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Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

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Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 th…

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.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#92
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason Telegram is able to easily outclass WA and Signal in the UX department is due to the lack of E2EE. If you don't need/want that it is clearly superior, but if you do...

What does UX\UI has to do with E2EE? Sure, Telegram team used more human resources elsewhere while WA and Signal where doing their E2EE magic, but once they where done - what stopped them from investing into everything else?

If you have true e2ee, you can't enter your login/password and see all your chats right there, instantly.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I took a look, but apparently you can't use the web app unless you already have an account, and you can only create an account in a mobile app. Is this an afterthought?

Found out the same thing. I guess they started from mobile, moved to web and git something better to do :)

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#94
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason Telegram is able to easily outclass WA and Signal in the UX department is due to the lack of E2EE. If you don't need/want that it is clearly superior, but if you do...

What does UX\UI has to do with E2EE? Sure, Telegram team used more human resources elsewhere while WA and Signal where doing their E2EE magic, but once they where done - what stopped them from investing into everything else?

On signal you will get various security related messages, like person x changed is key (because they reinstalled).

That stuff confuses every non IT person.

Not caring about it, allows for a more simple UI and UX to provide a easy way for person A to message B. Where B can be a group of thousands of people.

(a really secure way of posting a message to a big group would be way more complicated, even signal makes compromises)

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#95

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…

The funniest thing is that Telegram's group management tools blow anything FB has out of the water by a nautical mile. If you only need the one channel and you need to manage a 100+ people, Telegram is by far the best tool. For "communities" Discord is a bit better, since you can split stuff to multiple channels. Anyone with basic knowledge of the internet can also install bots on both to manage dozens of different t…

Does anyone need e2ee on group chats anyway?

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a look, but apparently you can't use the web app unless you already have an account, and you can only create an account in a mobile app. Is this an afterthought?

Found out the same thing. I guess they started from mobile, moved to web and git something better to do :)

I guess they want to know your phone number, or want to limit accounts to one per phone number.

Edit: but even so, they could verify a phone number by SMS, no need to make anyone install an app.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#98
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh? Wechat lets users provide their own stickers, for free or for money. I'd bet the range is competitive.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#99

telegram is way overrated. too hard to create an account, takes up too much memory, accounts do get closed for automated/arbitrary reasons. not at all like described in the article .

Accounts getting closed is the case of any major platform. If it is for fighting against bots and robots, it is a good thing. If it is fighting against humans, not so good. I have a opinion, that nobody should be censored/cancelled - it just makes them more angry and furious and will not change how they think or act.
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