7 ms·

While bashing on Telegram is basically HNs favorite past time, there aren't many other alternatives that work just as well in the area that I care the most abou

by isatty 5y ago

While bashing on Telegram is basically HNs favorite past time, there aren't many other alternatives that work just as well in the area that I care the most about: being a great chat app. Telegram is fast, has native clients instead of a garbage web ui (or electron based app), has better stickers than the alternatives, is easy to write bots for and has a larger user base where I'm at than any of the alternatives other than WhatsApp.

Laarlf 5y ago
Matrix or IRC if you hate yourself.
- isatty 5y ago
  I'm a long time user of IRC, but none of my irl friends are on it (anymore).
  - Laarlf 5y ago
    IRC for me is a way to seek support for OSS projects and nothing else. It is not really designed to be a IM for phones...
- theshrike79 5y ago
  IRC is really hard to do well, since it requires a consistent TCP connection to really be useful :/
  - joecool1029 5y ago
    Combine the parent's suggestions and use IRC over a Matrix bridge. It checks all the boxes when it works and as their comment mentioned you'll learn to hate things when it doesn't!
  - Siira 5y ago
    I use a self-hosted web client (thelounge). It's still not good for casual IM usage IMO, but it's pretty painless.
    - mehdix 5y ago
      I run znc on my server and Revolution IRC on my android phone and couldn't be happier about it.
  - dijit 5y ago
    FWIW there are efforts to prevent this being required and they’re quite close to mature. I currently run an irc network with these extensions.
maqp 5y ago
>Telegram is fast It's fast because it's insecure. Would they deploy end-to-end encryption for their groups, it would be as slow as the competition. >has native clients instead of a garbage web ui The "native clients" are used to manage data stored on remote server over an encrypted tunnel. The data that sits on Telegram servers is plaintext. The security benefits of the native clients (e.g. handling E2EE in a secure way) don't really play out when the desktop application doesn't feature end-to-end encryption at all, not even for 1:1 chats. >has better stickers than the alternatives, My Signal client has 1:1 match of my Telegram sticker packs. This is a non-issue. Porting them is trivial. >has a larger user base Sure, which means, larger amount of your data is hoarded by the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia who will take zero responsibility if his servers are hacked. Just a thought: You should probably refrain from advertising features of an app the glaring security issues of which you can ignore out of your privilege. There's a LOT of oppressive regimes in the world, and people living there shouldn't take your advice.
- isatty 5y ago
  I don't understand your first two rebuttals. I didn't want to keep talking about the fact that Telegram is not secure by default (there are plenty of other comments that go into this); I understand this, thank you. It doesn't have anything to do with the competition being unable to provide a fast _native client_ that I can use. I dislike web based apps, and I refuse to use them whenever a native alternative is available. > It's fast because it's insecure. Would they deploy end-to-end encryption for their groups, it would be as slow as the competition. Doubtful - it would increase the amount of compute required on their side, sure, but if done properly it will have close to 0 impact on the end users in terms of latency. > Mark Zuckerberg of Russia who will take zero responsibility if his servers are hacked. As opposed to _x_ from country _y_ that WILL take responsibility if their servers are hacked? Please. I will continue to talk about what I like about the user interface and what it does better than the competition because I want to.
  - maqp 5y ago
    >I dislike web based apps, and I refuse to use them whenever a native alternative is available. I agree with you, I'd use native Signal desktop client written on Rust if there was an option. But there isn't, thus I'm using the Electron app. It's not lightweight, but it's secure by default. I wouldn't use Telegram native client written in C over Signal Electron client, because Telegram doesn't offer E2EE on that fast client. >Doubtful - it would increase the amount of compute required on their side, sure, but if done properly it will have close to 0 impact on the end users in terms of latency. AFAIK, there is no efficient group DH key exchange mechanism, especially not one that's forward secret. Signal will always do effectively a for-loop over group member list and send message to each contact encrypted with the key used to send 1:1 messages. Sure, it has some cool optimizations like encrypting attachments with symmetric key that is multicasted to each party. But still, this can't beat Telegram in speed. The nice thing is, AES doesnt' have to get slower, neither does X25519, smartphones and computers are getting faster, as are networks, especially with the advent of 5G. In a few short generations, they will be indistinguishable in speed, even with groups so large expectation of privacy can hardly be assumed. >As opposed to _x_ from country _y_ that WILL take responsibility if their servers are hacked? Please. This is a really stupid time and place to play the game of whataboutism. The point clearly is, vendors that use ubiquitous E2EE, don't have to worry about messages leaking from server. >I will continue to talk about what I like about the user interface and what it does better than the competition because I want to. Yeah sure, you do that. But perhaps also check your privilege before you make recommendations to others wrt the nice UX being worth the massive security trade offs. You can't say you haven't been warned.
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
Most of Telegram's advantages come from it not being end to end encrypted by default. They've proven that simply claiming to be the most secure app is better for most users than actually being the most secure. Because true security comes with drawbacks, and users don't like drawbacks.
- t-writescode 5y ago
  Most of Telegram's advantages come from: * anonymous accounts. You need a phone number to set up an account, but you don't need to share your phone to talk to people on it * network effects. The sticker game is great on Telegram because there are so many people on it making stickers. * the secure chat *option*. It has an option of being secure and so therefore people think it's secure and when they find out it's not secure all the time, they're still happy that it has the option of being secure.
- Siira 5y ago
  A good app offers options. While most HN folk don't like Telegram's default, it at least gives you somewhat of a choice (and the user can force the E2E option even if the other party doesn't like it)(though they do not give the option to make all chats by default E2e, which is indeed a dark pattern). The other apps just shove possibly backdoored E2E down people's throats with no choice at all.
  - maqp 5y ago
    >The other apps just shove possibly backdoored E2E down people's throats with no choice at all. You can check e.g. Signal is not backdoored by reading the source code. You can find it here https://github.com/signalapp/ https://github.com/signalapp/ You can vefify the client you downloaded from Play Store hasn't been tampered with. Instructions for that are here: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/tree/master/reproducible-builds https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/tree/master/repr... Your post is slightly ironic, considering Telegram doesn't give you any choice on using E2EE for groups or any chats for that matter, on majority of desktop clients. Know this: when you're not using end-to-end encryption, i.e. when you're using Telegram cloud chats, those chats are by definition as private as a backdoored E2EE chat would be. So one could argue they are front-doored by design.
baby 5y ago
I use WhatsApp and it's pretty good for messaging friends, for large group chats I don't find telegram useful and I find discord much better.
jeroenhd 5y ago
This, seriously. I've switched to mostly Matrix chat (with bridges for backwards compatibility) and I seriously miss the Telegram experience. The official client is your run-of-the-mill Electron chat app, which comes with the standard lag and slowness. Alternative clients either lack features (notably, E2EE), are based on other terrible frameworks (Flutter, QML+Python, etc.) or don't work on the platforms I want to run them on. Spectral looks promising, and so does Fractal in a sense. I've had trouble getting E2EE to work on Nheko, and everything that does work is slow and laggy compared to native chat clients. One day I will probably get frustrated enough to hack the Matrix protocol into the Telegram app, if someone hasn't done that already by then. The lack of anything better annoys me to no end!
shapefrog 5y ago
> has better stickers than the alternatives do stickers count as a feature or a bug?

by isatty 5y ago

Laarlf 5y ago

Matrix or IRC if you hate yourself.

isatty 5y ago
I'm a long time user of IRC, but none of my irl friends are on it (anymore).
- Laarlf 5y ago
  IRC for me is a way to seek support for OSS projects and nothing else. It is not really designed to be a IM for phones...
theshrike79 5y ago
IRC is really hard to do well, since it requires a consistent TCP connection to really be useful :/
- joecool1029 5y ago
  Combine the parent's suggestions and use IRC over a Matrix bridge. It checks all the boxes when it works and as their comment mentioned you'll learn to hate things when it doesn't!
- Siira 5y ago
  I use a self-hosted web client (thelounge). It's still not good for casual IM usage IMO, but it's pretty painless.
  - mehdix 5y ago
    I run znc on my server and Revolution IRC on my android phone and couldn't be happier about it.
- dijit 5y ago
  FWIW there are efforts to prevent this being required and they’re quite close to mature. I currently run an irc network with these extensions.

maqp 5y ago

>Telegram is fast It's fast because it's insecure. Would they deploy end-to-end encryption for their groups, it would be as slow as the competition. >has native clients instead of a garbage web ui The "native clients" are used to manage data stored on remote server over an encrypted tunnel. The data that sits on Telegram servers is plaintext. The security benefits of the native clients (e.g. handling E2EE in a secure way) don't really play out when the desktop application doesn't feature end-to-end encryption at all, not even for 1:1 chats. >has better stickers than the alternatives, My Signal client has 1:1 match of my Telegram sticker packs. This is a non-issue. Porting them is trivial. >has a larger user base Sure, which means, larger amount of your data is hoarded by the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia who will take zero responsibility if his servers are hacked. Just a thought: You should probably refrain from advertising features of an app the glaring security issues of which you can ignore out of your privilege. There's a LOT of oppressive regimes in the world, and people living there shouldn't take your advice.

isatty 5y ago
I don't understand your first two rebuttals. I didn't want to keep talking about the fact that Telegram is not secure by default (there are plenty of other comments that go into this); I understand this, thank you. It doesn't have anything to do with the competition being unable to provide a fast _native client_ that I can use. I dislike web based apps, and I refuse to use them whenever a native alternative is available. > It's fast because it's insecure. Would they deploy end-to-end encryption for their groups, it would be as slow as the competition. Doubtful - it would increase the amount of compute required on their side, sure, but if done properly it will have close to 0 impact on the end users in terms of latency. > Mark Zuckerberg of Russia who will take zero responsibility if his servers are hacked. As opposed to _x_ from country _y_ that WILL take responsibility if their servers are hacked? Please. I will continue to talk about what I like about the user interface and what it does better than the competition because I want to.
- maqp 5y ago
  >I dislike web based apps, and I refuse to use them whenever a native alternative is available. I agree with you, I'd use native Signal desktop client written on Rust if there was an option. But there isn't, thus I'm using the Electron app. It's not lightweight, but it's secure by default. I wouldn't use Telegram native client written in C over Signal Electron client, because Telegram doesn't offer E2EE on that fast client. >Doubtful - it would increase the amount of compute required on their side, sure, but if done properly it will have close to 0 impact on the end users in terms of latency. AFAIK, there is no efficient group DH key exchange mechanism, especially not one that's forward secret. Signal will always do effectively a for-loop over group member list and send message to each contact encrypted with the key used to send 1:1 messages. Sure, it has some cool optimizations like encrypting attachments with symmetric key that is multicasted to each party. But still, this can't beat Telegram in speed. The nice thing is, AES doesnt' have to get slower, neither does X25519, smartphones and computers are getting faster, as are networks, especially with the advent of 5G. In a few short generations, they will be indistinguishable in speed, even with groups so large expectation of privacy can hardly be assumed. >As opposed to _x_ from country _y_ that WILL take responsibility if their servers are hacked? Please. This is a really stupid time and place to play the game of whataboutism. The point clearly is, vendors that use ubiquitous E2EE, don't have to worry about messages leaking from server. >I will continue to talk about what I like about the user interface and what it does better than the competition because I want to. Yeah sure, you do that. But perhaps also check your privilege before you make recommendations to others wrt the nice UX being worth the massive security trade offs. You can't say you haven't been warned.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

Most of Telegram's advantages come from it not being end to end encrypted by default. They've proven that simply claiming to be the most secure app is better for most users than actually being the most secure. Because true security comes with drawbacks, and users don't like drawbacks.

t-writescode 5y ago
Most of Telegram's advantages come from: * anonymous accounts. You need a phone number to set up an account, but you don't need to share your phone to talk to people on it * network effects. The sticker game is great on Telegram because there are so many people on it making stickers. * the secure chat *option*. It has an option of being secure and so therefore people think it's secure and when they find out it's not secure all the time, they're still happy that it has the option of being secure.
Siira 5y ago
A good app offers options. While most HN folk don't like Telegram's default, it at least gives you somewhat of a choice (and the user can force the E2E option even if the other party doesn't like it)(though they do not give the option to make all chats by default E2e, which is indeed a dark pattern). The other apps just shove possibly backdoored E2E down people's throats with no choice at all.
- maqp 5y ago
  >The other apps just shove possibly backdoored E2E down people's throats with no choice at all. You can check e.g. Signal is not backdoored by reading the source code. You can find it here https://github.com/signalapp/ https://github.com/signalapp/ You can vefify the client you downloaded from Play Store hasn't been tampered with. Instructions for that are here: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/tree/master/reproducible-builds https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/tree/master/repr... Your post is slightly ironic, considering Telegram doesn't give you any choice on using E2EE for groups or any chats for that matter, on majority of desktop clients. Know this: when you're not using end-to-end encryption, i.e. when you're using Telegram cloud chats, those chats are by definition as private as a backdoored E2EE chat would be. So one could argue they are front-doored by design.

baby 5y ago

I use WhatsApp and it's pretty good for messaging friends, for large group chats I don't find telegram useful and I find discord much better.

jeroenhd 5y ago

This, seriously. I've switched to mostly Matrix chat (with bridges for backwards compatibility) and I seriously miss the Telegram experience. The official client is your run-of-the-mill Electron chat app, which comes with the standard lag and slowness. Alternative clients either lack features (notably, E2EE), are based on other terrible frameworks (Flutter, QML+Python, etc.) or don't work on the platforms I want to run them on. Spectral looks promising, and so does Fractal in a sense. I've had trouble getting E2EE to work on Nheko, and everything that does work is slow and laggy compared to native chat clients. One day I will probably get frustrated enough to hack the Matrix protocol into the Telegram app, if someone hasn't done that already by then. The lack of anything better annoys me to no end!

shapefrog 5y ago

> has better stickers than the alternatives do stickers count as a feature or a bug?