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People should seriously move to Signal.
by darthrupert 3y ago
People should seriously move to Signal.
- mojuba 3y agoFrom my experience of constantly using both, Signal's UX is inferior unfortunately. On both macOS and iOS Signal feels like a second grade cross-platform app with a clunky Android feel (no ribbon effect, no animations, poor aesthetics). Telegram's UX quality is far superior to any other messenger app that I've ever used. Its social functions are quite nice too, I think Telegram invented some of them before they were copied by the others. The thing with Telegram though is that you can never trust a private company if you are a journalist, dissident or a government official. We don't know whether Pavel Durov is as independent as he wants us to believe he is. The big red flag in the Telegram story is why it's still not banned or censored in Russia. We don't know. But all in all, kudos to those who have built it, they have my respect, Telegram is one of the best pieces of software at least among the messaging apps.
- jamil7 3y agoI also use both extensively and I agree, Telegram has the best UX of any messaging app. The desktop app is QT I think so it feels very snappy compared to Signal's electron app. Signal's iOS app is a native Swift/UIKit app and open source however, so I'd encourage you to report any bugs or issues you find: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS
- darthrupert 3y agoIt is a very good client indeed, and Signal is not really catching up. Perhaps Matrix's upcoming Element X -client could reach that level of quality.
- kaba0 3y agoThanks for mentioning Element X. I do like the Matrix protocol, but their former ios app was very buggy.
- Arathorn 3y agoElement X is already out on iOS (as an early release which isn't feature complete yet): https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-element/ https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-e.... We explicitly used Telegram as the UX yardstick to be at least as good at in terms of quality and performance (sync speed, smoothness of scrolling, proper native UI, etc)... while also being E2EE throughout (unlike Telegram). Agreed that the classic Element iOS app was very buggy, which is why with Element X we completely rewrote it on top of matrix-rust-sdk, using SwiftUI for best-practice idiomatic native UI on top.
- kaba0 3y agoThank you, I have already downloaded it! So far it looks like you have absolutely managed to hit that yardstick!
- darthrupert 3y agoUnfortunately the server I use doesn't support sliding sync yet. edit Also, how far is Element X? I just tried it out with a matrix.org account, and it still makes the pretty bad UX blunder of confusing private one-on-one chats with rooms. I don't doubt that they're rooms technically, but you really need to hide that fact from the user if you wish to reach Telegram's usability.
- Arathorn 3y agoEX is about 2 weeks old. It doesn’t yet have filters to split DMs from rooms, but it will.
- Arathorn 3y agoplus unless I’m missing something, telegram doesn’t seem to distinguish DMs from group chats in the room list either?
- darthrupert 3y ago
- coolspot 3y agoWhatsApp, Signal, Google Talk and others are also not banned/censored in Russia.
- darthrupert 3y agoWhich makes Telegram extremely suspicious, frankly.
- mojuba 3y agoTelegram was banned in Russia before it was restored in 2020. Wikipedia says Telegram agreed to cooperate with the Russian govt "help with extremism investigations" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Telegram_in_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Telegram_in_Russia
- sintezcs 3y agoMove from Telegram to Signal? But why?
- BozeWolf 3y agoThe parent probably points to security. Telegram is insecure, this has been discussed many times before. (Rolled their own encryption, a master key, unencrypted group chats) Thing is that telegram is a completely different app. It has features for discovering and joining communities. Open or closed. Bots, etcetera. Both Signal and Whatsapp do not have that. It is more like a social network. That said: it is insecure. Especially in war times that does not sound good. If you do not trust signal or whatsapp, there are other secure communication methods. But seriously: telegram is the worst.
- theyknowitsxmas 3y agoOne of the OG devs doesn't trust it. https://medium.com/@anton.rozenberg/pavel-durov-sued-senior-tech-lead-for-1-7-b24961dec503 https://medium.com/@anton.rozenberg/pavel-durov-sued-senior-...
- kaba0 3y agoRolling their own crypto is only an advice for your average developer, not for a team of mathematics, who put out a bounty for anyone who can break it. If I were a journalist, I wouldn’t use it for the leak of a lifetime. But for the common folks it is absolutely more than fine.
- Shorel 3y agoI would think being compromised by the current Russian government is enough of a red flag.
- darthrupert 3y agoExactly. That + default non-encryption is a horrible combination in this day and age.
- coolspot 3y agoSignal is very obviously compromised, likely a CIA honeypot. Just look into their PIN + Intel SGX scheme. Or lack of open-source client with reproducible builds.
- darthrupert 3y agoVery obviously? Can you elaborate?
- coolspot 3y agoI gave the pointer to SGX + PIN , that is enough for curious to find out what I meant.
- darthrupert 3y agoIndeed. I can see how this might be a problem for some people but CIA is not on my threat model at least right now. Russia might be, even though I'm probably not important enough for them to care. Still I wouldn't want anyone there be able to mine my data for even the slightest piece of info.
- the_gipsy 3y agoMatrix is what should be recommended - at least here on HN.