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It's really cool that Telegram is growing, even if it seems nowhere close to WhatsApp or Facebook. I keep recommending Telegram to people I know, but familiarit

It's really cool that Telegram is growing, even if it seems nowhere close to WhatsApp or Facebook. I keep recommending Telegram to people I know, but familiarity and the network effect keep most people on WhatsApp/FB. My ultimate goal has been to move to Signal, but Signal being quite slow in the development and the infrastructure fronts, it's not a viable option for mass adoption right now. For all its cryptographic weaknesses, I find Telegram to be a better choice. Message delivery is super fast. It syncs messages across devices. It's available on popular smartphone and tablet OSes and also on the major desktop OSes. It's also available on the browser (need phone to activate it for use, whereas in the other cases one single activation will hold good almost forever). Telegram has been adding new features (some of them are probably catch ups with WhatsApp) at a good pace. My wishlist for Telegram is two fold - a) make the crypto better (or try to work with Signal and adapt that) and b) introduce a monetization plan so I can support the app financially for all the worth it has provided and keeps providing.

noja 11y ago
I wish Signal would hurry up with their web client. It would really boost adoption.
- darklajid 11y ago
  At least you're calling it web client. Signal seems to consider that Chrome extension a 'Desktop Client'. Which it isn't, and unfortunately it won't help users that aren't using Chrome (a lot of my non-technical friends are on Edge now with Windows 10, the rest is split roughly 50/50 between Firefox and Chrome). Signal, with decent support for multiple devices (and ideally: Without requiring a phone number!) would be awesome. Until then, Telegram works best for me.
  - ex3ndr 11y ago
    Or you can wait for Actor - we are working on porting Signal's crypto to our platform and we are already have much better UX, Servers and full featured slack-like (but easier) desktop/web clients.
    - newman314 11y ago
      Why not just help fix Signal?
      - ex3ndr 11y ago
        We are much more powerful team for UX/performance. We build entire platform from scratch. Signal uses simplest existing technologies on top of only pubsub. We are just working very differently. Making correct multidevice/federation/apps/etc are larger part of the work then crypto (specs are ready). It is much easier for us to integrate signal protocol to Actor instead of doing opposite.
        jacalata 11y ago
        It might be easier for you to do, but it seems like a worse end goal.
        ex3ndr 11y ago
        We can discuss this if you will explain why goal is worse.
        jacalata 11y ago
        Because people already use Signal and fragmentation of the secure messaging space makes it less useful.
        ex3ndr 11y ago
        When Signal will became federated network we can join networks together no problem here.
        newman314 11y ago
        If you are going to build something new, I guess I'll throw my suggestion of Signal+Ricochet+Burner in. * Signal - the crypto * Ricochet - no metadata leaking * Burner - the ability to have multiple IDs without trying to tie to PII Last but not least, a commitment to have Actor code evaluated by credible outside security firm.
- newscracker 11y ago
  My wish is for Signal to provide what Telegram provides for messaging (multi-platform, sync, speed of message delivery, etc.). Just a web client alone is not going to be a convenient replacement (if it implies that the phone should be around or that activation has to be done every time the browser is restarted or cookies are cleared).
pfg 11y ago
This. Telegram got a lot of things right. They have clients that work well on all platforms. Features like the Bot API and Channels have a lot of potential. However, their home-grown crypto and dismissal of feedback from the crypto community makes it hard for me to recommend it to anyone.
- antocv 11y ago
  I recommend it just because it has questionable crypto, to feed at least some data into Russia and not only to USA. Just to not have only one unchallenged world surveillance power.
- hatsunearu 11y ago
  The only thing that bothers me more than the homebrew crypto is their claims of security. False sense of security is worse than no security.
  - alexandrerond 11y ago
    No one has cracked it, specially in the time they offered a $300.000 prize.
- Khao 11y ago
  So far Telegram has done everything right. They have awesome native apps on all the platforms, no stupid web-wrappers that are slow and buggy. I haven't had a single bug, it's always been extremely fast and reliable. This is what makes a truly great user experience.
- oddvar 11y ago
  it would be great if open source solutions like Telegram, Signal and Matrix (and others) would all interoperate. I work on Matrix (https://matrix,.org https://matrix,.org) but I don't really care which client you want to use - as long as we can still talk to each other!

noja 11y ago

I wish Signal would hurry up with their web client. It would really boost adoption.

darklajid 11y ago
At least you're calling it web client. Signal seems to consider that Chrome extension a 'Desktop Client'. Which it isn't, and unfortunately it won't help users that aren't using Chrome (a lot of my non-technical friends are on Edge now with Windows 10, the rest is split roughly 50/50 between Firefox and Chrome). Signal, with decent support for multiple devices (and ideally: Without requiring a phone number!) would be awesome. Until then, Telegram works best for me.
- ex3ndr 11y ago
  Or you can wait for Actor - we are working on porting Signal's crypto to our platform and we are already have much better UX, Servers and full featured slack-like (but easier) desktop/web clients.
  - newman314 11y ago
    Why not just help fix Signal?
    - ex3ndr 11y ago
      We are much more powerful team for UX/performance. We build entire platform from scratch. Signal uses simplest existing technologies on top of only pubsub. We are just working very differently. Making correct multidevice/federation/apps/etc are larger part of the work then crypto (specs are ready). It is much easier for us to integrate signal protocol to Actor instead of doing opposite.
      - jacalata 11y ago
        It might be easier for you to do, but it seems like a worse end goal.
        ex3ndr 11y ago
        We can discuss this if you will explain why goal is worse.
        jacalata 11y ago
        Because people already use Signal and fragmentation of the secure messaging space makes it less useful.
        ex3ndr 11y ago
        When Signal will became federated network we can join networks together no problem here.
      - newman314 11y ago
        If you are going to build something new, I guess I'll throw my suggestion of Signal+Ricochet+Burner in. * Signal - the crypto * Ricochet - no metadata leaking * Burner - the ability to have multiple IDs without trying to tie to PII Last but not least, a commitment to have Actor code evaluated by credible outside security firm.
newscracker 11y ago
My wish is for Signal to provide what Telegram provides for messaging (multi-platform, sync, speed of message delivery, etc.). Just a web client alone is not going to be a convenient replacement (if it implies that the phone should be around or that activation has to be done every time the browser is restarted or cookies are cleared).

pfg 11y ago

This. Telegram got a lot of things right. They have clients that work well on all platforms. Features like the Bot API and Channels have a lot of potential. However, their home-grown crypto and dismissal of feedback from the crypto community makes it hard for me to recommend it to anyone.

antocv 11y ago
I recommend it just because it has questionable crypto, to feed at least some data into Russia and not only to USA. Just to not have only one unchallenged world surveillance power.
hatsunearu 11y ago
The only thing that bothers me more than the homebrew crypto is their claims of security. False sense of security is worse than no security.
- alexandrerond 11y ago
  No one has cracked it, specially in the time they offered a $300.000 prize.
Khao 11y ago
So far Telegram has done everything right. They have awesome native apps on all the platforms, no stupid web-wrappers that are slow and buggy. I haven't had a single bug, it's always been extremely fast and reliable. This is what makes a truly great user experience.
oddvar 11y ago
it would be great if open source solutions like Telegram, Signal and Matrix (and others) would all interoperate. I work on Matrix (https://matrix,.org https://matrix,.org) but I don't really care which client you want to use - as long as we can still talk to each other!