[izzytcp]

Hi, German here.

How about not storing any information at all? Nothing to give, problem solved. Just like Signal.

I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason! The app doesn’t solve any privacy problem, default chats are unencrypted, keeps personal info. App should be dead already or turned into a dating app because it’s clearly not seriously privacy fucused.

[AnonC]

> I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason!

Any reason? I’ll give you some serious ones.

Signal sucks really bad on user experience and features. If you try both for a week or two and learn about the features, you’d be able to conclude the same.

Signal does not care about users and prevents backups on iOS. Lose your device or delete the app due to some issues and reinstall? All your chats are gone!

Signal still has message delivery issues (like long delays)…it’s 2022!!!

Signal keeps pestering me to allow notifications and to allow contacts access. I can only choose “Not Now”, since there is no option that says “No”. When I choose “Not Now”, it will say “we’ll remind you later” and pester me again. I don’t understand why anyone would assume that this app cares about privacy or about users’ time.

[zelphirkalt]

> Signal sucks really bad on user experience and features. If you try both for a week or two and learn about the features, you’d be able to conclude the same.

Hm, for me Signal does all I need: Chat, voice chat, video chat, group chat, sending text, pictures, videos, whatever. All of that of course encrypted and not financed by a Russian millionaire/billionaire.

> Signal still has message delivery issues (like long delays)…it’s 2022!!!

Haven't noticed those. How sure are you, that your contacts are actually looking at Signal messages (two filled cirles checkmarks) or have network to receive the messages (two unfilled circles checkmarks)?

> Signal keeps pestering me to allow notifications and to allow contacts access. I can only choose “Not Now”, since there is no option that says “No”. When I choose “Not Now”, it will say “we’ll remind you later” and pester me again. I don’t understand why anyone would assume that this app cares about privacy or about users’ time.

OK, that's really annoying then. I usually use Signal on my computer, from which it works very nicely and never asks me any of those things.

[kitsunesoba]

Signal operates on the idea that anything sent through chat is ephemeral and not worth keeping, which just doesn’t work in practice in my experience.

When you’re knee deep in conversation with someone you’re probably not going to say, “oh hey we should switch to email so we can keep a record of this”. It might not even occur to you that the conversation could ever be of value.

There’s been several occasions when my life has been made much more easy for having been able to dig up some old message in iMessage, Telegram, etc from as far back as multiple years ago sometimes because the way things played out the pertinent info didn’t exist anywhere else simply because nobody involved could’ve ever guessed it had any importance.

[zelphirkalt]

> Signal operates on the idea that anything sent through chat is ephemeral and not worth keeping, which just doesn’t work in practice in my experience.

Why do you think that? Did you lose any messages? 'cause I can scroll back months and still see all my messages there. Never noticed any loss.

[kitsunesoba]

As mentioned in parent comment:

> Signal does not care about users and prevents backups on iOS. Lose your device or delete the app due to some issues and reinstall? All your chats are gone!

Switching out devices is something that happens often enough for many users that transferring history should not be an ordeal. Even the most careful users will occasionally break their phones, and sometimes people need to switch platforms for whatever reason.

WhatsApp suffers from this issue too, at least when trying to migrate histories between platforms.

[em-bee]

just to add, telegram can NOT transfer or back up E2E encrypted chats either. unencrypted chats transfer because they are saved on the telegram server.

i think deltachat is possibly the only one that can transfer encrypted messages because you can copy the encryption keys and the messages are just mails, easy to copy (and usually stored on your mail server too)

i don't know how matrix handles this, but from the way verification works there, i am not confident.

[lhoff]

Signal can do that. Both on Android and iOS. What it can't do on iOS is to create regular Backups (which it can on Android).

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...

I think it has something to do that Signal won't trust iCloud as Backup target.

[0xJRS]

> Signal does not care about users and prevents backups on iOS. Lose your device or delete the app due to some issues and reinstall? All your chats are gone!

My chats being gone from new devices is one reason I use Signal over others.

> Signal still has message delivery issues (like long delays)…it’s 2022!!!

I've sent tens or hundreds of thousands of messages over the course of years and the only time i've had delays is when I had spotty service.

[brnt]

I for one am 100% satisfied with Signals UX, and a big reason for that it precisepy that it does not evolve into a communications platform, but just pushes chats around. The delivery issues are very rare, and not a btother anyways. Chat is not time sensitive nor should it be.

Signal cares about privacy (unlike Telegram) and the evidence is right there in their respective source repositories.

[matkoniecz]

UX of Signal is terrible. Part of that is a direct result of security-usability trade-offs.

> The app doesn’t solve any privacy problem, default chats are unencrypted, keeps personal info.

I am using it for public chats.

--------------------

EDIT: this is inacurate, see replies

For example I get repeated "insert PIN password here to remember it".

I have a password manager. There is no way to get rid of it, even via deeply hidden settings. For example, what about disabling it for password with length over 40? Or something?

[dividuum]

> There is no way to get rid of it, even via deeply hidden settings.

At least on iOS: Settings > Account > [ ] PIN Reminders. I would be very surprised if there isn't a similar way of disabling those reminders on Android.

[matkoniecz]

Thanks, used that! And edited my post. Either I missed it or they added it after I started using Signal.

[durkie]

I have a "pin reminders" setting in iOS signal that I can turn off. It's in Settings > Account

[matkoniecz]

Thanks, used that! And edited my post. Either I missed it or they added it after I started using Signal.

[InCityDreams]

...i havent inserted my android remind-pin for years.

[em-bee]

I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason!

telegram is the only chat app that offers Free Software clients, does not force me to share my phonenumber, is easy enough to use even for old people.

matrix is ok. but element is still buggy and the ux is complex and takes some learning.

another alternative is deltachat. it uses smtp as transport and works with an email account. the UX is also easy enough to use. easier than matrix/element.

[kitsunesoba]

The multiple third party clients feature is huge for me. It’s means I’m not stuck with living with whatever set of trade offs have been made in the official client, and it means there are true native (UWP, UIKit, etc) clients for just about every platform that don’t use UI as branding and behave the way one would expect apps of those platforms to behave.

[zelphirkalt]

Last time I tried Telegram to see what it is like, it did automatically broadcast to all my contacts, that I use Telegram, and as a consequence people thought they could message me there, even though I was only testing the app. Also it did require associating with my phone/SIM. Do you mean, that it does not publish your phone number to other people on Telegram?

I keep an eye on deltachat, hoping, that it might become a viable alternative to phone number associated chat solutions. Not sure how mature deltachat is already.

[em-bee]

it should have asked you about that broadcasting. i am very sensitive about that so i am careful not to allow it.

deltachat is pretty mature for the features that it has. one nice one is that the autocrypt feature works with some regular email clients, so you can exchange encrypted deltachat messages with people who don't have a deltachat client.

it handles groups, image sharing, and integrates videochat with a configurable url (so you can use any video chat that can be opened through a webbrowser)

[zoobab]

Signal require a phone number, a nogo for real privacy.

[meijer]

I believe Telegram requires a phone number, too.

[maxnoe]

It requires a phone number, but it doesn't require sharing the phone number with other people. On signal you are only reachable via the phone number, Telegram has User names and allows to hide the number from the profile.

[boboralice]

It asks for a phone number when you sign up, but you don't have to share the phone number with people you want to add as a contact/share it in groups.

For a lot of people, Telegram does a good job of being "less evil than Facebook Messenger", and private in ways that matter to them. I'm more worried about some nutcase from a video game meetup group getting hold of my phone number than I am law enforcement finding out I was in that video game group in the first place.

I have a Matrix server and an XMPP server for 'truly private' communication anyway.

[zoobab]

Let's see if Telegram gives the data to courts:

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/22/08/31/2210240/court-orders...

[hungryforcodes]

It's actually fun to use?

[em-bee]

that's very subjective i suppose, i don't have much to compare it to. if by fun you mean stickers and animated emojis. sure. it doesn't get in my way. it is possible to find groups and people through searching for keywords. i can name my contacts as i like. (which matrix/element for example does not allow, and that's a real problem)

the only thing annoying is that anyone can just talk to me, whereas eg. in wechat people have to make a contact request before they can talk to me directly. but i have the impression that wechat is the unusual one here, which a feature that i'd like to see adapted by other messengers too.

i also miss wechat's feature of being able to choose a custom name for myself in each group. but again, i don't know if any other messenger offers that.

[upofadown]

>How about not storing any information at all?

That wouldn't work for groups. Abusers could then destroy the groups with impunity for the purpose of censorship. Telegram is mostly about groups. Telegram is often used for activism.

Signal claims to not store data about who is talking to who. That doesn't mean that they don't. If they were, say, a secret subsidiary of the CIA they would act exactly as they are acting now. In general you can't trust the providers of these sorts of things. See Crypto AG...

[DownGoat]

To some degree you can trust them, as data request to Signal have been through the court systems which is public. You can actually look up and see what data they have turned over after receiving court orders to do so.

[globalise83]

Would a secret CIA subsidiary hand over data for a routine civilian court request? If anything not doing so would make their covert surveillance tool even more trustworthy and effective.

[gzer0]

The only information Signal can provide is [1]:

  * Time of account creation 
  * Date of the account’s last connection to Signal servers. 

That is all. If you want, the link below is the grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California, in full.

[1] https://signal.org/bigbrother/cd-california-grand-jury/

[globalise83]

That's my point, if Signal were a CIA front with some kind of secret backdoor, it would probably not reveal that in response to a request from a Central District of California grand jury.

[Canada]

The signal code is public and has been widely reviewed. We know full well what the server knows regardless of what they say.

[hunter2_]

Suppose an update is rolled out in app stores, and many people update to it. Suppose this new version contains surveillance instead of matching the published/reviewed code. Won't there be some substantial period of time during which many messages can be stolen before somebody eventually goes on twitter to say "hmm, wireshark shows more data than I'd expect" and/or "hmm, I can't get the source to build quite like the store's new apk"?

[Canada]

Then we're screwed. All mainstream applications running on modern general purpose computers are vulnerable to this.

You don't like that? Stop busting their balls and produce an alternative operating system and application update framework which is not vulnerable.

[upofadown]

That means the end to end encryption (if you verify your identities) works. It says nothing about how much meta data Signal collects.

[Canada]

We know exactly how much metadata can be collected. You can just look at how the official client works. You can reverse engineer what the server has to do. This not a matter of uncertainty. Signal doesn't mention the collection of the push messaging device IDs explicitly. But that ID doesn't yield a government level adversary any advantage that they don't already have from knowing the phone number, so it doesn't matter. Contact intersection can be logged, then pre-imaged. We can't know. But we already know it can because we know how the clients work. That's it.

Signal doesn't claim cryptographic security against that metadata collection, but then there isn't currently any working system that can make such a claim, so why bust their balls over it?

[zelphirkalt]

That is at least an indication, but unfortunately not a proof. They could run modified versions on their servers, if they wanted.

[Canada]

No, it simply does not matter what modified version of their server they run. We know what the clients do, and we know what the servers can log. This is a fact as sure as day follows night, and that an apple will fall to the ground when dropped. It isn't even debatable. Your comment is incorrect, full stop.

[tiagod]

Poeple use it because the UX is great, as well as the bot DX. E2EE isn't a critical feature for most people picking a chat app.

Signal is a great alternative to WhatsApp. Not so much for Telegram.

[wellthisisgreat]

Because you lose all your chat history without any way to export it.

I unfortunately have convinced some of my relatives to use Signal without me looking into it beforehand.

Now because of Signal’s moronic design I dread the day when something happens and I decide I want to save all our chats for posterity / memories, but wouldn’t be able to. There is simply no “export” button. There is some way to do it on Android but on iOS we are SOL.

[croes]

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...

[madmoose]

> Signal Desktop does not support transferring message history to or from any device.

> Migration Assistant and Time Machine for macOS are not supported.

[nulbyte]

Sounds like option 3: "If this option is supported, Telegram will change its data structure and privacy policy for users from Germany."

[londons_explore]

I would prefer them to be clearer to say "we will redesign our systems so we no longer store IP addresses".

"Change our data structure" sounds like they might just host the servers outside the country and use a "Telegram Deutschland Inc" company that doesn't have access to any user data to run the service.

[mccorrinall]

Even if they don’t store it: if they get a court order, and it requires to turn on IP logging, they will have yours the next time you log in.

[seanw444]

Better than a history, at least.

[xenator]

Just to remind that Signal is bu//sh*t messenger that ask you for your phone number. And keep and share all the information with authorities. Since it is a US based company, and it is what US based companies do.

If you want to make a protected application, don't tie it to any real world data. That is very easy.

[Forbo]

> And keep and share all the information with authorities.

Hilarious that you call it bullshit whilst spouting your own. https://signal.org/bigbrother/

Unless of course you have some documentation to back up what you're saying.

[bigfudge]

I love Signal, but in some jurisdictions government request for data can be accompanied by gagging orders with serious penalties for breach. I'm not sure that list can be considered complete.

[Forbo]

Does the design of Signal's applications or server infrastructure change because of the jurisdiction? Does the information they gather or store change?

[afiori]

With signal can you join public/private channels without disclosing your phone number?

The last time I checked (a few years back) I only saw private groups and no way to hide phone numbers.

If that is still the case then there are less reason to have a warrant for you phone number as it is easier to access.

[xenator]

If you trust some random people over internet who publish anything, then my words should have the same power to you.

[tommit]

To be fair, those statements look a tad more official than your published comment.

[rvz]

> How about not storing any information at all? Nothing to give, problem solved. Just like Signal.

Yeah, give S̶i̶g̶n̶a̶l̶ Twilio your phone number instead. Problem solved.

> I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason! The app doesn’t solve any privacy problem, default chats are unencrypted, keeps personal info. App should be dead already or turned into a dating app because it’s clearly not seriously privacy fucused.

They don't care and Signal offers less that what Telegram has despite Telegram being less secure. Signal is bad at selling itself.

Maybe Signal needs to offer a better user experience, backup chats across all devices and offer more useful features; not less than their competitors rather than pushing a private cryptocurrency scam project useful for criminals, scammers and money launderers.

[Forbo]

If the cryptocurrency weren't useful for criminals, scammers, and money launderers, then it wouldn't be useful for political dissidents either. The reason the undesirables use those technologies is because they work. Yes, bad people are going to use effective tools. Does that mean nobody should have them? Granted, I wish they would have just implemented Monero instead, especially since MobileCoin was (is?) unusable in the US. I agree they definitely could use some work on the backups side of the house as well.

[ajsnigrutin]

> why people use Telegram instead of Signal

Telegram has a great bot feature, that you can use to do a bunch of stuff (from smart house notifications, to "uptime robot" tracking of services up/down states, build results, temperature alarms, server monitoring, etc. One curl oneliner, and you get a message on your phone with whatever data needed (even with an image/graph or a file attachment).

[bloqs]

Telegram seems to have captured some of thr discord market and seems to do "group" stuff a lot better UX wise.

[afiori]

To effectively capture discord usage telegram should add Group groups, that is to allow user to create an Organizations with some channels and groups.

Also some kind of shared access policy.

Could even be a pro feature.

[theshrike79]

I specifically like Telegram because it doesn't have group groups =)

[afiori]

I don't use discord or other complex chats much, are there annoyances that come up with group groups?

[ComodoHacker]

Desktop client already has it, it's called 'folders'.

[afiori]

That is client side; there is no functionality comparable to how discord groups chatrooms by server

[isaacfrond]

I switched from signal to Telegram because the iphone version was buggy as hell. That's why.

[edsimpson]

Signal bugs on ios really are a pain point for people that I have convinced to switch. Even basic things, the ios app does not seem to use the correct camera API which makes using the internal camera lower quality which also makes video calls blurry.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/5294

[onli]

You can install Telegram with f-droid, and it works well on a degoogled phone. Signal forbids alternate clients and is not on f-droid. It's thus just not an option.

[khannurien]

https://signal.org/android/apk/

Signal will send you a notification when updates are available, and self-update.

[NayamAmarshe]

So will Telegram but at least they're not hostile towards F-Droid like Moxie.

[martin_a]

> Signal forbids alternate clients

Which might be due to their E2E encryption?!?

[smarx007]

No, it's a management decision and not a technical limitation.

[GekkePrutser]

It was mainly moxie who was hell-bent against that though. I'm hoping they'll reverse their stance since he left. And on federation as well.

Moxie was against all these things because it would make new features more difficult to implement. But personally I care much more for an open infrastructure. Most of their new features weren't even useful.

I'm currently using a matrix bridge and I didn't get banned (officially that's a third party client too) so that's a good sign.

[hef19898]

Strange, I have Signal on a de-googled Puxel 2 runnibg ClayxOS...

[smarx007]

But I guess you have an original Signal APK installed, not an alternative client that connects to Signal servers.

[newpseudonymn]

There are third party apps that connect to Signal's servers such as Molly. https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android

[fsflover]

How can I install Signal on my Qubes OS or on Pinephone, if I don't have any Google or Apple phones?

[neverrroot]

Channels, Groups, it’s overall way better. But true, per default not as secure. Supports secure chats, that are secure.

[izzytcp]

Are channels and groups e2ee?

[endless1234]

No. Is discord, reddit, hacker news e2ee? No, but they are still products people want to use.

[croes]

Do you use discord, reddit, hacker news for private communication?

BTW reddit and Hackernews are E2EE, it's just that one E is public.

[wruza]

What is your HN key fingerprint? I’d like to compare it to know if our messaging is secure.

[croes]

I'm not messaging to you but to HN via E2E https connection. You can't read that messages as they are transported, you can read them afterwards because HN makes them public not because my message wasn't send encrypted.

[_Algernon_]

What does that even mean?

[croes]

Telegram is just the middleman between sender and receiver. When you write on HN, the receiver is HN. That message is transported via E2E https encryption so it's secure. But because HN displays all messages publicly you can read them after they were received.

This doesn't change the fact that the transport as such is E2E.

[boomboomsubban]

That your message is transferred from your computer to the recipient, HN's servers, encrypted. At no point should anyone in the middle be able to read your message. After arrival, HN then publishes it on a public forum for everyone to see.

[skyyler]

They aren't meant to be.

The people signing up for telegram in droves aren't looking for a replacement for signal or wickr or whatever "secure" messaging platform.

They're joining their friends' group chats and subscribing to their friends' channels. It's a replacement for twitter/facebook more than anything else.

[dymk]

You already know the answer to that.

[loo]

As secure as a fox who's just been appointed Professor of Security at Secure University?

[autoexec]

> How about not storing any information at all? Nothing to give, problem solved. Just like Signal.

just so you know, Signal does permanently store sensitive user data in the cloud. They collect your name, photo, phone number, and a list of every person you contact using Signal. That data is stored in your profile on their servers.

Signal really used to not store anything, but that hasn't been the case for a long time now and if this is the first you're hearing about that, it should tell you all you need to know about how trustworthy Signal is.

[perakojotgenije]

Because it works flawlessly on all three major operating systems (windows, linux, macos), unlike Signal who can not make a decent linux port.

[yunohn]

> How about not storing any information at all?

Acc to telegram:

> Telegram may disclose IP addresses and phone numbers

How do you propose this data is masked? You need a phone number to use Telegram (and Signal), and you need an internet connection, thus exposing your IP address.

I’m not sure why you think Signal does not have this information.

[OkayPhysicist]

Signal has been subpoena'd in the past, and the only relevant information they were able to provide were account creation date and account's last connection date. Literally nothing else. It's actually a little funny to read:

https://signal.org/bigbrother/cd-california-grand-jury/

[autoexec]

That was in the past though. Now Signal is storing exactly that same information permanently in the cloud. Specifically they store your name, phone number, photo, and a record of every person you contact.

[d0mine]

Metadata is enough to execute people (by certain country but anywhere in the world--it is immoral for Signal to position itself as secure if it provides such data).

[autoexec]

Last I checked Signal was outright lying in their privacy policy which was never updated after they started collecting and storing user data in the cloud. You can't morally market yourself as secure while you lie to your users about what their risks are.

[anticensor]

When did that change and how do you know about this?

[yunohn]

But did you actually read that? It specifically doesn’t mention the obvious data that they do have (phone and IP), but instead focus on other sensitive metadata:

> variety of information we don’t have, including the target’s name, address, correspondence, contacts, groups, calls.

[fsflover]

Matrix won't have this information, if you have your own server.

[ComodoHacker]

>How about not storing any information at all? Nothing to give, problem solved.

This means no history sync, no seamless device switching, no contact discovery, no search. That's not what people want.

[t0bia_s]

Telegram and Signal has basically same problem. Thats centralised storage of data. So if you care about privacy, Signal is not alternative to Telegram.

Matrix is decentralised open-source solution. I don't understand why people don't use it more instead of Signal or Telegram. Or Session, but it is not very user friendly.

[tcfhgj]

I don't get why anyone uses Signal.

Horrible UX compared to WhatsApp, no sync of messages between devices, walled garden like WhatsApp, you can't have your own custom client

only thing: not Facebook & open source

You can have all of that with a Matrix client (except good UX, that's unique to Telegram)

[tommit]

I'm not sure what you mean. Messages sync just fine between my iPhone and Linux machine.

> Horrible UX

It got way better in the past few years. When I did the initial push with my friends, we failed. Mainly because the basic functionality was buggy at times, such as messages that would simply not be received. But now it's running real smooth imo. Sure, there are a few things I would like to see. Polls is a big one. Maybe a smooth gif creation like WhatsApp -- but those are fairly minor. My experience is that it gets pretty much the job done and that's all I want from it. What exactly is so horrible about it in your experience?

> only thing: not Facebook & open source

Those two are pretty big positives, at least for me. That's pretty much exactly what I'm looking for.

> You can have all of that with a Matrix client

Well ... unfortunately that's a bit much for your average Joe, simple as.

[maxnoe]

No they don't sync just fine. A device cannot receive chat history from before it was added and signal regularly "forgets" linked devices, losing all messages on the device and starting from scratch after relinking.

[jen20]

> why anyone uses Signal.

> not Facebook

Bingo!

[gsich]

>I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason!

Very easy to integrate custom notifications with bots. Signal is more like "maybe it works with this 3rd party tool". Also being able to use custom buttons with bots.

[sschueller]

Moxie rubs me the wrong way and I don't trust him. So defacto, I don't trust signal.