Telegram is just actually superior in terms of features I don’t get it.
Half of the people I regularly talk to are on WhatsApp. I don’t like it but that’s reality, it’s hard to get them to migrate because this means that people THEY talk to would have to do the same. Also a good chunk of them use rakuten Viber. Now why do they use THAT? It’s bloated, ad-ridden, and buggy. Almost nobody I know is on telegram. In fact most are still using Facebook messenger.
Wow, I completely forgot about Viber that’s amazing
Why would I use russian whatsapp owned by russian Zuckerberg living in Dubai?
If anything Signal would be the superior alternative.
But as stated by other ppl before me, I use whatsapp because at least where I live almost everyone uses it and Telegram is for conspiracy theories and Nazi or russian propaganda.
Personally? Because telegram feels dodgier than WhatsApp. At least I can trust WhatsApp enough around security. If I really want to upgrade my privacy or freedom, I would have chosen either Matrix, Signal or Session.
Yeah I get that. It also is dodgier lol. Some of the type of people that use telegram are hella suspicious
At least I can trust WhatsApp enough around security.
Funny how Mark Zuckerberg himself was found out using Signal over his own messaging app. Raises some suspicions, doesn’t it?
If I really want to upgrade my privacy or freedom, I would have chosen either Matrix, Signal or Session.
It’s not like you had any privacy with a messaging app that is owned by Meta to begin with for you to be able to upgrade it in the first place. When not even the owner of WhatsApp uses WhatsApp, I find it unreasonable why anyone else would want to use WhatsApp. Like, its owner doesn’t use it for a reason that is bad enough to make him use Signal over his own messaging app which apparently “respects” privacy.
Not much difference because both signal and WhatsApp use the same protocol and encryption.
Sure as hell does. E2EE isn’t the only factor you should take into the matter if you care about your privacy. Who knows, maybe WhatsApp stores plain text in the drive. Maybe they send the private keys of the WhatsApp user to Meta. You don’t know since everything related to WhatsApp is closed-source. What about the metadata WhatsApp collects? Metadata is a much more valuable thing than you might think it is. Signal proved to collect as little metadata as possible with the response they gave to this subpoena. On top of that, Signal is FOSS. If you had the choice to use one, choosing WhatsApp over Signal would be retarded. Plus you might as well use the messaging app from the original creators of the Signal protocol that WhatsApp came to implement.
And also, if using both of them didn’t matter, care to give an explanation about why even Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of WhatsApp, decided to use Signal instead?
Because he has a lot of nerdy friends that use signal? Same reason anyone else would choose one messenger over another i’d guess.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/09/29/whatsapp-backdoorwill-facebook-be-forced-to-break-message-encryption-as-reported/
https://thehackernews.com/2017/01/whatsapp-encryption-backdoor.htmlAt least I can trust WhatsApp enough around security.
🤔
I use email with GnuPG. Everything else is woefully insecure. BTW, I have no friends.
👀
Messaging apps are tricky, you can’t just pick what’s the “best” because it’s primary function is to message people, so the best app is what can do that.
If nobody you want to message uses telegram, or signal, or matrix, than they aren’t very good messaging apps FOR YOU.
You have to start using the app, then start convincing everyone else to use it, and that’s quite a hurdle, when most people you know use the “good enough” Whatsapp, or even just SMS, or iMessage.
The quality and superiority of those apps can be ranked without even going into technical/privacy details.
Telegram
WhatsApp
Signal
every emoji looks much better in signal, except the screaming one, there WhatsApp does it best.
… and the ones from Telegram are just ugly throughout.
Using an emoji lineup to pick what service is superior is the most pantshittingly stupid reasoning i have ever seen. Jesus fucking christ.
It’s a messaging app where you message other people, including close family and friends. Emojis are one of the most used features. If the emojis look trash compared to the competition, that’s one more barrier to entry for the average user. Me and you most probably don’t care about that at all and prioritise other features way above emojis, but for other users it matters a ton.
Consider going back to reddit, I’m sure they miss your profound insights and friendly nature over there 🙄
The perceived usefulness of a network, platform, or communication protocol increases with its relative adoption. That’s known as “network effect”, and network effect is at strongest for anything regarding direct communication - such as messaging platforms.
In other words: WhatsApp is used by lots of people, and this discourages people to migrate over better alternatives, like Signal (my choice) or Telegram (OP’s).
Most of the 3rd world countries use WhatsApp.
And all of Europe basically
Not all but I was in Sweden for some time and didn’t notice people using whatsapp
What did they use?
Because latin americans are way too brainwashed to use it. (source: i can’t get any of my friends or family to use telegram)
Why does anyone choose Telegram or WhatsApp over Signal which is encrypted and audited? (Probably features I don’t care about, but they do)
I agree that signal is superior in terms of privacy but a lot of people don’t care about that. And most people using WhatsApp DEFINITELY don’t care about that.
WhatsApp uses the same encryption schema as signal.
This undermines your whole original post.
Oh so we should only care about good and secure design when end users care about it!
Because you clearly can’t read the room that was sarcasm.
I never said you shouldn’t care though??
Signal is based in the US. Better to use something that is not based in the.US.
As long as your messages are end-to-end encrypted, I don’t know why you would care about that. It’s proven that they do not collect any metadata that could harm your privacy and most of their stuff is open source. The signal protocol is a pretty solid protocol supporting E2EE. There are not even cloud backup options, so your messages can never be read from someone other than you and the receiver, unlike something like iMessage that has cloud backup option that backups your messages stored locally on your device probably in plain text to iCloud.
It takes just one FISA court order to compromise Signal.
does signal have multi device synchronization? on telegram you can start to write a message on one device and continue on another.
one of the feature i use most on telegram is saved messages to send stuff between phone and pc.
this is pretty much the only thing that is keeping me on telegram.
Was going to post this :3
I’ve been using Signal for a long time now, it was great until they ended SMS text support, then they started trying to turn Signal into a social media thing, I just want end to end encryption without having to worry about somebody like Zuckerberg having access to my texts.
I agree, and their reasoning to do it was insulting. The crypto bullshit and the stories bullshit along with the SMS decision was enough for me. I’ve uninstalled it, and haven’t missed it. It’s not a good app if you care about privacy anyway, there are better apps that don’t require a phone number to use them.
Telegram let’s you send 2gb files, and stores them forever. Signal has a 100mb limit.
It also used to be easier to set up on multiple devices at the same time, but I believe that Whatsapp and Signal have improved that by now too.
I’m not sure the file limitations are much of a factor when 100mb covers most files that would need to be sent through a messaging service. There are plenty of dedicated services for sharing larger files.
Piracy tho. I can go to my telegram, search a movie title and click play and it just works.
If the file size is under 2GB I guess, which is ehhh
4GB if the sender was premium, which they will be.
I don’t care if its 720p if it just works.
Tbh I’ll want it to be decent 1080p
It often is.
I mentioned it because it was an annoying limitation for me. 100mb is not a lot for media and zip files nowadays. And I don’t know any good free services that will work more conveniently than simply sending with Telegram, suggestions welcome.
https://toffeeshare.com/ is what I usually use for big files. But both sender and receiver need to be online for the whole transfer. It doesn’t store anything you send on their servers, but that’s a feature for me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Why would you text someone a zip? I always send any files like that over email, I recommend ProtonMail for security but what do I know
That’s the point tho, it negates the need for dedicated services for sharing larger files
Why not use an encrypted service to send files though?
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It’s encrypted, just not E2E encrypted
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A lot of the time the files i’m sending are game clips or parts of Youtube videos. i want good quality above privacy
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Why switch platforms if all your data is still being collected? This just provides another business with your data to sell and possibly have hacked. Sure, Telegram offers encryption, but it’s not enabled by default even though they advertise it thoroughly. This demonstrates they’re taking advantage of peoples desire for privacy simply to increase their user base while making the users + contacts do all the work.
As far as file sharing, with ProtonDrive I can use any messaging service and send a 500GB file if I wanted, fully encrypted with password protection and an expiration date. Telegram keeping the files forever doesn’t seem like a benefit either.
Right?
People don’t choose, people use whatever most people around them use. Whatsapp and telegram are both centralized, and shouldn’t be trusted because, by the nature of it, they can (and eventually will) turn user-hostile.
Messengers come and go, if we really want to make some progress in this area, we should embrace federated and p2p protocols as the logical evolution. Anything else is just wasting time and user privacy.
Matrix protocol messengers amiright?
I’d rather push for XMPP personally, the matrix protocol has been
a dumpster firein an “almost ready, trust me bro” state for as long as it has existed, and failed to justify its own weight and complexity. But that’s mostly irrelevant since they are open protocols and can somewhat bridge with one another.I’m selfhosting a Matrix server and have all my Chats from other apps also bridged to there. For just text chat I don’t feel like Matrix is missing anything, the thing preventing me from getting my not so technically minded friends on it is the missing support for good group voice chat.
It XMPP better for group VC? Is the option available to bridge Messenger like Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, iMessage to XMPP?
I’m selfhosting a Matrix server and have all my Chats from other apps also bridged to there.
Same here, but with XMPP in place of Matrix. For historical context, XMPP was invented about 25 years ago on the premise that people were already tired of having their instant messaging scattered over multiple protocols (rather than Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, iMessage now, it was Yahoo, MSN, AIM, ICQ, … then), so bridging is very much front and center in the XMPP world. Over time, people also realized that bridging sucks in general (you either dumb down your client to the lowest common denominator which sucks for yourself, or your client isolates itself from the source protocol enough that it sucks for everyone else).
To add insult to injury, most modern protocols also forbid, by their ToS, the use of alternative clients (which very much includes bridges), and to the best of my knowledge WhatsApp, Signal and Discord will eventually suspend your account on this basis.
Matrix is still trying to carve a niche for itself in this space, and is failing IMO (judging by the quality/security of the bridges they have come-up with, and the recent libera.chat fiasco). I’d say that the situation in this regard in XMPP is only marginally better due to the fact that XMPP had a decade headstart to fail and try over, and I would not recommend using bridges on either of them if that can be avoided.It XMPP better for group VC?
I’d say “it depends”. Fun fact, Matrix uses jitsi-meet under the hood (which is XMPP + a media transcoding/multicasting component that doubles as a relay), and jitsi-meet is my recommendation for this use-case: as long as the central server has good bandwidth, you can really scale up your VC to many attendees. On top of that, XMPP has support for peer-to-peer group VC, with the benefit that hosting is simpler, it doesn’t require any central component/relay (but the bandwidth cost is incurred on all participants and you won’t go beyond a handful of attendees that way).
To add insult to injury, most modern protocols also forbid, by their ToS, the use of alternative clients (which very much includes bridges), and to the best of my knowledge WhatsApp, Signal and Discord will eventually suspend your account on this basis.
Good thing that I’m in the EU and the big chat platforms will be forced to open up their API to third-party clients soon with the DMA.
But from my point of view bridging with matrix works well and I have all my chats in one place. And for me that is the only reason I’m sticking with matrix as only one other person I know is using matrix directly. While it would be ideal to get everyone on one decentralized chat platform that is also rather unrealistic… so I’m doing my part using Matrix and getting friends on it when it makes sense but not actively trying to get people on there that don’t have a good reason to use it. And using XMPP mostly sounds like it is just around longer but not that much better, so switching now dosen’t seem to make sense.
Yep, if you are on either, you are fighting the good fight, so keep it up :)
And if you self-host, you’ll find it dramatically easier to do on XMPP (that’s how I ended-up here, after giving up on Matrix’s shenanigans).
Yep, if you are on either, you are fighting the good fight, so keep it up :)
I will! It is a really nice setup for me.
And if you self-host, you’ll find it dramatically easier to do on XMPP (that’s how I ended-up here, after giving up on Matrix’s shenanigans).
Interesting, but I got past that hurdle… and I made it extra hard for myself as I didn’t use the ansible playbook but instead created my own docker setup (own as in writing a docker-compose.yml myself, not as in creating the containers from scratch). But this way I understand the system and could fix problems that I had myself rather nicely.
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You should definitely give XMPP a chance, but not feel bad about ending-up with whichever feels better: they are mostly fine, and largely preferable to the non-standard/non-federated alternatives.
XMPP is orders of magnitude lighter weight so that might factor in if you have associated costs to running in the cloud.
If you want to get started the easy way, go with ejabberd, it has sane defaults and lots of convenience (e.g. it embarks a stun/turn server to facilitate calling through NAT, acts as a ACME client to renew certificates automagically, …).
On Android, Cheogram is a good client to recommend for power-users, Quicksy/Conversations for those who want to use their phone number for contacts auto-discovery. Desktop has Dino/Gajim, (i)OS(X) has SiskinIM, BeagleIM.Regarding the libera.chat drama, you can read more here: https://libera.chat/news/temporarily-disabling-the-matrix-bridge
IMO that tells a lot about the people behind Matrix and their overall attitude (I had the same “trust us”, “it’s gonna be soon, I swear!”, “that was bad luck but it’s gonna be fine!” vibes when interacting with the Matrix team members in the early days).And to add to @u_tamtam@programming.dev’s info about setting up XMPP here is a ansible playbook that you could use to deploy matrix: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
I would look at what you want to use it for and see if you can do that better with XMPP or Matrix. The factor that is keeping me on Matrix is that I have all diffrent chats with people on different platforms in one client that is cross platform. Here is the list of available bridges in Matrix to get other chats into it: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/
But keep in mind that is is against ToS for most apps, so there is a small risk of getting banned from other platforms. I can only tell you that I’ve been using it with WhatsApp, iMessage, Discord and Signal for half a year and am not banned anywhere. That is with running my own Matrix Server and bridges on a rented VPS.
For information about what XMPP can do you’ll have to do research on your own as I don’t know anything about it besides that google kinda “killed it”.
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The factor that is keeping me on Matrix is that I have all diffrent chats with people on different platforms in one client that is cross platform.
yeah, as I wrote above, that’s no different in XMPP (but probably much more secure and better maintained: till recently most of the bridging in matrix-world was leveraged by libpurple, which has an horrendous security track-record).
If you are getting into bridging in XMPP, I recommend giving slidge a try: https://sr.ht/~nicoco/slidge/that is is against ToS for most apps
https://slidge.im/core/user/low_profile.html#keeping-a-low-profile
google kinda “killed it”.
And yet it has hundred folds more users than Matrix :) XMPP is ubiquitous (it props up google cloud/nintendo switch push notifications, if your online game has a chat system with million users that’s it, WhatsApp is using it, you have billions of IoT devices running it, …) so just like Linux it can’t really be “killed” at this point as a critical piece of software infrastructure. On the user-facing side, things are alive and kicking with great and well-maintained clients (which is more than can be said about matrix, being a single-source implementation held together by a single company constantly fighting financing issues).
Because I’d rather be spied on by the USA than Russia.
Not being spied on is not an option if you want to stay in contact with people.
Do you live in Russia? Who can really use that information to damage you somehow, the USA or Russia? If you live in the US or in a country subservient to their government is better to being spied by Russia on that case.
I’ve made this exact argument many times. As a US citizen Russia and China have no power over me so it’s better for me to have my info there than at home. A person’s own government may use their info as a means of direct control while a foreign government can’t do that.
Fair lol
If anyone is going to spy on me I prefer that it is not America.
America bombed and invaded 2 countried that are our neighbours. We are still feeling and living the effects of the wars American thugs waged in the Middle East.
a) because it’s what everyone I know uses
b) telegram is not end-to-end encrypted by default. And not end-to-end encrypted at all for group chats. That’s kind of a dealbreaker. Telegram is one of the last messaging apps I’d recommend.
In my country whatsapp messenger can and will be seen by the government if there is a request. Have heard it many times. I don’t think any messenger or anything you write is actually secure or actually private. We just came to terms with that.
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It’s also closed source and doesn’t really specify the specifics of its crypto implementation or really even the underlying technology.
Edit - I was apparently mistaken or my information is outdated. MTProto is indeed open source, though I swear that hasn’t always been the case.
It is open source, & they are also a non-profit organization.
Here’s the source codeIt’s open source.
I didn’t choose. Literally every single person with a smartphone in my country uses whatsapp so that’s what I use too.
people use the messaging app that their friends are on
doesn’t matter if it’s objectively terrible
