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I would recommend that you try Signal, Wire and any other messaging platform with just one or two close people. Once you get a hang of the user experience and s

I would recommend that you try Signal, Wire and any other messaging platform with just one or two close people. Once you get a hang of the user experience and see any deficiencies and any annoyances first hand, you can decide whether it's even worth asking all your other contacts to try them. My advice: Except Telegram, none of the others (Signal or Wire) are ready as a replacement for WhatsApp in UX or speed as of this moment. But Telegram has end-to-end encryption only for device specific, one-to-one chats (called "Secret chat"). Normal chats are only encrypted during transport and are stored as plain text on the servers and on the devices to support quick searching and multi-device/multi-platform sync.

lima 10y ago
What are you missing with Signal?
- newscracker 10y ago
  Signal is quite slow at message delivery, to start with. It's not easy to know if a message was delivered at all. That's the main reason I almost stopped using it. Secondly, Signal does not have multi-device support and multi-device sync. Coming from Telegram, where I can catch up on messages on multiple devices and choose to switch to a computer keyboard to respond with longer messages, as opposed to a small touchscreen keyboard, I very much prefer having the ability to use different systems. Signal's desktop "app" is just with Chrome and AFAIK, it needs to be authenticated every time (with Telegram, I authenticate my desktop app once and it works fine across restarts). It's still tied to one device (the phone). Wire allows users to signup or find other people using phone number or email address. Even Telegram depends on a phone number as the sole identifier for a user. Overall, none of the current set of messaging apps or platforms are extremely appealing to me. All of them have some drawbacks. My dream platform would be a "decentralized and federated" system like email without having to be in individual walled gardens.
  - lima 10y ago
    > It's not easy to know if a message was delivered at all. One checkmark: delivered to server, two checkmarks: delivered to recipient. Works for me. > Secondly, Signal does not have multi-device support and multi-device sync. > Coming from Telegram Telegram has, to my knowledge, either end-to-end encryption or multi-device sync.

lima 10y ago

What are you missing with Signal?

newscracker 10y ago
Signal is quite slow at message delivery, to start with. It's not easy to know if a message was delivered at all. That's the main reason I almost stopped using it. Secondly, Signal does not have multi-device support and multi-device sync. Coming from Telegram, where I can catch up on messages on multiple devices and choose to switch to a computer keyboard to respond with longer messages, as opposed to a small touchscreen keyboard, I very much prefer having the ability to use different systems. Signal's desktop "app" is just with Chrome and AFAIK, it needs to be authenticated every time (with Telegram, I authenticate my desktop app once and it works fine across restarts). It's still tied to one device (the phone). Wire allows users to signup or find other people using phone number or email address. Even Telegram depends on a phone number as the sole identifier for a user. Overall, none of the current set of messaging apps or platforms are extremely appealing to me. All of them have some drawbacks. My dream platform would be a "decentralized and federated" system like email without having to be in individual walled gardens.
- lima 10y ago
  > It's not easy to know if a message was delivered at all. One checkmark: delivered to server, two checkmarks: delivered to recipient. Works for me. > Secondly, Signal does not have multi-device support and multi-device sync. > Coming from Telegram Telegram has, to my knowledge, either end-to-end encryption or multi-device sync.