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Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

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Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#201

Post by theshrike79 »

gefhfffh wrote: post #136
theshrike79 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you only need the one channel and you need to manage a 100+ people, Telegram is by far the best tool. Even better than Element? In my experience it does well with hundreds of people as well. And it allows to group channels as well, or use bots And you can use E2EE everywhere you think you want it

Element is still an UX clusterfuck.

I've been on IRC since its inception in the 90's and I've used ircII and BitchX etc. I'm no stranger to janky clients for communication tools.

Element is still in its death by a thousand cuts phase. There's nothing hugely wrong with it, but everything is a bit wonky. Just enough to be consistently annoying enough for me not to bother.

Summary: Matrix mostly good, Element bad. They should just copy Discord's UX 1:1, change the colour theme and work from there.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#203

Post by noxer »

8note wrote: post #13
fennecfoxen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Some Jan 6 folks did. Presumably not all of them did

The whole Jan 6 thing is a complete joke. Many people outside the USA can not even understand why this is still a thing people talk about, compare it to terrorism and even to the 9/11 attacks. Its completely insane.

I remember 9/11 from outside USA. It "broke" the normal way people lived their life. Jan 6 on the other hand did nothing, no one cared. Only US propaganda media made a huge deal out of it. And they keep talking about the 768 (an more) people who have been charged as if they where charged for terrorism or something. Most of them simply got charged for entering a restricted building. Comparing this to a terrorist attack that took the life of 3000 people and injured at least 6000 other is grotesque and disgusting.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#204

Post by throwjs51009 »

j16sdiz wrote: post #112
smt88 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Encryption isn't useful because you can be tortured" is a bizarre and ridiculous argument. The police can only make you talk if they know who to make talk in the first place. Reading your messages tells them who to interrogate, where to find them, who else is involved, etc. Encryption is important especially in such countries.

It is encrypted, just not e2ee. The police need to crack the encryption protocol (not impossible, telegram use non-standard crypto), or somehow gain access to telegram's server farm.

That's not true. Nobody needs to crack any encryption. Check my other comment with 3 links.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#205

Post by throwjs51009 »

gefhfffh wrote: post #198
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is proven beyond doubt that whatever Element fetches from their own servers and decodes on application launch are not messages encrypted using e2ee protocols. It is also completely clear that it does reduce the privacy of user messages. I don't know what else to argue about here.

Element does not fetch any message from their servers in general. If you use a server hosted by Element and don't disable encryption, e2ee encrypted messages will be fetched from their servers. What is "it" that in your opinion should reduce the users privacy? > I don't know what else to argue about here. I don't know what you are arguing about right now. What I know, is that I have disproven your original thesis (vi…

Maybe what people like to know is how Matrix's backup encryption is different from WhatsApp encrypted backups:

https://www.whatsapp.com/security/WhatsApp_Security_Encrypte...

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#206

Post by iszomer »

throwaway599281 wrote: post #165
amelius wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really strange, given what this country has done on social media to control foreign elections, allegedly, just saying.

>given what this country has done on social media to control foreign elections What has Russian done that a) Directly affects the results, such as hacking any system where electronic vote is possible. b) Any kind of propaganda or lobbying that any other country such as the USA, England or Israel don't also engage to make public opinion more sympathetic to them.

More of option B? If it hasn't been mentioned already and I know it already is a contentious topic repeating it, the drama with J.R. was allegedly a "professional political attack":

https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/149022042327069900...

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#207

Post by gefhfffh »

theshrike79 wrote: post #201
gefhfffh wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you only need the one channel and you need to manage a 100+ people, Telegram is by far the best tool. Even better than Element? In my experience it does well with hundreds of people as well. And it allows to group channels as well, or use bots And you can use E2EE everywhere you think you want it

Element is still an UX clusterfuck. I've been on IRC since its inception in the 90's and I've used ircII and BitchX etc. I'm no stranger to janky clients for communication tools. Element is still in its death by a thousand cuts phase. There's nothing hugely wrong with it, but everything is a bit wonky. Just enough to be consistently annoying enough for me not to bother. Summary: Matrix mostly good, Element bad. They…

While I can't make Element copy Discords UX (not sure I'd even want that), I can show you a young client that seems to do that: https://cinny.in/

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#208

Post by iszomer »

theshrike79 wrote: post #201
gefhfffh wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you only need the one channel and you need to manage a 100+ people, Telegram is by far the best tool. Even better than Element? In my experience it does well with hundreds of people as well. And it allows to group channels as well, or use bots And you can use E2EE everywhere you think you want it

Element is still an UX clusterfuck. I've been on IRC since its inception in the 90's and I've used ircII and BitchX etc. I'm no stranger to janky clients for communication tools. Element is still in its death by a thousand cuts phase. There's nothing hugely wrong with it, but everything is a bit wonky. Just enough to be consistently annoying enough for me not to bother. Summary: Matrix mostly good, Element bad. They…

It's okay for desktop use but frustrating on mobile.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#209

Post by throwjs51009 »

nickpp wrote: post #145

Wasn't Facebook supposed to be some sort of monopoly with an iron grip on its audience due to the first-mover effect? So now it turns out even chat platforms are viable competition...

News from last week:

Facebook suffers biggest one-day fall in history as shares plunge over 26%

More than $230bn wiped off the value of Meta making stock market history.

Most concerning was a never-before-seen drop in Facebook’s daily user numbers.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2022/02/03/almost-200...

Anyway, I think facebook is too big to fail.

Re: Telegram Became the Anti-Facebook

#210

Post by gefhfffh »

throwjs51009 wrote: post #205
gefhfffh wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Element does not fetch any message from their servers in general. If you use a server hosted by Element and don't disable encryption, e2ee encrypted messages will be fetched from their servers. What is "it" that in your opinion should reduce the users privacy? > I don't know what else to argue about here. I don't know what you are arguing about right now. What I know, is that I have disproven your original thesis (vi…

Maybe what people like to know is how Matrix's backup encryption is different from WhatsApp encrypted backups: https://www.whatsapp.com/security/WhatsApp_Security_Encrypte...

Thanks for the link. Actually, didn't even know that WhatsApp changed their backup mechanism, which previously used a mechanism that allowed e.g. google to obtain the messages.

Overall, the concept seems to be the same: use a secret, only known to the client to secure data stored at a untrusted location.

The major differences include:

- closed vs open source (it's easy to validate the mechanism in the implementation whereas you pretty much need to trust WhatsApp that they don't leak the key)

- WhatsApp uses a third party provider for storing the data whereas with Matrix your Homeserver is responsible for messaging and the backup

- only the main app can access the backup whereas with Matrix any of your clients can independently read and write to the backup (because there is no main client)

- WhatsApp stores everything in the backup, a Matrix client only the keys, because the messages are stored somewhere else

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