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Telegram blows my mind. Say what you want about their security; they have the absolute best UX of any (primarily 1-on-1) messaging app, bar none. Discord is a

Telegram blows my mind. Say what you want about their security; they have the absolute best UX of any (primarily 1-on-1) messaging app, bar none. Discord is a close second. But the quality and polish of telegram blows me away to this day. And it’s lots of small features and details such as built in translation for messages in a foreign language, all the smooth animations, quick look and summaries of channels with aggregated links media etc, a super fast and responsive UI etc. And their stickers are actually ridiculously fun to play with (I used to not be into that, telegram converted me). Just yesterday I accidentally found out that it’s possible to replace a picture you have sent, with a new or different one - I sent a photo, realised it would have been better cropped, and just edited the message as I normally would have. And with all that it’s the only popular messenger that is actually easy to programmatically interact with. (And cheap! WhatsApp has a business offering and it’s ridiculously expensive)

fartcannon 4y ago
"it’s the only popular messenger that is actually easy to programmatically interact with." Let me introduce you to Matrix SDKs https://matrix.org/sdks/ https://matrix.org/sdks/
- scrollaway 4y ago
  Keyword is popular. I’m a proponent of matrix, but it’s absolutely not popular.
  - fartcannon 4y ago
    It's very popular with people who value not having their data stored in plaintext.
    - scrollaway 4y ago
      Do you know how much comments like that help Matrix gain a foothold in the closed source messaging space? Not all all, that’s how much. Seriously. Again, huge proponent and financial supporter of matrix efforts here; I think they do an a amazing job. But comments like yours are detrimental to what they do.
      - fartcannon 4y ago
        Nah, they do help the folks who don't know about it.
    - jonathantf2 4y ago
      People don't value that, they value a good UX and the fact that all of their contacts have the app. Matrix has neither of these.
      - fartcannon 4y ago
        People do value that, and they also value a great UX, which Matrix also has. Additionally, matrix, doesn't forcefully associate your plaintext account with your phone number! People with a clue value that.
        scrollaway 4y ago
        700,000,000 users disagree with your statements. You can’t make something true by just saying it’s true. Also your attitude is super toxic. You’re calling people who don’t value the same things you do, “clueless”. You don’t really get to bullshit people on HN — you can be super smart and skilled in your field, you’ll far too often come across people with vastly more experience than you. I invite you to think about that. Again, matrix is great, and I see it as the future of messaging. But it’s absolutely not the “present” of messaging; it’s years behind telegram, and the UX of most clients including the more popular ones is garbage.
        fartcannon 4y ago
        Its not years behind. That's a lie. In fact Id say it's ahead because you don't need to use a phone number (huge liability), you can choose to use e2e if you want and theyre not storing your data in plaintext! Oh and all of matrix is totally open source! Wow. That's how you know you can trust it. If they decide to pull a WhatsApp and move to Facebook, you can just fork and get on with your life. I like that the telegram client is open, but the sever isn't. Which means I don't really trust them. Same problem as Signal.
        jonathantf2 4y ago
        Just because it's open source doesn't mean I can trust it, I don't have the time to audit the code myself. Being open source is not a feature.
    - pizza234 4y ago
      I use Discord for public communications and I don't mind plaintext storage at all - on the contrary, on public chats, I personally value public history. The last time I've used Matrix actually, usability was a disaster; took me a while to figure out even just how to login, and that wasn't the only problem.
      - fartcannon 4y ago
        The login screen was too complicated for you, eh?
        pizza234 4y ago
        I was asked to login concurrently from two different browsers, every time I wanted to login. It was a very puzzling experience, and took me a while to figure it out, because it was something I've never experienced before in chat systems, and it wasn't spelled clearly, like "you must login from two browsers", in order to compensate for the unusualness. The UX of communicating with other users was problematic as well. I've tried to establish communications with a certain user, and I have no idea if I succeeded or not (likely not); two separate communications "channels" (I don't know the terminology) were opened with the same user, which is perplexing, since again, this is something I've never experienced before. I think those two weren't even the only problems I've had.
        fartcannon 4y ago
        Did you file a bug? That doesn't happen. Normally you log in. And that's it. On a new device, you can (optionally) verify your account to see previous encrypted comversations. But you don't have to do that. As for the chat rooms, they work exactly like Discord, which is exactly like every chat client with chat rooms has since the dawn of IRC. You can send a message to one person, or you can join a room and message everyone at the same time. Easy peasy!
        seizethegdgap 4y ago
        Do you remember using Riot pre-cross signing? If you don't, then you have no idea how bad it used to be.
    - AnonymousPlanet 4y ago
      So is PGP...
      - fartcannon 4y ago
        PGP is rad.
- tiagod 4y ago
  Telegram is on another level, honestly. You can do anything from a bash script with curl.
  - fartcannon 4y ago
    That is cool. I love FOSS with good APIs. It's too bad the sever is closed. Makes it hard for me to trust.
superasn 4y ago
Yes their API is one of the best. A simple curl request is enough to send a message and it has been so useful (sentry, uptime, door bell notifications(1), etc). (1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrkAWSemDC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrkAWSemDC8
- izacus 4y ago
  They also publish a fully functional C library that makes building fully (!) featured 3rd party clients easy. They support everything - from Linux, Windows all the way to Tizen. You compile it into your app and it "just works" with all the features of the main client. As a result, you have a large set of very good clients for pretty much all platforms. Imagine if the FLOSS darlings like Signal would make something as amazing as this - a library any plaform (from RPi, watches, etc.) to implement the best possible secure client that fits the user.
  - asddubs 4y ago
    Signal's stance on third party clients is so disappointing. Telegram really has them beat there, although it has to be pointed out that Signal actually publishes server source, while Telegram doesn't.
    - tcfhgj 4y ago
      Well,signal doesn't do it always as well, see the 1 year pause when they added cryptocurrency stuff
      - asddubs 4y ago
        still better than not at all, but yeah that whole shitcoin thing made me lose a lot of faith in them
- rsync 4y ago
  "A simple curl request is enough to send a message and it has been so useful (sentry, uptime, door bell notifications(1), etc)" hmmm ... could I participate fully on Telegram without ever installing the app anywhere ? That would be compelling ...
rvz 4y ago
Of course. Telegram seems to be the clear winner here at convincing the masses to move off of WhatsApp and have them stick around in Telegram. 700M tells us that it is a viable alternative for many users. Signal on the other hand seems to have failed to stick with the rest of the users and instead of trying to attract users from WhatsApp, not only they can't get backing up messages working properly, they instead were focused on introducing a scam cryptocurrency and wallet only usable on their app that no-one wants, and probably scared everyone off. Perhaps Signal is only good for getting users to keep using WhatsApp or Telegram, since there are too many missing basic features that the end users keep complaining about when trying it out.
- fritigern 4y ago
  The main thing keeping me from using Signal is that their Linux client is really really bad. In contrast Telegram has a great Linux client.
Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
> Say what you want about their security; they have the absolute best UX of any (primarily 1-on-1) messaging app, bar none. That is precisely because they don't give a shit about security. While others like Whatsapp bother with e2ee and resulting device sync problems and inability to do server-side search, Telegram just stores everything on a server without (meaningful) encryption and boldly claims that 'it is the most secure messenger'. And, imagine that, users just believe that it is the most secure! (I did talk to MANY people who repeated this word for word, 'Telegram is the most secure and encrypted messenger app!', and yes, nobody of them used Secret chats, - it doesn't nicely sync, and nobody needs disappearing messages anyway.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  WhatsApp is not e2ee. When Facebook displays advertising based on conversations in what’s app. You will never convince me it’s e2ee. It’s fake privacy.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    WA was E2EE, at least at one point. Its key weakness was not notifying of key changes by default.
    - philliphaydon 4y ago
      Before being bought by Facebook I would believe it was e2ee. But believe it’s not e2ee between the client and Facebook. They just decrypt analysis and reencypt and forward. Since communication is not peer to peer and goes via FB the key exchange is prob with Facebook not the users.
      - gruez 4y ago
        >They just decrypt analysis and reencypt and forward. Since communication is not peer to peer and goes via FB the key exchange is prob with Facebook not the users. Do you have any evidence for this, or is this your "better safe than sorry" assumption for every e2e messenger that doesn't allow you to verify keys?
kitsunesoba 4y ago
What's more is that the quality of UX manages to be mostly consistent across clients with entirely disparate codebases written in different languages with different UI toolkits. That's awesome. You have your pick of a massive variety of clients… one of them bound to fit your device setup like a glove. No lowest-common-denominator one-size-fits-all compromises like is so common with cross platform software these days.
- fritigern 4y ago
  Telegram's Linux client is simply Amazing.
  - benplumley 4y ago
    It's one of the worst Linux desktop programs I use daily. It gets scaling a bit wrong so all the icons look blurry, scrolling in chats regularly breaks (scroll wheel just does nothing but is fine in all other programs), and the one time I tried to video call in it it crashed. Discord's client is much better.
    - ubercow13 4y ago
      Are you using the Telegram-provided build instead of a distro build? Distro builds of it are often broken IME.
      - fritigern 4y ago
        Flatpack and Snap versions both work ok. I'm using the distro (manjaro) build, which is also pretty good. No idea how good the AUR versions are.
      - benplumley 4y ago
        I'm using the manjaro build, I'll try Telegram's own build, thanks.
    - ako 4y ago
      For what it's worth, Telegram's scaling on windows is also broken. Use it with one 100% and one 200% scaling monitor, on the HDPI everything is too small to read.
stefan_ 4y ago
The translation feature that sends your messages to Google - via an undocumented API and a random selection of User-Agents. This is who you trust your messaging security to?
- Siira 4y ago
  Trust a hacker or an MBA - difficult choice!
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
And they do all that with a tiny tiny team. They are the epitome of shut up and take my money.
adfjalkfja 4y ago
Discord is much, much better IMO and I've never enjoyed Telegram. Probably is better for the general public though
- kaba0 4y ago
  In browser or on mobile? I really don’t like either, but it is especially buggy/unintuitive on ios.
  - adfjalkfja 4y ago
    Both desktop app and android, also had issues signing up. It didn't like my number
alfongj 4y ago
> Say what you want about their security; they have the absolute best UX of any (primarily 1-on-1) messaging app, bar none. > Discord is a close second. But the quality and polish of telegram blows me away to this day. User experience is, well, subjective to the user. For tech savvy, primarily desktop users, Telegram and Discord can be great choices. This is however probably not true for the majority of the population.
- wetpaws 4y ago
  >This is however probably not true for the majority of the population. Apparently it is true for 700M people
qwerty456127 4y ago
Telegram UX still has a lot of place to improve. E.g. I hate being unable to pin more than five chats an having to hunt the rest as they jump around.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  You can pin more chats with premium; it’s in the announcement.
BatteryMountain 4y ago
Checkout it's memory footprint on desktop. It is not using typical web tech (aka electron). It's just C++ & QT. List of third-party tech in their desktop stack listed here: https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop
- ggktk 4y ago
  The Mac client leaks a lot of memory when you run it for a while. Yesterday I had to restart it because it was using 2GB of RAM.
andrepd 4y ago
>And it’s lots of small features and details such as built in translation for messages in a foreign language Is "automatically sends your message text to google" supposed to be a plus?
- scrollaway 4y ago
  Who said automatically? You have to enable it. And all it does is save me the round trip to a Google translate prompt anyway so what exactly is the difference? Seriously, sometimes people are so cynical here it makes my blood boil. Give people some credit, ffs.

fartcannon 4y ago

"it’s the only popular messenger that is actually easy to programmatically interact with." Let me introduce you to Matrix SDKs https://matrix.org/sdks/ https://matrix.org/sdks/

scrollaway 4y ago
Keyword is popular. I’m a proponent of matrix, but it’s absolutely not popular.
- fartcannon 4y ago
  It's very popular with people who value not having their data stored in plaintext.
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    Do you know how much comments like that help Matrix gain a foothold in the closed source messaging space? Not all all, that’s how much. Seriously. Again, huge proponent and financial supporter of matrix efforts here; I think they do an a amazing job. But comments like yours are detrimental to what they do.
    - fartcannon 4y ago
      Nah, they do help the folks who don't know about it.
  - jonathantf2 4y ago
    People don't value that, they value a good UX and the fact that all of their contacts have the app. Matrix has neither of these.
    - fartcannon 4y ago
      People do value that, and they also value a great UX, which Matrix also has. Additionally, matrix, doesn't forcefully associate your plaintext account with your phone number! People with a clue value that.
      - scrollaway 4y ago
        700,000,000 users disagree with your statements. You can’t make something true by just saying it’s true. Also your attitude is super toxic. You’re calling people who don’t value the same things you do, “clueless”. You don’t really get to bullshit people on HN — you can be super smart and skilled in your field, you’ll far too often come across people with vastly more experience than you. I invite you to think about that. Again, matrix is great, and I see it as the future of messaging. But it’s absolutely not the “present” of messaging; it’s years behind telegram, and the UX of most clients including the more popular ones is garbage.
        fartcannon 4y ago
        Its not years behind. That's a lie. In fact Id say it's ahead because you don't need to use a phone number (huge liability), you can choose to use e2e if you want and theyre not storing your data in plaintext! Oh and all of matrix is totally open source! Wow. That's how you know you can trust it. If they decide to pull a WhatsApp and move to Facebook, you can just fork and get on with your life. I like that the telegram client is open, but the sever isn't. Which means I don't really trust them. Same problem as Signal.
        jonathantf2 4y ago
        Just because it's open source doesn't mean I can trust it, I don't have the time to audit the code myself. Being open source is not a feature.
  - pizza234 4y ago
    I use Discord for public communications and I don't mind plaintext storage at all - on the contrary, on public chats, I personally value public history. The last time I've used Matrix actually, usability was a disaster; took me a while to figure out even just how to login, and that wasn't the only problem.
    - fartcannon 4y ago
      The login screen was too complicated for you, eh?
      - pizza234 4y ago
        I was asked to login concurrently from two different browsers, every time I wanted to login. It was a very puzzling experience, and took me a while to figure it out, because it was something I've never experienced before in chat systems, and it wasn't spelled clearly, like "you must login from two browsers", in order to compensate for the unusualness. The UX of communicating with other users was problematic as well. I've tried to establish communications with a certain user, and I have no idea if I succeeded or not (likely not); two separate communications "channels" (I don't know the terminology) were opened with the same user, which is perplexing, since again, this is something I've never experienced before. I think those two weren't even the only problems I've had.
        fartcannon 4y ago
        Did you file a bug? That doesn't happen. Normally you log in. And that's it. On a new device, you can (optionally) verify your account to see previous encrypted comversations. But you don't have to do that. As for the chat rooms, they work exactly like Discord, which is exactly like every chat client with chat rooms has since the dawn of IRC. You can send a message to one person, or you can join a room and message everyone at the same time. Easy peasy!
      - seizethegdgap 4y ago
        Do you remember using Riot pre-cross signing? If you don't, then you have no idea how bad it used to be.
  - AnonymousPlanet 4y ago
    So is PGP...
    - fartcannon 4y ago
      PGP is rad.
tiagod 4y ago
Telegram is on another level, honestly. You can do anything from a bash script with curl.
- fartcannon 4y ago
  That is cool. I love FOSS with good APIs. It's too bad the sever is closed. Makes it hard for me to trust.

superasn 4y ago

Yes their API is one of the best. A simple curl request is enough to send a message and it has been so useful (sentry, uptime, door bell notifications(1), etc). (1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrkAWSemDC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrkAWSemDC8

izacus 4y ago
They also publish a fully functional C library that makes building fully (!) featured 3rd party clients easy. They support everything - from Linux, Windows all the way to Tizen. You compile it into your app and it "just works" with all the features of the main client. As a result, you have a large set of very good clients for pretty much all platforms. Imagine if the FLOSS darlings like Signal would make something as amazing as this - a library any plaform (from RPi, watches, etc.) to implement the best possible secure client that fits the user.
- asddubs 4y ago
  Signal's stance on third party clients is so disappointing. Telegram really has them beat there, although it has to be pointed out that Signal actually publishes server source, while Telegram doesn't.
  - tcfhgj 4y ago
    Well,signal doesn't do it always as well, see the 1 year pause when they added cryptocurrency stuff
    - asddubs 4y ago
      still better than not at all, but yeah that whole shitcoin thing made me lose a lot of faith in them
rsync 4y ago
"A simple curl request is enough to send a message and it has been so useful (sentry, uptime, door bell notifications(1), etc)" hmmm ... could I participate fully on Telegram without ever installing the app anywhere ? That would be compelling ...

rvz 4y ago

Of course. Telegram seems to be the clear winner here at convincing the masses to move off of WhatsApp and have them stick around in Telegram. 700M tells us that it is a viable alternative for many users. Signal on the other hand seems to have failed to stick with the rest of the users and instead of trying to attract users from WhatsApp, not only they can't get backing up messages working properly, they instead were focused on introducing a scam cryptocurrency and wallet only usable on their app that no-one wants, and probably scared everyone off. Perhaps Signal is only good for getting users to keep using WhatsApp or Telegram, since there are too many missing basic features that the end users keep complaining about when trying it out.

fritigern 4y ago
The main thing keeping me from using Signal is that their Linux client is really really bad. In contrast Telegram has a great Linux client.

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago

> Say what you want about their security; they have the absolute best UX of any (primarily 1-on-1) messaging app, bar none. That is precisely because they don't give a shit about security. While others like Whatsapp bother with e2ee and resulting device sync problems and inability to do server-side search, Telegram just stores everything on a server without (meaningful) encryption and boldly claims that 'it is the most secure messenger'. And, imagine that, users just believe that it is the most secure! (I did talk to MANY people who repeated this word for word, 'Telegram is the most secure and encrypted messenger app!', and yes, nobody of them used Secret chats, - it doesn't nicely sync, and nobody needs disappearing messages anyway.

philliphaydon 4y ago
WhatsApp is not e2ee. When Facebook displays advertising based on conversations in what’s app. You will never convince me it’s e2ee. It’s fake privacy.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  WA was E2EE, at least at one point. Its key weakness was not notifying of key changes by default.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    Before being bought by Facebook I would believe it was e2ee. But believe it’s not e2ee between the client and Facebook. They just decrypt analysis and reencypt and forward. Since communication is not peer to peer and goes via FB the key exchange is prob with Facebook not the users.
    - gruez 4y ago
      >They just decrypt analysis and reencypt and forward. Since communication is not peer to peer and goes via FB the key exchange is prob with Facebook not the users. Do you have any evidence for this, or is this your "better safe than sorry" assumption for every e2e messenger that doesn't allow you to verify keys?

kitsunesoba 4y ago

What's more is that the quality of UX manages to be mostly consistent across clients with entirely disparate codebases written in different languages with different UI toolkits. That's awesome. You have your pick of a massive variety of clients… one of them bound to fit your device setup like a glove. No lowest-common-denominator one-size-fits-all compromises like is so common with cross platform software these days.

fritigern 4y ago
Telegram's Linux client is simply Amazing.
- benplumley 4y ago
  It's one of the worst Linux desktop programs I use daily. It gets scaling a bit wrong so all the icons look blurry, scrolling in chats regularly breaks (scroll wheel just does nothing but is fine in all other programs), and the one time I tried to video call in it it crashed. Discord's client is much better.
  - ubercow13 4y ago
    Are you using the Telegram-provided build instead of a distro build? Distro builds of it are often broken IME.
    - fritigern 4y ago
      Flatpack and Snap versions both work ok. I'm using the distro (manjaro) build, which is also pretty good. No idea how good the AUR versions are.
    - benplumley 4y ago
      I'm using the manjaro build, I'll try Telegram's own build, thanks.
  - ako 4y ago
    For what it's worth, Telegram's scaling on windows is also broken. Use it with one 100% and one 200% scaling monitor, on the HDPI everything is too small to read.

stefan_ 4y ago

The translation feature that sends your messages to Google - via an undocumented API and a random selection of User-Agents. This is who you trust your messaging security to?

Siira 4y ago
Trust a hacker or an MBA - difficult choice!

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

And they do all that with a tiny tiny team. They are the epitome of shut up and take my money.

adfjalkfja 4y ago

Discord is much, much better IMO and I've never enjoyed Telegram. Probably is better for the general public though

kaba0 4y ago
In browser or on mobile? I really don’t like either, but it is especially buggy/unintuitive on ios.
- adfjalkfja 4y ago
  Both desktop app and android, also had issues signing up. It didn't like my number

alfongj 4y ago

> Say what you want about their security; they have the absolute best UX of any (primarily 1-on-1) messaging app, bar none. > Discord is a close second. But the quality and polish of telegram blows me away to this day. User experience is, well, subjective to the user. For tech savvy, primarily desktop users, Telegram and Discord can be great choices. This is however probably not true for the majority of the population.

wetpaws 4y ago
>This is however probably not true for the majority of the population. Apparently it is true for 700M people

qwerty456127 4y ago

Telegram UX still has a lot of place to improve. E.g. I hate being unable to pin more than five chats an having to hunt the rest as they jump around.

scrollaway 4y ago
You can pin more chats with premium; it’s in the announcement.

BatteryMountain 4y ago

Checkout it's memory footprint on desktop. It is not using typical web tech (aka electron). It's just C++ & QT. List of third-party tech in their desktop stack listed here: https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop

ggktk 4y ago
The Mac client leaks a lot of memory when you run it for a while. Yesterday I had to restart it because it was using 2GB of RAM.

andrepd 4y ago

>And it’s lots of small features and details such as built in translation for messages in a foreign language Is "automatically sends your message text to google" supposed to be a plus?

scrollaway 4y ago
Who said automatically? You have to enable it. And all it does is save me the round trip to a Google translate prompt anyway so what exactly is the difference? Seriously, sometimes people are so cynical here it makes my blood boil. Give people some credit, ffs.