Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

I use Telegram long before it became sort of mainstream and I haven't regretted that decision for a minute, minus their outages that started happening once every few months lately and are worrying.

Tried Whatsapp once, hated it, never tried again. Viber is even worse.

Telegram has been what an IM program should be, for years now (it gave me the vibe of my much beloved Miranda IM almost 20 years ago). I'd love it if they added more link previews (9GAG and Instagram previews stopped working almost a year ago and the functionality was never recovered) and even more keyboard shortcuts for full navigation without a mouse -- but even without these it's the most solid IM experience I ever had.

Maybe they are not as encrypted or protected in general as Signal. Maybe (but what do we know about Signal, save for a lot of claims?). But the fact that several governments and corporations demanded them to give access to various keys or to shut down channels is a testament that Telegram isn't as amateur in encryption and protection as the overly nitpicky HN audience would have you believe.

Telegram has a broken business model from the start. It doesn't make money and it's not sustainable.

Somebody could take over telegram and start a pretty similar service to facebook since most of the chats are not encrypted. So if Durov were not to lead his vision of 100% free Telegram it might get really bad. A service ran on savings of the founder as philantropic as he is is not sustainable. They will either pivot to ads, to profiling or something paid subscription any of which will probably not be received well.

You can see more here: https://fourweekmba.com/telegram-business-model/

They recently did pivot to ads but only in certain chats -- for most users nothing will change. And I am glad they did because I want them to survive.

Also, Durov has been strongly resistant both to censorship and takeover attempts so far. Which is more than I could say for your average SV startup.

I am siding with Telegram still. They have proven themselves many times over and I can only hope that this will continue.

Started with certain chats and will end with probably full on profiling since it's the most profitable

Well, then we'll migrate away to another service -- choice isn't big these days, but it does exist still. That always happened so I am not sure I can stand behind your firm pessimism about them currently.

This is true for every app in the list except Matrix, which is distributed.

I would like to second that you should avoid Viber if possible. It's clunky and incredibly slow and astonishingly frustrating

Yeah. It rode on the "free SMS" wave for way too long and people still use it because of that... nevermind that SMS-es are free in most of the world nowadays. :D Or the fact that literally every messenger is free and most have no ads (unlike Viber which does have ads).

The very continued existence of Viber is a living testament of the glacial pace with which the non-tech folk pick up on what's wrong with some of the popular tech.

I actually think the existence of Viber is a testament to how much Western tech does not pay attention to parts of the world like Asia.

I genuinely hate the UX of Viber but since moving back to the Philippines, I've been involved in this long lesson on how much tech orgs (at least in the US) don't pay attention to these parts of the world. It seems to me that lack of care and attention leads to the rise and dominance of companies like Viber, Grab, Lazada, and their ilk in markets like the Philippines.

In the end, these apps that you and I both despise are what works best for the consumers that use them most precisely because they just work (but not well).

I like how practical a lot of Asians are. This gave rise to WeChat where you can literally do almost anything you can think of -- calling for transport and paying people included.

This made it really easy for the Chinese gov to track people but in the end people value convenience more than potential surveillance state repercussions.

We as a programmers must learn to respect that and think in terms of what's convenient for our users -- and not what's a trendy tech or some such.

The fact that Telegram can give keys to begin with is what makes it insecure. WhatsApp and Signal can't provide any keys that would decrypt a user's messages.

We don't know that for sure. We only have circumstantial evidence -- namely that Durov (and thus Telegram) escaped Russia after having been approached by intelligence services. That's all we have to go on.

Maybe he was able to break encryption and hand the keys to the agencies but preferred to escape to avoid that. Or maybe it was something else.

To be fair, I don't care much if Telegram is well-encrypted. History has shown that state actors prefer to sabotage the roots of encryption algorithms and/or embed backdoors if the service isn't truly end-to-end encrypted. But as I said, that isn't my number one concern when using messengers.

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