Nobody I know gives a shit that it's not E2E encrypted. It's a kick ass instant messenger, that's all that matters to most people. Vastly superior to Signal and others in almost every way.

There are like 1000 features in telegram that just don’t work properly for e2e chats as well. When I use e2e messengers they cut so many features for security. Matrix doesn’t show link previews when e2e is on for example.

I think you mean Element doesn't show previews when E2EE is on.

This is not a fundamental limitation but a default setting in order to preserve privacy. You can easily turn URL previews for a given E2EE room on by going to the room settings > General > scroll down to Other > URL Previews.

Sure, but it’s for some reason framed as a WhatsApp competitor even in countries where Facebook Messenger is relatively popular, which seems silly to me. It appears to fill a similar feature niche as Facebook Messenger, not WhatsApp, even if these two categories can be somewhat conflated for most uses.

Yeah, the irony is they position themselves as 'anti-facebook' and they're worse for the user than FB's whatsapp product from a security standpoint.

I'd probably even trust FB's unencrypted messenger content to be better protected than telegram.

They clearly have a loyal fan following though.

I absolutely don't recommend using Telegram for sensitive communications.

That said, this idea

> I'd probably even trust FB's unencrypted messenger content to be better protected than telegram.

is ridiculous.

With Facebook you know you will be datamined and the result sold to anyone who wants to buy..

With Telegram maybe Putin reads it, maybe not.

One of them is a threat to my family and friends, the other is not.

FB doesn't sell the data, they sell the ability for advertisers to advertise to groups. I'm not a fan of ad-driven models, but this is a lot different than selling data.

If you're using unencrypted messaging you should assume it's public. This is true of FB messenger and Telegram, but if I had to bet on what unencrypted content is more likely to be owned I'd bet on Telegram. This is mostly a bet on where the world's best security people are and the company culture.

Really though we shouldn't be relying on the benevolence of any of these company leaders, that's why people should use Signal or WhatsApp where the encryption means you don't have to (or Urbit where there is no central leader).

Telegram, specifically P. Durov has literally sponsored Russian dissidents. He refused to give over info when he still ran VK over to the FSB instead sending them literally memes. When Telegram was banned in Russia, he spun up free proxies for people to bypass the restrictions.

In short - you’re posting misinformation.

From this article it sounds like he probably did give info over to the FSB when running VK after he got spooked. Though at least it does sound like after that he made changes to get out of the country so he could be more independent.

VK =/= Telegram. At this point the FSB has free reign on key requests from VK — it’s owned in majority by Usmanov, who has strong connections to the Kremlin. But in the article it says that he made that clear in his remarks as well when he was ousted.

Yeah I know VK != Telegram, but in the article when he was running VK it sounded like he got scared and handed over a lot of personal user details to the government.

It also sounded like with Telegram there was some abuse of looking up or deleting other employees chats when threatened. The culture of the company doesn’t seem great.

All of this is kind of irrelevant though. The core issue is unencrypted chats.

That is not intentional.

My point is not that Durov sends data to Putin (I don't think he does).

My point is that there is a lot we don't know about Telegram.

When it comes to WhatsApp and all other Facebook properties we know a lot and much of what we know is ugly.

But yes, I should find a better way to phrase it.

What a civilized response. I don’t know if this is the norm on HN, but this is incredibly constructive compared to the reddit or twitter doubling down for any stance. Cheers.

If your friends don’t care but you do, educate them. The good old “I’ve got nothing to hide” is de-facto a synonym of self-censorship or recklessness due to lack of awareness.

> based on public/private key pairs

I said it many times and I'll say it again: this can't possibly work in the real world, period. People are notoriously terrible with passwords already. So terrible in fact that VKontakte (I worked there, both with Pavel and after he was ousted) had, and still has, a department dedicated to account recovery. And those are passwords, short strings that you can actually remember. You can't possibly expect an average person to keep their private key (a file you can't store in your head) absolutely secret and never lose it at the same time.

In my world, the ability to recover your account if you lose everything is a hard requirement for any product that is meant to reach mass adoption.

The ability to revoke access is also a hard requirement. People share their credentials — it's a fact of life. In the usual setup, you can change your password and terminate sessions. But if your private key is your identity, you can't do shit to prevent someone who has gained access to it from impersonating you for the rest of eternity.

>In my world, the ability to recover your account if you lose everything is a hard requirement for any product that is meant to reach mass adoption.

I don't think it matters as much for messenger attached to your phone number. Even if you lose all your conversations you still can be reached by the same identificator and most of your contracts are stored in phonebook anyway.

Phone numbers aren't good identifiers for other reasons: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30258495

let's be realistic:

(outside of certain self-referential bubbles - like this site) no one cares anything about encryption, if in public chats I am anonymous and untraceable (example: no one can know my phone number and there are granular privacy settings) this is enough for 98% of people out here

"yes, encryption is useful if I want to send nudes to my partner or if I want to buy drugs but not while I'm asking mom for the sufflè recipe or I'm organizing a dinner with friends" this is what people think, and they are not completely wrong

"Normal" people are slowly but surely starting to care about encryption. They hear about it from people participating in self-referential bubbles like HN and then they start wondering. This is my experience.

I see telegram being used by local sport clubs as an alternative to messenger, primarily it seems for the reason that it doesn't require a facebook account. Most online gaming groups I know use discord, while programmer projects tend to use slack. A few gaming groups continue to use teamspeak.

I don't know however any groups that use signal as a replacement for any of the above, so do people have experience in migrating groups from those platform to signal?

Both Threema and Signal are the way to go with chat apps, the only advantage Telegram offers are vast groups for specific purposes. Here in Berlin, I'm getting cheap produce through telegram, get alerted to public transport controls (I do have a ticket, but sometimes friends do not), and sell/buy stuff I don't need.

Other advantages:

-not being tied to a phone number

-having a desktop app which doesn't suck (sync issues, connection issues, lacking features, is basically a simple proxy for your phone, etc)

-allows me to use 3rd party apps

-having chat history synced across my apps and devices and backed up. History is immensely important

Checkout Element, it covers all that as well. However, the Desktop App is Electron, so I don't know if you are OK with that

This is the main problem with Matrix for me. If they would just develop a good desktop client, I would be all over it.

Have you tried some of the alternatives like fluffychat ? I feel their UI is far ahead of the official clients

Actually, no. Thanks for the hint, I'll be testing that soon :)

TBH I would consider Matrix the way to go regarding chat. It allows app and vendor independent communication and combines e2ee with Synchronisation across arbitrary many devices (something that many people like from Telegram).

These days, Threema and Signal don't support the Matrix Protocol.

Telegram's advantages are a simple bot API and proper moderation tools for large channels.

And an app that is small and fast (and a proper desktop app, not some electron).

I'm consistently surprised when I remind myself that Telegram is a Qt app. It's so out of the norm today, when so many things [I use] are bloated Electron apps.

It's also Qt Widgets based, which is even more interesting IMO. Just really, really good engineering that happened here.

Funnily enough given the title, those same things have even bigger groups on Facebook than telegram in Berlin even accounting for how popular it is here.

"Die Fahrscheine bitte! Schwarzfahren ist eine Straftat"

If I'll ever need an app to pass around Pentagon secrets, I'll surely use Signal or something better. But if I need an app to chat with my friends and discuss what's going on without being banned and having the daily dose of Mandatory Truth injected, then Telegram works just fine so far.

The source code is available, so if you don't like the defaults, you can change them?

Not end-to-end encrypted, but it is encrypted.