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Boggles my mind how WhatsApp is still a more popular messenger than Telegram by a long shot. Talk about network effects and people not doing their research. Or
by nikivi 7y ago
Boggles my mind how WhatsApp is still a more popular messenger than Telegram by a long shot.
Talk about network effects and people not doing their research. Or not caring about UX.
- Aloha 7y agoTelegram wins for me, because desktop is a first class citizen.
- forinti 7y agoThat and it's dead easy to write a bot.
- StavrosK 7y agoIt's pretty easy to write a bot for Signal too, if you're willing to run a daemon: https://pypi.org/project/pysignald/ https://pypi.org/project/pysignald/
- fernandotakai 7y agoyup. i wrote a simple one for my group of friends (i was also playing around with asyncio for the first time) and it took me less than an afternoon.
- chupa 7y agoDesktop is a first class citizen, so much that encrypted chats aren't supported yet.
- kreetx 7y agoI have both Signal and Telegram and although I don't use as much Telegram to say this with absolute certainty, but Signal definitely has issues on all platforms I use (Android, macOS, Linux) - not deal-breakers, but issues. Telegram on the other hand has had none thus far.
- tylorr 7y agoI'm curious to know what issues you have with Signal on Android. I use Signal on Android daily and I haven't had problems with it for a few years now.
- jjeaff 7y agoI mean, your choice is between an app owned by Facebook or an app owned by the creators of the largest social network in Russia. I'm surprised more aren't using Signal, open source, and I believe funded by a non-profit organization. With founders that are known to care about organizational transparency and user privacy.
- sedeki 7y agoI think it is worth noting that the creator of VK (Russia’s Facebook equivalent; overtaken by the Russian state), is actually a known libertarian dissident.
- zzzcpan 7y agoYes, politically Telegram is in the best position between all three.
- daybreak 7y agoI like the concept of Signal but Telegram has some great features like usernames and public chat groups. In the end, better encryption by itself (Telegram rolled their own) loses out over function. Also, the owners of Telegram are not on good terms with the Russian government (its been banned before).
- tptacek 7y agoMy routine reminder that Signal doesn't have these features because they genuinely care about privacy and metadata security, and will withhold basic messaging app features until they know how to provide them without (a) creating a database of every pair of communicating users that they retain serverside and (b) leaking information about conversations to traffic analysis. See: user profiles, GIF sharing, both with really interesting explanations of how Signal ultimately figured out how to implement these features. It does make Signal a little less usable than some other messengers, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't use Slack a lot more than Signal. But this is also why Signal is what I use when the secrecy of what I'm talking about actually matters.
- dewey 7y agoIf I have to I use WhatsApp (Using Signal's encryption framework) over Telegram as I don't like to use a russian chat app that came up with their own encryption and doesn't even enable encryption by default. It's not just about UX or not doing research.
- kjaftaedi 7y agoEnd-to-end encryption only encrypts messages in-transit. The messages are still available in plaintext at either endpoint, and to the companies if they want them. Facebook already publicly announced that they are going to use their AI to scan whatsapp messages for content violations (prior to encryption).
- eitland 7y agoDislike Facebook as much as anyone here and expect them to do anything they can come up with as long as they can get away with it but it seems this particular piece was debunked: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/08/more_on_backdoo.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/08/more_on_backd...
- sb057 7y ago>russian chat app British-Emirati, but same difference.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 7y agoWhat's with the massive xenophobia here? It takes one second to find out they are not exactly in bed with the government and you're just left with racist statement.
- dewey 7y agoIt has nothing to do with xenophobia or racism. When the NSA tapped the dark fibers of Google etc they were also not exactly in bed with the government and yet they found out about the fact afterwards and started encrypting everything only then. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-infiltrates-links-to-yahoo-google-data-centers-worldwide-snowden-documents-say/2013/10/30/e51d661e-4166-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story.html? https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...) When you look at the surveillance happening in Russia paired with the unclear status of Telegram's encryption and it being off by default I'd say it's valid to be suspicious.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- technofiend 7y agoTaking to my friends who are heavy WhatsApp users it's less about text chatting and more about voice chat over data because it's far cheaper per minute than crossing the PSTN.
- jjeaff 7y agoSignal has great voice calling. At least, I rarely have any trouble and the calls are usually crystal clear.
- tialaramex 7y agoSpecifically, Signal's secured VoIP is Ogg Opus (better performance than the technology your phone uses to make actual phone calls) but in CBR mode (compression but with a fixed ratio so that a frame of audio is always the same number of bytes, thus a MITM attacker can't determine anything except how long your call lasted) An unencrypted voice chat app could do VBR Opus, which would need slightly less bandwidth on average for the same quality but might mess with flow performance estimators in the network and make the experience worse by mistake. One of the inadvertent benefits of Signal's strong centralisation of control is that they could just go "Opus CBR is great, we're using that now" and do it. No multi-year phase-in with most calls still being "legacy", no need to accumulate "buy in" from third parties who might not prioritize this work, they just did it.
- newscracker 7y agoAll these apps have voice calling, including Telegram.
- chupa 7y agoI've done my research. Whatsapp has encrypted chats by default, Telegram doesn't. Also Whatsapp UX is much simpler and I value simplicity. Telegram is starting to look like a spaceship with so many features.
- eitland 7y ago> I've done my research. Whatsapp has encrypted chats by default, Telegram doesn't. Telegram has encrypted chats by default, just not E2E-encrypted.
- chupa 7y agoI don't think we should be celebrating that the chats are not sent in plaintext over the net in 2019. That's not the point.
- eitland 7y agoYou not only implied that Telwgram chats where unencrypted (AKA plaintext), you outright stated it. That is wrong. I guess there are some real issues with Telegram, but lets be honest and not lie and say it isn't encrypted.
- ericd 7y agoWhat does it mean that they're encrypted, but not E2E? That means the chats are MITM'd by the company, no? If you're talking about HTTPS, that's an incredibly low bar.
- eitland 7y agoAs far as I understand it it means keys goes one way, messages another way, so that no single jurisdiction can get hold of anyones messages by seizing the servers. Warning: the above is just my very simplified explanation of my understanding of what I read a while ago. Edit: again, this is based on something I read a while ago, but I think Gmail has or had a similar system where you have to have access to two different places in the system to get hold of the messages, so yes, Google can get hold of anyones messages bjt it is not like anyone can do a select * from messages where accountid = 12345. (And this is not how I think they store the mails anyway :-)
- baby 7y agoIf you care about security Whatsapp is so much better imo.
- vezycash 7y agoI've brought over at least 10 people to telegram but only one uses it regularly. The main reason is notifications don't deliver. I'm not sure if telegram app developers suck or if IOS, Android and battery saver apps are in collusion with Whatsapp.