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Telegram gets 3M new signups during Facebook apps’ outage

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Re: Telegram gets 3M new signups during Facebook apps’ outage

#151

Post by jumbopapa »

FredFS456 wrote: post #148
jumbopapa wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also like to mention that you can't use the desktop client standalone and Signal requires a phone number to sign up. It would be nice if they got rid of these requirements. I use Signal and Telegram both - it's clear to me that Telegram provides the better user experience. I like Signal from the privacy standpoint though. If you're using Android then I think that Signal is kind of a no-brainer to use because it d…

Whatsapp doesn't operate as a standalone client either.

I never said it did, but I don't use Facebook properties to begin with.

Re: Telegram gets 3M new signups during Facebook apps’ outage

#152

Post by thecatspaw »

dnate wrote: post #141
s_dev wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Secret chats are meant for people who want more secrecy than the average fella. All messages in secret chats use end-to-end encryption. Seems fair to me -- some people do want some archive of their conversations but the option to limit the storage duration of those conversations. Secret chat is a heavily promoted feature -- it's not some hidden mode just because it's not the deafult.

There is literally no downside to end-to-end encrypting text messages. So it should be default. It is just harder to implement technically.

There is, you can only access them on the devices you sent them from or receive them from. If you add another client weeks down the line, you cannot access these messages anymore

Re: Telegram gets 3M new signups during Facebook apps’ outage

#153

Post by ardy42 »

newscracker wrote: post #146
mgw wrote: post #15

I understand Telegram's appeal because of its high quality apps and big feature list, but articles such as this one really should be more nuanced when pushing Telegram's marketing message of "We have true privacy and unlimited space for everyone.". Their default mode is not end-to-end encrypted [1] and as such the product is less private than WhatsApp. Even tech-savvy users in my social circles are not aware of this…

> When talking about privacy these articles should at least mention Signal. I hope they will use their recent funding [2] to polish their apps and increase the speed of innovation. I keep repeating this often, but Signal is not a user friendly platform for average users. It is good for ephemeral chats and conversations that one wouldn't care about later. Signal actively blocks chats from being backed up (and restored…

> Signal actively blocks chats from being backed up (and restored) on iOS.

I don't think that's true. Signal's backups require you to copy a file from your old phone to your new phone's storage. It's possible on Android to mount your phone's filesystem on a PC. IIRC, Apple is the one that doesn't make that easy on iOS, not Signal.

Re: Telegram gets 3M new signups during Facebook apps’ outage

#154

Post by newscracker »

meruru wrote: post #147
lucideer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Signal has a far superior user experience No. It doesn't. If you're going to advocate for an open alternative, at least be intellectually honest about it's pros/cons. You might have gotten used to Signal, and be unfamiliar with Telegram (and sure, much of usability has an element of subjectivity to it), but... the above statement simply isn't true in the general sense. Personally, I tend to try and advocate for Rio…

Seconding the Riot.im/Matrix recommendation. It checks all the right boxes: federated, multiple FOSS clients, multiple FOSS servers, no phone/email requirement, etc.

I'm just waiting for end-to-end encryption to be available, stable and be the default on Matrix.

Re: Telegram gets 3M new signups during Facebook apps’ outage

#155

Post by patrickxb »

ar7hur wrote: post #7

... or so says Durov, CEO of Telegram, without providing any way to fact-check his affirmation. I admire the PR stunt.

Also, the article doesn't mention how many users sign up in a regular 24 hour period (say on Wednesday a week ago).

3M in 24h is a lot of sign ups regardless (if they had 200M users a year ago, that's over a 1% jump in total number of users), but it would be interesting to know how many more than usual that is.

Re: Telegram gets 3M new signups during Facebook apps’ outage

#156

Post by afiori »

dpq wrote: post #68
Arnt wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal is borderline unusable? I've never used Telegram but if that's your assessment of Signal, Telegram must be great. Can you tell me about it?

Honestly I think the docs/official feature map at telegram.org would do a better job than me. I don't think you'd enjoy TG if none of your friends are using it, though [obviously]. Edit: ok I launched Signal which was installed on my phone since forever but never saw any active use, and I must say I remember it to be much worse than it actually is. Either it's seen a lot of improvement, or my initial experience frust…

There are some nice bots and channels, I often read hn via https://t.me/hacker_news_feed

Re: Telegram gets 3M new signups during Facebook apps’ outage

#157

Post by newscracker »

anotheryou wrote: post #94
roel_v wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having just installed Signal yesterday, in what respect is it worse than Whatsapp (from a UI pov)? The only thing I found so far is the bad integration with contacts.

I mostly use it on desktop and the clients feels like 10 years ago. - Doesn't go in to system tray (unless you fiddle with command line arguments). - can't search messages - overall unpolished (e.g. saving a file has no "show in folder" option afterwards)

> - Doesn't go in to system tray (unless you fiddle with command line arguments).

This was really jarring for me the first time I used Signal Desktop on Windows. I clicked on the close button and then realized that the app had terminated instead of minimizing to the tray (as such apps would be expected by many users to behave).

Thanks, I didn't know about command line arguments for that. I'll check it out.

Re: Telegram gets 3M new signups during Facebook apps’ outage

#158

Post by Frondo »

14 wrote: post #129
Frondo wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having used Signal, Telegram, and Whatsapp heavily (friends on all three, natch), here's my one absolutely critical beef with Signal: It doesn't always deliver messages, and it more frequently doesn't deliver them in a timely fashion. In my experience, Signal delays delivery of messages about 5% of the time -- which is actually huge and makes it unusable for reliable chats. The story which made me never trust Signal…

I really wish I could see this visual flare you are talking about as in if you could post some images I would buy it. I am honestly sitting here and thinking about what exactly flare might look like in a messaging app and I can’t really come up with an answer. Is it a color scheme? The layout of the buttons? Signal to me seems like many of the other messaging apps all much the same maybe slightly different in layout.…

Again, if visual flair isn't important to you, then fine, it isn't important to you. It's important to me -- I like my stuff to look subjectively "nice" and

Here's Signal:

https://imagebin.ca/v/4aAU1ai9CG8D

And Telegram:

https://imagebin.ca/v/4aAUJhRmj8Jx

Signal is white (and no night mode on IOS), the bubbles are undecorated rounded rectangles, there's no background and no option to set one, no stickers, no option to set disappearing messages on the fly, no indicator of when the person was last online. It looks plain.

Telegram has a night mode, options to set background colors, chat messages. It doesn't look plain.

As I've said, if you don't care whether something looks plain, then that is absolutely great and entirely up to you. Lots of people don't care about lots of things and there's really nothing wrong with that.

I like my apps to look nice (and I can, within broad strokes, define what "looks nice" is) and I know this isn't a unique position I occupy.

Re: Telegram gets 3M new signups during Facebook apps’ outage

#160

Post by zkar »

Most of the conversation here is pros/cons of Signal vs. Telegram. The bigger elephant in the room is whatsapp. Instead of telegram/signal trying to one up each other, try to be better than whatsapp. Even then, you will need to get to a critical mass usage to be useful which whatpass has already accomplished.
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