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Comment by rpastuszak | Hacker News Reader

Signal and Telegram seem to be the most commonly mentioned alternatives here. Which one do you prefer and why?

Signal. Open source, non-profit, very good privacy defaults. Telegram seems even worse than whatsapp to be honest because they don't even have encryption on by default.

Telegram always has encryption, just no end-to-end encryption by default. This is a privacy/convenience trade-off. When chatting about groceries/memes/latest Netflix releases, you don't really need E2EE that much, and chats without E2EE are synced to all devices in Telegram, including a fully-supported desktop app.

I get this argument, but for me, needing to moderate conversations "chatting about groceries/memes/latest Netflix releases," to make sure they don't edge into discussions I'd _really_ rather have E2E encrypted is something I just _know_ will go wrong for some of the participants in chat sooner or later. _That's_ a convenience tradeoff in favour of E2E by default for me. (But yeah, not for most people...)

I'm willing to bet you money that virtually nobody adjusts their privacy settings based on topic of conversation, especially not non-tech people which is almost all users. I don't think I've ever seen anyone chat with their girlfriend and go "hey, grocery talk over, switch to e2ee now". Defaults matter and I'm certain almost no telegram conversations use e2ee as a consequence, with private info or otherwise. It's important to have it as a default and to tell people why they should use an app that does.

It’s also important to have an option to turn it off, to benefit from mass-grouping (whatsapp limits groups to 256 users, lurking or not), chat history (new group participants can’t scroll up in whatsapp) and easy continuity (phone/pc job use case). Also it is not clear if whatsapp implements the same:

  - forward secrecy
  - self-destruction
  - forced destruction

as telegram does. E.g. whatsapp seems to only have an option for 7 day self-destruction, which may be too long for some use cases, and no instant destruction. Neither of two are superior privacy-wise all things considered, but stating that always-on e2ee is a most important thing is probably naive. And then you have tg bots, ui/keyboards, stickers, etc which for a regular user outweigh the security area entirely.

Also your virtual bet is lost because every time my circle discusses ‘hot’ topics in telegram (company issues, lawyer/audit-related chats, recreational drug use, etc), we go secret and warn users who do otherwise. We can’t check whether that is common or not, because those who have to be ‘secret’ may resist to admit this activity.

Signal, because I have more trust in Moxie that the Telegram team.

I have not used Telegram though, so that’s not a preference based on usability, just on trust.

Telegram because it works across all my devices and so far has been adopted by friends. Closest to iMessage for any non Apple device for me.

I prefer Element, but apparently it's not popular enough even among HN users, so don't even hope. Signal is popular among the HN users, because it was hyped for a long time by tech-journalists as a pinnacle of secure messaging, but as an app it's even worse than WhatsApp. And not very popular outside of HN. Telegram is very popular in Russia&neighbours and only mildly popular in Europe, even less so in USA. Arguably the best of 3 in terms of usability, HN users don't like it because it has some non-standard e2e encryption, which is not enabled by default in private chats.

Also, FYI, Telegram is going to introduce some paid features soon, but it's not completely clear what they'll be. There just was some talking about that's it about the time they are going to monetize it, but I'm not sure if they announced what exactly becomes paid and what doesn't.

Prefer Telegram. My p2p communication is minimal and I manage dozens of groups with thousands of members. Telegram not only handles this but provides a lot of tools to manage groups effectively.

Sessions is my go to for privacy related messaging. It's a fork of Signal with data pushed over a decentralised network.

I personally use Signal, but I think Session is great for the crowd that wants "Signal but without the phone number".

I would prefer signal, but I use Telegram. Everyone I talk to likes the feature set, so Signal would seem like a step backward.

Signal is just another walled garden, making it a no-go for me.

Out of interest, what do you use instead?

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