201–210 of 972 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that normal Telegram chats are not end to end encrypted. You have to start a “secret chat” for that.
Telegram gets a lot of flak for this, but if what they're saying here is true, I believe that it's a pretty sane architecture: https://telegra.ph/Why-Isnt-Telegram-End-to-End-Encrypted-by... Definitely a better alternative to WhatsApp in any case.
Where is the "Don't switch" option? Because as much as I hate that Facebook bought them, they're part of what I would call "critical social infrastructure." Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company.
I quit WhatsApp, Facebook et al and went with Signal. Initially it was hard converting people to a privacy oriented service, but today I have an endless list of open chats in Signal.
Where is the "Don't switch" option? Because as much as I hate that Facebook bought them, they're part of what I would call "critical social infrastructure." Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company.
How is it possible for this answer to be first... Really HN? WhatsApp is critical infrastructure?? Excluding company ownership, what is the crucial difference between all IM listed? There's LITTLE DIFFERENCE, they all serve the same purpose, feature parity is pretty much there. When you add company ownership to the mix, WhatsApp is owned by fucking Facebook. Let that sear in your mind.
You might have good arguments for your white-hot searing hatred of this company, but I will confess, it makes your position look much worse when you represent it with hotly charged emotional statements instead of reasoning.
For example: I find it trivial to understand why someone would call a Facebook service "Critical Infrastructure", thinking about how we don't control how families and communities choose to meet up.
Your childs little league sport uses facebook, your aunt and uncles have organized the family into a whatsapp channel, your President incites riots on Twitter... we don't get to choose which networks are the critical ones, and sometimes, we make the binary choice of "Be apart of society" or "Don't".
Just my 2c, it doesn't seem that hard to understand why he would call these things critical, when you actually take a few moments to think it through honestly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s not a good comparison. There are many alternatives to WhatsApp and it’s not a „critical“ infrastructure. In contrast, you sometimes can’t choose your ISP and internet is much more critical.
It can be in area's (such as in The Netherlands) where literally _everyone_ is on WhatsApp and it is the default form of personal online communication. Not using WhatsApp means not being able to communicate with a lot of people.
Telegram is a great IM experience . The client is good, feature set is good, the stickers are amusing (if you're into that kind of thing), the feature set is complete and everything is polished. Telegram is, I think, going to be one of the easier sells if you're trying to convince non-technical users to switch from WhatsApp or FB Messenger. The privacy, security, and governance story is not great though. If you care…
Signal (by design, probably) has no chat sync or backup. That's a dealbreaker in my book.
Edit: looks like chat history transfer has been a feature since June 2020: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/9/21280664/signal-chat-trans...
- Telegram might be the easiest to use where you likely find the most people but I disagree with a lot of things done by/around telegram.
- Threema (now open source) is as far as I know the most privacy focused one and by far my favorite. I like the way they are doing many thinks and they have many small goodies (like you can give a small "thump up/down" to messages in 1-to-1 chats from the message received notification to indicate agreement/acceptance). Or the way they handle accounts (separate from phone number and license, you can give people your Threema id without giving them your phone, the "trust levels", etc.). Or that they have a clear&clean business model. There are also a bunch of aspects which are useful if used in a e.g. business context like account revoke-ability, in person QR code based key exchange, fixed chat history etc.
I simply don't trust a single one of the messaging apps that they won't immediately upload my entire address book to their servers so they can have a more complete social graph.
I've tried Telegram at one point but it was a huge pain to use if you didn't let it access your contacts (or maybe it didn't work at all... my memory's fuzzy on which messaging apps were which.) Whatsapp was similarly awful as well.
Where is the "Don't switch" option? Because as much as I hate that Facebook bought them, they're part of what I would call "critical social infrastructure." Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company.
I honestly wish I understood what the big deal is. Don't give the app any permissions and you're good. All they can share then are your contacts.