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For casual messaging, Telegram is fantastic. Actual multi-session clients across devices. No Electron. Truck loads of features and thoughtful touches everywhere

For casual messaging, Telegram is fantastic. Actual multi-session clients across devices. No Electron. Truck loads of features and thoughtful touches everywhere. It's easily the slickest and if you're looking to have friends and family who don't have a lot of patience for technical issues actually convert and stay converted, it's the only one I've found to do the trick. Searching through your messages by type, really good video messaging, voice messaging, video chats, and the best stickers on any platform. It doesn't do E2EE by default (you need to manually flip on Secret Chats) and group chats are not E2EE at all, both of which make it HN kryptonite because apparently E2EE everywhere, by default, is the only thing that matters even though there are technical trade-offs to an E2EE-everywhere model. I appreciate I can flip on Secret Chats when I need them but do wish it was an option in group chats. I selfhost a Matrix homeserver: it's nowhere near ready for primetime and misses a lot of those thoughtful touches less technical people appreciate. If you do want to try to onboard people to Matrix with the Element client (and be very careful because you only get one, maybe two shots with your friends and family before they go back to whatever they were using before) use Mozilla's homeserver for its vastly better performance and option of SSO sign-on.

novok 5y ago
WhatsApp has a better privacy story than Telegram, because every chat is a 'secret chat' by default. If your using signal, a priority for you is private chat with something the normies in your life can use, otherwise you'd just use whatever is the most popular where you live.
- the_other 5y ago
  > WhatsApp has a better privacy story than Telegram No it doesn’t. It’s owned by the 2nd largest surveillance capitalist; it shares a back-end with Facebook (so at a whim they can use the metadata around your chats to update their advertising models of you and your contacts); IIRC it leaks your engagement to FB (via web link previews).
  - maqp 5y ago
    Let's do an apples to apples comparison -End-to-end encrypted by default (WA yes, Telegram No) -End-to-end encrypted group chats (WA yes, Telegram No) -End-to-end encrypted group video calls (WA yes, Telegram No) -End-to-end encrypted desktop chats (WA yes, Telegram No) -Client-side encrypted cloud backups (WA yes, Telegram No) -Cross-platform end-to-end encrypted chats (WA yes, Telegram No) It's a bit hard to make a case for Telegram's good intentions when they lack the ability to actually deploy usable, ubiquitous end-to-end encryption. They could even pay people like Moxie to implement it for them, which begs the question, why haven't they. Durov absolutely has the money. Yes WA and FB has access to your communications metadata, but so does Telegram. And every entity that hacks Telegram. Pavel Durov isn't a magical entity of good will and intentions, he's a Russian guy with sure, decent eye towards good user experience, but the cost for that is too great, considering he's never hired a competent cryptographer to even see if the features the app provides could be implemented in a privacy preserving way. I'd love to be able to defend Telegram's design choices, but the more they spend their time adding "sleek animations" and other bs features, the clearer it becomes it's just another social media platform with same privacy features as Facebook Messenger: -Not end-to-end encrypted by default (Telegram Yes, FBM yes) -No end-to-end encrypted group chats (Telegram Yes, FBM yes) -Opt-in 1:1 end-to-end encrypted chats on mobile (Telegram Yes, FBM yes) In that comparison, WA comes at the top. But then again, it's a false dichotomy as Signal puts incremental privacy features with no real down-sides. -Open source clients (Signal yes, WA no) -Reproducible builds (Signal yes, WA no) -User-managed groups (Signal yes, WA no) (And no, Telegram being open source with reproducible builds isn't really worth anything until the verification confirms that it's really using proper E2EE. Currently Telegram's source only confirms that it's not E2EE by default etc.) As for the surveillance capitalistic aspect, Telegram is only as good as their word. FB wasn't surveillance capitalistic when it started back in 2005. Telegram isn't slaughtering the piglet before it's time to cash in, but they can get hacked at any point, and the hundreds of billions of messages that sit on their server, effectively unencrypted (storing the database key in server's memory is the same as "not encrypted"), Telegram isn't private even if Durov never wanted to use that data. The fact is experts agree such data is a liability, a toxic asset, that nobody can protect forever. Durov isn't as security researcher patching zero-days faster than NSA, GCHQ, Fancy Bear, Unit8200, CCA et. al. find them. Most probably Durov wouldn't even realize a rootkit has been sneaking data out of his server for the past 8 years. Compared to these risks, WA has been ahead of Telegram ever since they implemented Signal protocol in 2016.
- theshrike79 5y ago
  I'll take proper native bot support over privacy for my everyday chats any day. And by "chat" here I mean a channel with multiple people. For 1-on-1 it's all the same to me. Telegram is still the easiest, since I can have the same chat history on multiple devices easily.
- fsflover 5y ago
  > WhatsApp has a better privacy story than Telegram https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25685446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25685446
  - maqp 5y ago
    The backdoor only applies to WhatsApp for Business, where companies want a fail-safe to open employee messages e.g. after they've left the company. The fact they're transparent about it should be enough. Do not use WA for Business, for personal private communication. They are not the same product, and the business version isn't truly E2EE.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      There is no way to verify this. Do you trust Facebook?
theshrike79 5y ago
> I selfhost a Matrix homeserver: it's nowhere near ready for primetime and misses a lot of those thoughtful touches less technical people appreciate. This is true. I've been on IRC since the mid 90's with ircII and BitchX and even I find Matrix/Element to be tedious to navigate. There's exactly zero chance I will suggest it to anyone non-technical until they get their clients up to snuff with the competition. Telegram and Discord are the two best IRC-replacements, both offer easy native bot support and tools to manage bigger group chats (100+ members).

novok 5y ago

WhatsApp has a better privacy story than Telegram, because every chat is a 'secret chat' by default. If your using signal, a priority for you is private chat with something the normies in your life can use, otherwise you'd just use whatever is the most popular where you live.

the_other 5y ago
> WhatsApp has a better privacy story than Telegram No it doesn’t. It’s owned by the 2nd largest surveillance capitalist; it shares a back-end with Facebook (so at a whim they can use the metadata around your chats to update their advertising models of you and your contacts); IIRC it leaks your engagement to FB (via web link previews).
- maqp 5y ago
  Let's do an apples to apples comparison -End-to-end encrypted by default (WA yes, Telegram No) -End-to-end encrypted group chats (WA yes, Telegram No) -End-to-end encrypted group video calls (WA yes, Telegram No) -End-to-end encrypted desktop chats (WA yes, Telegram No) -Client-side encrypted cloud backups (WA yes, Telegram No) -Cross-platform end-to-end encrypted chats (WA yes, Telegram No) It's a bit hard to make a case for Telegram's good intentions when they lack the ability to actually deploy usable, ubiquitous end-to-end encryption. They could even pay people like Moxie to implement it for them, which begs the question, why haven't they. Durov absolutely has the money. Yes WA and FB has access to your communications metadata, but so does Telegram. And every entity that hacks Telegram. Pavel Durov isn't a magical entity of good will and intentions, he's a Russian guy with sure, decent eye towards good user experience, but the cost for that is too great, considering he's never hired a competent cryptographer to even see if the features the app provides could be implemented in a privacy preserving way. I'd love to be able to defend Telegram's design choices, but the more they spend their time adding "sleek animations" and other bs features, the clearer it becomes it's just another social media platform with same privacy features as Facebook Messenger: -Not end-to-end encrypted by default (Telegram Yes, FBM yes) -No end-to-end encrypted group chats (Telegram Yes, FBM yes) -Opt-in 1:1 end-to-end encrypted chats on mobile (Telegram Yes, FBM yes) In that comparison, WA comes at the top. But then again, it's a false dichotomy as Signal puts incremental privacy features with no real down-sides. -Open source clients (Signal yes, WA no) -Reproducible builds (Signal yes, WA no) -User-managed groups (Signal yes, WA no) (And no, Telegram being open source with reproducible builds isn't really worth anything until the verification confirms that it's really using proper E2EE. Currently Telegram's source only confirms that it's not E2EE by default etc.) As for the surveillance capitalistic aspect, Telegram is only as good as their word. FB wasn't surveillance capitalistic when it started back in 2005. Telegram isn't slaughtering the piglet before it's time to cash in, but they can get hacked at any point, and the hundreds of billions of messages that sit on their server, effectively unencrypted (storing the database key in server's memory is the same as "not encrypted"), Telegram isn't private even if Durov never wanted to use that data. The fact is experts agree such data is a liability, a toxic asset, that nobody can protect forever. Durov isn't as security researcher patching zero-days faster than NSA, GCHQ, Fancy Bear, Unit8200, CCA et. al. find them. Most probably Durov wouldn't even realize a rootkit has been sneaking data out of his server for the past 8 years. Compared to these risks, WA has been ahead of Telegram ever since they implemented Signal protocol in 2016.
theshrike79 5y ago
I'll take proper native bot support over privacy for my everyday chats any day. And by "chat" here I mean a channel with multiple people. For 1-on-1 it's all the same to me. Telegram is still the easiest, since I can have the same chat history on multiple devices easily.
fsflover 5y ago
> WhatsApp has a better privacy story than Telegram https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25685446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25685446
- maqp 5y ago
  The backdoor only applies to WhatsApp for Business, where companies want a fail-safe to open employee messages e.g. after they've left the company. The fact they're transparent about it should be enough. Do not use WA for Business, for personal private communication. They are not the same product, and the business version isn't truly E2EE.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    There is no way to verify this. Do you trust Facebook?

theshrike79 5y ago

> I selfhost a Matrix homeserver: it's nowhere near ready for primetime and misses a lot of those thoughtful touches less technical people appreciate. This is true. I've been on IRC since the mid 90's with ircII and BitchX and even I find Matrix/Element to be tedious to navigate. There's exactly zero chance I will suggest it to anyone non-technical until they get their clients up to snuff with the competition. Telegram and Discord are the two best IRC-replacements, both offer easy native bot support and tools to manage bigger group chats (100+ members).