I'm amazed by the pace at which Telegram ships features, and with what finesse.
Related regarding feature deployment: I got some negative feedback for dumping on Matrix for announcing Spaces without iOS client support. They should have waited until Element had all their major platforms covered before announcing it. It's maybe an unpopular take but when around 40% of my homeserver's users can't use a major feature, that's a shitty rollout.
Using Whatsapp is like sending a locked chest to your friend and a copy thereof + a copy of the key to unlock it to a warehouse. Government employees and warehouse workers can enter the warehouse at will, use the key to open your chest, and copy everything too.
Nice lock.
It's just incredibly scary not to know anything about who these developers are, where they are located and most importantly how this is all financed!
I understand Pavel Durov is a very wealthy man, but developing and hosting a popular global messenger service can't be cheap.
Long run it's a problem, but until I have a app at the same risk/feature sweet spot I don't mind the downsides of telegram.
(Edited cause I am utterly unable to spell)
Basically any western country can be secretly ordered to turn over all my information on the flimsiest of reasons, if it’s not already just intercepted through Five Eyes style arrangements.
The chances of Russia volunteering to share my chat history with anyone that could actually impact my day to day life is pretty much nil, and I’m certainly not interesting to anyone in their sphere.
Likewise. I'd like FSB to know what I did in the last one hour. I wonder if they really find it interesting to pursue me.
They've started syncing notification settings, so I can either have both my laptop and my phone beeping or none. Combine that with working within a small team that primarily uses Signal and it's absolutely terrible.
Leave them off and you'll miss something important. Leave them on and my phone beeps after work hours. And since there's nothing in between pausing them for 8h or 1 day, I forget to turn them on in the morning.
Went from never needing to touch those settings to having to change them at least 5x every fucking work day.
But the features I've seen since growth are: 1) group call (which happened during early growth), 2) screen share on desktop, 3) color hinting in chats removed (which now results me in messaging several people I didn't intend to because I've been trained for years to rely on colors for hinting and it takes longer to untrain users. Thank god delete exists...) 4) mobile coin.
I'm still waiting on 1) usernames 2) channels 3) easy access to community based stickers (or just an official repository!). Things that I don't care about but the community does: 1) backup of messages 2) transferring messages between phones. Honestly after these two things a lot of other stuff is "cool." But these make it more usable. A 20 minute interaction with Signal users outside the community forums will illustrate how important these things are to people (the community forums have a real group think that's a big disconnect from what most users want). I'm all for more UX devs and making the app prettier, but it's no longer "early 2021" and we still don't have them (and have been waiting for years). It feels like there's a larger disconnect between devs and us users than there was in the past. People wouldn't throw a fit about MOB if the rest of the platform was moving along steadily and would probably be treated as "cool, but I'm not going to use it and have reservations." I'd welcome cool stuff like that, or noise canceling (featured in this update), or any other stuff if the rest of the platform was moving along.
I'm losing faith in Signal. I fought so hard to get my friends on board (years!) and now that we have critical mass it feels things have slowed instead of accelerated. It isn't just us "hackers" and privacy conscious people anymore. To the devs reading this: I love you and appreciate the work you do, but help us out here. We don't understand why these weird decisions are being made and they feel like step backwards instead of forward.
My android phone has a global "do not disturb" feature for notifications, so I'm not disturbed during sleeping hours. Can you use that?
> during sleeping hours
There's an important difference there. I think the GP wants their phone to keep working when they're off work -- including giving them notifications in other apps, for personal conversations.
On desktop* there is no e2ee even among the options.
* where "desktop" includes GNU/Linux phones.
Desktop apps are not the ones where you create Telegram account; you only authorize them.
For another example, Threema, which is E2EE by default, doesn't allow more than one device with the account (to use multiple devices, you must create several accounts, one for each device and link them, and then basically any chat is a group chat. For desktop use, the web client uses webrtc to talk to your device to use it as a proxy).
1. I was able to use telegram without using the smartphone app at first, I just needed a phone number to register on desktop
2. The MacOS desktop app supports E2EE
3. Some third party desktop apps support E2EE
4. Signal has synced E2EE that works on both desktop and smartphone (And so does Matrix)
2. Which one? There are several and the one I'm running (the official one; brew cask telegram-desktop) does not.
3. They are third party and if it doesn't work nicely or has missing functionality ("why are not my chats from other devices there?"), Telegram devs can still point fingers that's not the official client and should be discussed with the third party developers. Ultimately, they will find out why the original Telegram doesn't do it.
4. Signal doesn't do cloud messages as Telegram does. You might have noticed that functionality like that makes Telegram much more popular among normal users.