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Why, in conversations about chat apps, does telegram get brought up so frequently as a private alternative? Is it not also mostly proprietary the same as whatsapp/messenger whatever? Is it just a matter of a dislike for facebook?
Why, in conversations about chat apps, does telegram get brought up so frequently as a private alternative? Is it not also mostly proprietary the same as whatsapp/messenger whatever? Is it just a matter of a dislike for facebook?
Very good point. There's a free-ish client on F-Droid (probably even official), but it's still a proprietary and centralized service. I would not really consider it better than the other proprietary options, but for whatever reason some tech people are into telegram.
Today I really wish it had full encryption. It says something about the developers that they’ve avoided default E2E for a full decade or more now. I’m trying to use signal more. But I also have years and years of telegram group chats to migrate…
Even luckier, their system handled the load apparently. Hopefully their eng team is proud of it.
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Indeed. And don't forget how well Telegram works compared to the competition. If anything will draw them away on convenience grounds (rather than some moral high ground, which was apparently not convincing enough or these new users would have installed an alternative sooner) it will be Telegram.
Messaging systems "working well" primarily means "the people I want to talk to are using it". Operational failures are a level-zero hurdle to pass, and after that it's all network effect.
Operational failures are honestly not a big factor unless they happen often. Facebook has had 2 such failures now in the past 3 years. Will this really cost them users? No. WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and Apple's Messages have all had approximately that same level of reliability.
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Other than the 1:30 hour downtime that happened to a lot of old accounts. I actually think it's genius if they throttled old accounts just to let new people see how good telegram is.
Source re 'old accounts'? I have an account as old as you can get, and had no problems, so I'd be interested in proof of a disproportionate impact on older accounts.
My account is from 2016, if not 2015 even.
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Other than the 1:30 hour downtime that happened to a lot of old accounts. I actually think it's genius if they throttled old accounts just to let new people see how good telegram is.
Source re 'old accounts'? I have an account as old as you can get, and had no problems, so I'd be interested in proof of a disproportionate impact on older accounts.
I'm actually quite thrilled that end users found a way to communicate in spite of "the everyday solution" being down. That gives me some hope that smaller vendors do stand a chance against incumbents, even in Facebook's space.
I'm not particularly thrilled, given Telegram is based in the United Arab Emirates, its client-server encryption is almost purposefully garbage (they basically rolled their own TLS, and predictably researchers keep finding vulnerabilities in "MTProto"), they don't enable e2ee chats by default, and they don't e2ee group chats at all. Do. Not. Use. Telegram.
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Note that telegram chats are not e2e encrypted by default.
And that it uses a proprietary encryption protocol, "MTProto", which has been repeatedly found to have vulnerabilities, like every other self-made encryption scheme. Now add in the fact that it's a UAE company...
I don't know why you keep saying that. They have servers and offices distributed in different countries, but IIRC most of the team including the founder and CEO are Russian. They say the distribution is so that no single jurisdiction can force them to do too much.
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Telegram offers the absolute best user experience IMHO. I would love to use Signal, but I can't really stand it.
Are they competitors? As far as I can tell, Telegram focuses on non-E2EE messaging and is more of an alternative to Facebook Messenger, Google Talk, etc. for non-private messaging. That's fine, but its support for E2EE is incredibly limited compared to Signal (or even WhatsApp), which includes multi-device support, a fairly-functional encrypted backup method especially in the case of Signal, etc.
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The clients are open source, which provides better assurances around the E2E encryption than whatsapp.
Except who the hell even use E2EE on Telegram?