Comment by anonzzzies | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonzzzies | Hacker News Reader

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I have lately been telling people whatsapp is from facebook (meta means nothing to them) and now they are looking for alternatives. Unfortunately, there isn't really much european/eu (never heard of birdychat though). It does show though it is not hard to get some people to switch; they have groups on whatsapp and use it for nothing else; these are people they chat with often so they only need to switch those and then whatsapp can go.

I find Telegram the best app; its faster and easier than the rest I find. The default no e2e sucks so cannot use it for everything, but having everything immediately ready and working on all devices makes it very nice. When you buy a new one, immediately all is there. Yes, obviously I am aware that can only be because no e2e, but normies and non normies alike seem to really hate the whatsapp, and even more, signal losing all your messages because backup/restore is too annoying. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but if someone manages to make more that experience... I mean turn it around; make e2e the default but allow people to create groups or 1-1 without e2e if they want (knowing then downsides and upsides of that).

>working on all devices makes it very nice.

Signal has end-to-end encryption working on all devices. Telegram doesn't because they're amateurs.

I didn't say Signal did not and obviously Telegram can make it work because they do have it if you switch it on per chat. So what do you mean?

Edit: I guess you are from Ukraine? That is valid, the CEO is fishy. I did say I would not recommend it, I said it is the only performant and easy to use chat app I know off. That was a user perspective thing and more the hope of people pointing out 'no you fool here is another good one'. Definitely not Signal, slow and unfriendly. Whatsapp a little better, but Meta. Next.

>Telegram can make it work because they do have it if you switch it on per chat

You can't enable 1:1 secret chat from your desktop client. The secret chat doesn't appear on desktop when you enable it on your phone. So you're forced to drop end-to-end encryption if you want interoperability between phone and desktop clients. You can't enable secret chats for group chats on any client. The company isn't working to make secret chats actually usable.

>I guess you are from Ukraine?

Nope.

>Definitely not Signal, slow and unfriendly

The thing is, friendly apps are apps that respect your human right to privacy. There's a term for applications that appear to do something useful while doing something against the user's interests without them knowing: A Trojan Horse. Which is a malware classification.

When you view it through that lens, Telegram is the unfriendliest app out there outside completely unencrypted messengers like Palringo (at least used to be the case), where anyone can read your message from the cable with WireShark.

There are many unfriendly apps on that light? insta chat, messenger, slack, discord, teams? and all of those are terrible software as well (slow, high mem etc); at least telegram is fast.

anyway, the point was not to use or endorse telegram, or the garbage i mentioned, but strive for e2ee while fast and usable.

I would sign up for anything e2ee but yeah ideally open source and hosting owned by an EU company.

> at least telegram is fast

Telegram is fast precisely because it's backdoored by design. Forward secret messaging app with proper key management has to encrypt the message to every peer in the group. Telegram can just use single packet to server that then pushes it to everyone else. This difference will die over time as 5G and 6G take over and phones get faster by generation. Telegram will not get more safe by generation. They're only playing to get as many users to their roach motel to make it as difficult as people for people to leave.

> Unfortunately, there isn't really much european/e

What about Deltachat/Arcanechat?

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