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A comment on Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook. Parent comment

Re:Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook by shp0ngle on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @01:04AM (#30269478)
Yeah, it’s ridiculously well made. I’m not disputing that. The protocol is weird but they built a great app on top of that.

They just cannot be sustainable long term. There is literally no restriction size-wise on data you can save on their servers. For free. And they have basically no income. They have some new ad program with basically no tracking (which is good for users, sure, but nobody will pay that much for that). They get 0 commissions from payment (and I never heard anyone using their payment thing). TON went nowhere.

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Re:Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook by tazjin on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @03:09AM (#30270199)
I'd pay double what I pay for things like media streaming services for Telegram if they had a supporter tier. It's easily the best service I use.
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Re:Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook by noxer on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @07:28AM (#30271844)
The restriction is done trough throttling in speed. It only looks like you have unlimited space but lets say you would actually want to upload a TB of stuff it would take very very long unless you use multiple accounts and then if you ever would need to download it it would again take very very long.

It also seems like files that are not downloaded by many people for a while get moved to slow servers and downloading these is really really really slow. If you have a few GB and want an additional online backup sure you could abuse it for that but realistically the potential to abuse it is low as it simply makes no sense as a could storage + they simply delete accounts from people who abuse the network. "Spam" is very lose defined and if you spam upload/download I'm sure they consider that to be spam and delete your account. Kinda pointless "backup" if you can lose access the moment you use the backup.

>And they have basically no income.

How would you know? They launched ads in public channels.

>TON went nowhere.

TON exists and seems functional just doesn't have anything to do with Telegram anymore due to the SEC.

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Re:Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook by wruza on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @03:33AM (#30270352)
protocol is weird

You’re repeating weird, but working with both bot api and tg api weekly or so (tg api through a wrapper, but I’ve read about lower level calls and used these in gramjs) I can’t see what do you mean by that.

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Re:Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook by maemre on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @04:22AM (#30270683)
Maybe they are referring to the fact that Telegram rolled their own cryptographic protocol that had a vulnerability that was fixed with a cryptic message [1] and still has some dubious choices [2]. I am not a cryptographer by any measure, so I don't whether there was a reason why they didn't pick an existing protocol like OTR. But, it doesn't make sense to me that they didn't switch to another protocol that is audited several times but released a second version of their protocol with the same criticisms.

[1]: https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/telegram-ecdh/ [2]: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/31418/signal-vs-t...

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Re:Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook by shp0ngle on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @04:02AM (#30270547)
Meaning MTProto. Not the bot API.
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Re:Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook by wruza on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @04:41AM (#30270797)
So, crypto part or mtproto in general? I’m not a fanboy who is going to defend tg crypto, and personally I wonder why they didn’t use the same security stack e.g. my browser uses for gmail access. But apart from that it feels to me like a regular rpc protocol, clumsy sometimes, but nothing particularly weird. Working also with many stock exchanges protocols, I can tell these are sometimes weird af, despite being mostly over-https. E.g. bitfinex and iirc bitmex are funny ones, not to mention FIX/FAST or large exchanges native protocols.
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