on its own, and acquire a network effect (which it needs, because IM apps are a class of their own), friction to get new users needs to be reduced to near-zero. And for that... polish is needed. That's it.

Not the OP, but I last tried every web/Desktop app on this list about a month ago:

https://matrix.org/clients/

I came to the same conclusion I have the past four times I tried. The same one as the person you’re responding to.

I have wanted to like matrix for so many years now but every time I use it, it's unbearably slow and things like gestures seem incredibly clunky compared to telegram.

Sure, apps with lots of paid developers have better gui, and flows than open source.

I still prefer open source. Managed to convince a portion of friends as well.

Matrix is good in theory but its UI is still confusing. I'm also bitter that my old account that was closed a long time ago cannot be retrieved or reset, which means that I cannot use my phone number again (it's stuck forever to the closed account).

What are you talking about? You do not need phone number. I self host matrix instance and all I did was create username and passwords for people I know and shared with them. They then logged in and changed their passwords. At no point the sign up workflow asked for phone number.

Also, the UI has improved a lot recently. There are number of matrix clients that have appeared on app stores but I still prefer Element which gets regular updates and features.

You don't even need to create usernames/passwords in advance - you can just send your friends custom one-time URLs, which will allow them to enter their own desired usernames and passwords.

https://zeratax.github.io/matrix-registration/

I'm sure you can contact the admins of matrix.org and ask for the phone number to be released. (I'm assuming you used that instance, as you mentioned nothing else.) I believe they are reachable at [email protected] .

Rather seems like a bug.

What phone number? I use Element, and I never had to enter my phone number at any point.

You can provide it for the benefit of your friends (or possibly enemies or attackers) to use it to find your Matrix ID from their pre-existing contact phone number.

I see. Seems like an useful feature for many people.

Matrix itself has as much as an UI as Email (even less)

Matrix is hardly an alternative to the features of discord unless you only use it for having a few grouped text channels.

Matrix is terrible for hosting communities compared to Matrix. Matrix is only good if you are okay having a single group chat for everyone to put everything into. A single group chat does not scale, so it's better to use a platform like Discord.

Matrix added spaces as a grouping of channels akin to a discord server back in september, so this problem is now solved.

A simple directory of rooms that you can join is still very far away from the way Discord works. Matrix is still focused around users joining rooms which where Discord is focused around users joining servers.

At least in the mobile app I didn't even know this existed. To find this directory of rooms you need to open up the spaces drawer. The you need to open a menu for the space by clicking on a stack of three vertical dots. I thought this would have things like settings or something in it, but no this is the way to navigate to important information. Then you need to click on explore rooms. You now can see a list of rooms you can join. You can now join a room with a tap. Then you have to open the room with a tap. This is extremely convoluted and hidden.

Meanwhile Discord doesn't need this whole process since you don't need to manually join rooms yourself.

Matrix recently added a feature called 'Spaces', which is analogous to a Discord 'server':

https://element.io/blog/spaces-blast-out-of-beta/

Spaces is just a directory of text rooms. Users don't just join every single room and rooms are independent from each other instead of having a single roles system shared between the whole server. In this model having an announcements channel wouldn't work since there will be people who didn't join the channel. Similarly people might not want to join a rules channel.

ATM people will see suggested rooms, auto joining is in the works.

However, don't see a problem. Why does it matter if they join each channel? you don't need to read a channel in Discord as well despite you are auto joined

>Why does it matter if they join each channel?

Higher friction to visit other channels means that it will mean less people will visit other channels. I've been in a Nix / NixOS room for a while and I had no clue I was in a space and that space had other rooms until you commented that it existed. I never had this issue with discord. It was obvious there were other channels the first time I used it.

> I've been in a Nix / NixOS room for a while and I had no clue I was in a space and that space had other rooms until you commented that it existed.

sounds like a temporary issue though: first only rooms existed, now Spaces exist, but the room directory still exposes rooms instead of Spaces

> ”If someone has access to a material on their own device, Telegeam can only make it inconvenient (but not impossible) to save/forward content…”

Is this effectively true for media? Key concept is democratizing DRM. You as a digital person having digital rights and letting you manage them.

Consider Netflix on iOS devices. Now consider if OnlyFans creators could have the same effective guarantees. Might they not adopt Telegram in droves?

Media DRM is not infallible either. Sure, it's a lot more inconvenient than a feature that simply blocks screenshots, but even the most secure hardware DRM used on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video etc. is regularly cracked, the methods are just not public. (Though they usually attack Google's Widevine DRM rather than Apple's FairPlay.)

> And how do they plan to restrict screenshots on iOS anyway?

iOS doesn't have the same system as Android that fully blocks screenshots within the app, but they can obscure part of the screen when taking a screenshot.

you can use scrcpy for android screenshots

Not on Android 12 any more, though (that is scrcpy as such still works, but it's no longer able to mirror "secure" apps).

> This is how you ruin your otherwise-great platform

They already ruined it with ads

I've used Telegram for years, I'm part of about 20 groups and over 40 channels, and I have NEVER seen an ad. You won't ever see an "ad" unless you're part of huge channels, and then people can promote their posts as "ads".

Not a telegram user so I'm interested in how are the ads displayed? Like banner ads?

Like chat messages

https://promote.telegram.org

> Sponsored messages on Telegram are displayed in large public one-to-many channels with 1000+ subscribers and are limited to 160 characters. Sponsored Messages are based solely on the topic of the public channels in which they are shown.

It's a stretch to define Telegram as "ruined by ads"; this policy seems a reasonable compromise to monetize the product. The "famous competitor"'s way of monetizing is considerably more harmful, IMO.

Lol, have people learned nothing watching software in the past decade? It always starts with the innocuous "oh don't worry, this is very limited and only a select group of people will be exposed to it!" line

If one actually watches, instead of making rhetorical arguments, they'll observe that there are different types of products, and one can't make a generalized statement.

Windows for example, is expanding their ad-base, even if they have a base revenue due to the product being sold, so it's reasonable to present a slippery slope argument.

Ubuntu is not (directly) sold, yet, they've removed the ads (Amazon sponsored searches).

Android products have different dynamics - differently from O/S, the cost of switch is considerably lower; users do complain/act when advertisement becomes too invasive, so there is a balancing force.

This balancing force applies also to messaging apps, so the slippery slope argument is not realistic. See the significant number of users who switched to Telegram when WhatsApp was sold to Facebook, or when they changed the privacy rules.

I don't know how many users expect to freeload messaging apps (that is, to expect that apps don't monetize metadata or ads or not to directly sell the product). I have heard people complainints about Whatsapp's privacy invasion rather than Telegram's advertising (as a matter of fact, I guess that none of the people I know has ever seen a Telegram ad).

In this specific case, paradoxically ads are less dangerous, because the cost to the user is overt, as opposed to metadata (ab)use, which is covert.

Personally, I feel like I’ve seen just as much, if not more software I value ruined by it failing to afford to keep the lights on.

you might even say most software is ruined by NOT having ads, I wish everything had even more ads, I say!

You won't see them in private messages. It's only in some big public channels that people can promote their posts as "ads".

can channels opt-out of having ads?