They have the most productive and high quality engineers in the game. And I say this as someone that whinces at telegram for not having e2e encryption by default.
The Telegram Apps are all great and have so many awesome features that are crucially also extremely well implemented. Everything seems so well thought through!
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.
TBH my threat model views Russian and Middle Eastern oligarchs and governments as less of an immediate threat to my freedoms than my own government or major US tech firms.
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.
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.
This is also the reason I prefer using VPN based in countries that are NOT based in USA/EU and that are not friendly to USA/EU -> Russia, China, Myanmar, Iran etc.
Secret 1:1 & group chat by default like signal, well labeled non-secret large chat rooms, open source clients and using standardized encryption and they'd do pretty well amongst the privacy crowd too.
sounds like you’re describing Matrix. It’s a shame that the only user friendly mobile client is called “fluffy chat” and seems to be targeted at furries or children.
Same. This has been my frustration with Signal lately. They've had a large growth in a userbase but feels like they aren't growing their team fast enough to become real contenders with Telegram and WA. You don't have to move fast and break things, but you do have to move.
The only feature I can think of since that growth annoys the shit out of 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.
Yeah the syncing issue has been hitting me more. Not as bad as Slack though, but still enough that where I've answered something on my desktop it'll still ring my phone. It's better than Slack because this is at least <5 minutes apart (Slack will message my phone >10 minutes after I responded on desktop). I'll admit that I'm willing to give Signal more leeway than Slack because they're small. But these things hinder growth.
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.
I don't think Matrix is there yet. But it's clear that they are catching up. We'll see if they have the same growing problems. I was really hoping Signal would use the centralization to advance faster and then when it was fully featured open up to allowing other servers. But you know... they got to grow first.
"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."
My android phone has a global "do not disturb" feature for notifications, so I'm not disturbed during sleeping hours. Can you use that?
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.
As far that I'm aware, it is key management/distribution problem and how to expose it to the user. So in order to not manage them, only the device with the phone number that the account is registered with can do it.
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. Does not really matter to the argument; you cannot do E2EE on the desktop with such an account. But you could on the mobile device, once you install the app there. They call it "device of origin".
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.
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.