Telegram gets 3M new signups during Facebook apps’ outage • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by Markoff » Thu, Mar 14, 2019, 11:54 PM UTC

OJFord wrote: post #255

kitsunesoba wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, iMessage’s voice feature doesn’t get much use. Everybody I know uses it text only and opts for dictation over voice messages. Personally I prefer text. Telegram’s voice message support is much better, but without fail when someone sends me one I end up listening to it 2-3+ times to make sure I heard/understood it correctly. Never have that problem with text.

I think Chinese people do, at least that was my experience of peers at university (in the UK) - many would wonder around either holding phone perpendicular to face, or with an earphone wire microphone strapped around their mouth having essentially asynchronous telephone conversations. Best of both, in a way? Maybe it's also about language - easier to speak Mandarin than type or draw it on a touchscreen? I don't know.

they are just lazy or too old, actually typing simplified Chinese it's faster than English, amount of characters you have to type/swipe to deliver same content it's much lower than with latin languages due to length of words and primitive grammar (even more primitive than English and that's already something compared to European languages with tons of grammatical cases and forms for each word and multiple plurals and genders, heck Chinese doesn't even have singular, if they would switch to pinyin they could conquer the world)

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

#302

Post by Krasnol » Fri, Mar 15, 2019, 12:26 AM UTC

jonlucc wrote: post #298

Krasnol wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would you say that a museum or university isn't sustainable because its revenue from goods and services is less money than it spends? Yes? That's why it's being usually run by tax money. A regular flow of funds. Something you can plan and work with.

Ok, then I'll speak specifically about my local institution. My local art museum gets zero funding from taxes, but runs on its endowment and whatever revenue it brings in from admission, membership, events, food and beverage sales, and merchandise sales. Are they unsustainable because of that?

How is this applicable to what I wrote?

Here is the relevant part again:

> because its revenue from goods and services is less money than it spends

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

#303

Post by ergocoder » Fri, Mar 15, 2019, 1:27 AM UTC

alehul wrote: post #295

ergocoder wrote: post #293

Honest question here. Isn't Telegram inherently unsafe/unsecure because all of its operations are in Russia? When a Russian authority knocks on their doors, they would be forced to answer. It's true that US would do the same thing. But I'd prefer US doing it over Russia or China doing it. Because, at least, transparency and justice system in US is a lot better than ones in Russia and China.

Telegram moved out of Russia and has since been banned in the country. That aside, as an American, I feel like maybe there's some advantage to it being Russia rather than the US, as it's not your own country or an ally. Probably not enough of a reason to prefer Russia, but there is something to think about there. :)

Ha, I see. It seems the founder already left Russia and can't go back.

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

#304

Post by ubercow13 » Fri, Mar 15, 2019, 3:05 AM UTC

rickycook wrote: post #289

ubercow13 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they? That seems like an extraordinary claim. Do you have a source?

it’s not quite that brazen, but from what i remember the whatsapp server can push a new public key for your contact/chat to the device, which means that they can MITM you. the chat shows that the key changed, but most users wouldn’t know what that means and ignore it

Isn't that how Signal works too? What else would it do, disallow you from continuing the chat if the key changes?

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

#305

Post by kerng » Fri, Mar 15, 2019, 3:29 AM UTC

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…

Agree, that the arguable best option Signal should be at least be mentioned. Also, unlikely at that if Telegram had an drastic increase in users that it would be similar for Signal.

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

#306

Post by jammygit » Fri, Mar 15, 2019, 3:31 AM UTC

Frondo wrote: post #114

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.

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've had the same delayed send issue recently with signal. Its not a deal breaker for me, but I am open to other apps if they were comparably secure..

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

#307

Post by Barrin92 » Fri, Mar 15, 2019, 4:58 AM UTC

chewz wrote: post #38

I am recommending Wire. https://wire.com/en/ https://wire.com/en/about/ https://wire.com/en/security/

Also somewhat off-topic, their backend is written in Haskell and on GitHub. Not terribly relevant for the end user, but I found it an interesting choice.

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

#308

Post by saagarjha » Fri, Mar 15, 2019, 6:09 AM UTC

ubercow13 wrote: post #182

saagarjha wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram's clients are nominally open source.

What more could you want?

Clients that are actually open source, updated on time, and have source code that actually builds?

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

#309

Post by saagarjha » Fri, Mar 15, 2019, 6:11 AM UTC

amedvednikov wrote: post #195

saagarjha wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling either of those "native" is a bit of a conceit, since both reimplement standard system controls and eschew the use of system frameworks such as Cocoa.

The Swift app and the original Objective-C app are native.

Again, they are native only in that they run native code and use the bare minimum Cocoa (Touch) controls that they are required to do by the system. Everything else is reimplemented, rather poorly IMO.

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

#310

Post by fnord123 » Fri, Mar 15, 2019, 7:53 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #309

amedvednikov wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Swift app and the original Objective-C app are native.

Again, they are native only in that they run native code and use the bare minimum Cocoa (Touch) controls that they are required to do by the system. Everything else is reimplemented, rather poorly IMO.

>they are native only in that they run native code

so... native. I'm glad everyone agrees then.