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Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

wired.com

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Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#32
post #3

"Telegram is favoured by Jihadists" "Telegram is Russian Spying" "Telegram has extremely weak crypto" "Telegram is used by pedophiles" "Telegram is used by far-right terrorists" .... Use Signal! sigh The amount of times people bash on telegram is becoming painful. But lets take a logical argument; NSA has made it's mission in backdooring basically everything. We know from the Snowden revalations that their technical…

> If telegram was weak: Jan 6th and Jihadi terrorists wouldn't use it. The Jan 6 dudes ("terrorists" and/or otherwise) put their ugly mugs all over Facebook, Twitter, Parler, and the public Internet. I wouldn't exactly take opsec advice from that lot.

Indeed. And it was trivial to get evidence of neo-Nazis faking "tradie" personae in the Melbourne riots because people could rock into their Telegram groups.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#33
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram and Signal are the best we have out of CENTRALIZED solutions. Both are founded by anarchists who like end-to-end encryption and user empowerment. One accuses the other of being less secure and easily backdoored by governments… but the actual problem is — they are both centralized. We don’t even need to resort to conspiracy theories — all Germany would have to do to ban Telegram is make Apple take it out of i…

>... founded by anarchists ... That's reaching deep... seriously?

It’s based… no ?

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the article - "Whether this is a good thing for the world is another question, one muddied by how poorly understood Telegram is, especially in the US. The vast majority of journalists still refer to it as an “encrypted messaging app.” This description unnerves many security experts, who warn that, unlike Signal or WhatsApp, Telegram is not end-to-end encrypted by default; that users must go out of their way to t…

> what ultimately matters is how people actually use it, and that is probably in an unencrypted manner I've heard criticisms about Telegram's MTProto encryption on HN, but in my usage of Telegram nobody has ever turned on the secret chats mode enabling it anyway. Anyone privacy-conscious asks me to use Signal, Matrix, or even Threema. I have heard compliments about Telegram sticker packs though, if the other apps wan…

> I have heard compliments about Telegram sticker packs though, if the other apps want more users they could consider making "cute stickers" :)

Many of Signal's sticker packs were ported from Telegram:

https://signalstickers.com/?s=author%3ATelegram

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#36

I mean, I've seen hit pieces before, but man was this elaborate. It even had chapters !

You have not read many "hit pieces" then.

My favourite one from Wired is when they critically examined Project Xanadu leader and its history.

It's from 1995 but people still keep linking to it whenever Xanadu is mentioned.

https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have heard compliments about Telegram sticker packs though, if the other apps want more users they could consider making "cute stickers" :) You joke, but Telegram's clients have been innovating for years. Way ahead of the rest. Its packed with features and yet never feels bloated or slow. Frankly, its amazing.

Not even a joke, I had a younger friend comment on the sticker cuteness and it never even crossed my mind that people would prefer messaging apps based on that. The Telegram client/feature set is great, and I hope Signal and competitors will improve their clients to match.

This is why line dominates in Japan. The range of stickers is incomparable.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#38
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If telegram was weak: Jan 6th and Jihadi terrorists wouldn't use it. You must have missed this piece [1]: > The app was in fact secretly built by the FBI, and designed to allow law enforcement to tune into conversations between about 9,000 users scattered around Earth. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/08/operation_ironside_an...

The article doesn't discuss Telegram at all. How is it related?

it shows that criminal groups aren't always going to pick the most secure option for communication

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#39

This article is good. Telegram is really weird and sketchy; the rants Durov posts on his channel against WhatsApp usually make no sense; and their claims of security are dubious. And TON was a disaster. On the other hand. If I did any social organizing today, I would definitely use Telegram. Signal is fine , but nobody is using it and the UX is just worse. I don't trust Facebook to randomly not shut everything down b…

Telegram is ridiculously smooth, runs on everything, doesn’t treat any platform as an afterthought (despite having the electron thing, Signal is still very mobile oriented), and isn’t Facebook. It’s about as good as you’re going to get without making big sacrifices somewhere.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the article - "Whether this is a good thing for the world is another question, one muddied by how poorly understood Telegram is, especially in the US. The vast majority of journalists still refer to it as an “encrypted messaging app.” This description unnerves many security experts, who warn that, unlike Signal or WhatsApp, Telegram is not end-to-end encrypted by default; that users must go out of their way to t…

> what ultimately matters is how people actually use it, and that is probably in an unencrypted manner I've heard criticisms about Telegram's MTProto encryption on HN, but in my usage of Telegram nobody has ever turned on the secret chats mode enabling it anyway. Anyone privacy-conscious asks me to use Signal, Matrix, or even Threema. I have heard compliments about Telegram sticker packs though, if the other apps wan…

I don't think I've ever seen any of the stickers from the telegram company actually used in a chat. I've seen lots of stickers that people have had drawn, though, sometimes even used by the people who commissioned them.
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