Comment by miaklesp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by miaklesp | Hacker News Reader

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If you are a journalist reporting from a repressive county and living in danger - better use Signal/Tor/PGP. But if you an average human who just wants to share family photos or discuss work stuff and keep the data in privacy, out of Google/Facebook, advertisement agencies and court orders - then Telegram is much more pleasant messenger to use.

Signal is a messenger for sequrity enthusiasts, Telegram is a privacy-respecting messenger for average user. Quality of Signal apps is not that good in comparison, Telegram is just much, much better for everyday use. It has native (not Electron) open-source clients for all popular platforms, tons of features and stickers (valuable for average people) and conveniently synchronises between devices. It does not have goal of monetization, but respects privacy of users and does not cooperate with governments. Has anti-blocking mechanisms built-in.

Based on past actions of Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, there are no much reasons to not trust in integrity if his intentions so far.

The first problem with Telegram is that it's not full e2e. Only the private chat function is end to end encrypted, all group messaging is not.

The second problem with Telegram is that it's not truly open source. Only the client is open source and I recall (correct me if I am wrong) that the client code is not even up to date with the deployed apps in production, which seems strange to me.

The third problem is that Telegram are using their own encryption and authentication algorithms rather than using academically reviewed techniques.

The forth problem is monetization, after so many years of operation with no ads or obvious income stream from consumers it makes me question how it's even operating.

Other than these concerns, telegram for a daily casual messenger is great. The app is better than whatsapp and is cross platform.

To address my problems/concerns with telegram I recently tried "Wire". Which seems to operate more transparently and securely, whilst also having excellent cross platform apps.

The first and only problem with Signal, for me, is that it’s unusable. See my other comment above. There’s no point touting security benefits if the app and platform are not meant for the masses and cannot be relied upon. FWIW, I’ve tried Signal many times in the last few years, but one thing or the other forces me to abandon it.

I have tried Wire and like it. But it too misses in the chat sync across devices sometimes (even within a day or two of the message being sent).

Yes wire isn't perfect, but I think that if more people used it and more organisations paid for it, then it would become better over time.

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