Poll: Switching from WhatsApp

I trust Bruce Schneier on this stuff and he advises against telegram: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/06/comparing_mes...

Also in the comments on that "article" some people link against a cryptoanalysis of telegram, which can be found here: http://cs.au.dk/~jakjak/master-thesis.pdf

Someone else also mentions that telegram stores message logs on their server, if that's true it is definitely a big no no.

NOTE: I don't know what Zom is so ignoring it in the below.

Viber, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Threema and Discord are all built on the same paradigm: accounts tied to a single service and thus the inertia of network effect makes vendor lock-in a real problem when acquisitions happen or Terms of Service change.

Signal is in theory the "best" of these 5 options in the short-term, but it being open source is utterly irrelevant when you consider the network effect lock-in of a single-service model.

In fact, Telegram is probably a "more open" option given the portability its API provides. Openness vs privacy/security are entirely different concerns in isolation, but I believe openness is most important for providing a model upon which privacy can be sustained in the longer term.

Of course Matrix is the only truly long-term sustainable option of these. Encouraging users to move to any of the others will only lead to this discussion re-occurring down the line. And being ultimately more difficult as platform-switching fatigue intensifies.

People keep saying email has encryption, but in the rare cases when email is encrypted with pgp, only the contents of the messages get encrypted. Not the metadata. And apparently the metadata is the most valuable data for government snoops. They don't care as much what you've been saying, but knowing that you've been emailing back and forth weekly with some person of interest over the last 5 years is what they're really after.

Also pgp doesn't support any of signal's key ratcheting or deniability. And the web of trust leaks information publicly about who your contacts are! (And its vulnerable to Sybil attacks.)

Don't get be wrong, I love email and think its great. But it doesn't hold a candle to Signal when it comes to secure communication.

I use Telegram long before it became sort of mainstream and I haven't regretted that decision for a minute, minus their outages that started happening once every few months lately and are worrying.

Tried Whatsapp once, hated it, never tried again. Viber is even worse.

Telegram has been what an IM program should be, for years now (it gave me the vibe of my much beloved Miranda IM almost 20 years ago). I'd love it if they added more link previews (9GAG and Instagram previews stopped working almost a year ago and the functionality was never recovered) and even more keyboard shortcuts for full navigation without a mouse -- but even without these it's the most solid IM experience I ever had.

Maybe they are not as encrypted or protected in general as Signal. Maybe (but what do we know about Signal, save for a lot of claims?). But the fact that several governments and corporations demanded them to give access to various keys or to shut down channels is a testament that Telegram isn't as amateur in encryption and protection as the overly nitpicky HN audience would have you believe.

I like Threema because it works and the business model simple. Pay a few bucks and get it forever.