I use telegram for some group chats, but I'm not sure why tech-savvy people would like it so much – messages are not end-to-end encrypted which makes it an inferior choice compared to even whatsapp
For one, it's the only major messenger that has an actually lightweight, well-written and full-featured desktop client rather than yet another boxed-up web browser. I might be more enthusiastic about using the alternatives if I could use the Telegram client.
It's very bizarre to see all these comments downplaying this, or implying the lack of E2EE by default somehow makes it less attractive to the average user than something like Signal.
Most people care about usability and interconnectivity first and foremost because the majority of their messaging activities are not so sensitive that they feel the need to sacrifice those things for mandatory E2EE. Call that shortsighted if you like, but it's far more common than this "encryption or bust" mindset around here.
If signal or some messaging platform could find a way to be E2EE capable all the time, with all the same usability and design as telegram, without unnecessary restrictions on users, and without it being a completely walled off garden from which your data can never be self-extracted, it would win this argument.
Same goes for things like Tutanota and a lot of these other data prisons that are cropping up which create privacy through taking away user agency.
Until then users will pick what they want for their own needs. Telegram met those needs for many.
isn't only the client side oss? server side logs/libs is more likely. isn't it amazing 30 guys handle a billion users and who knows what sort of ddos is unleashed against them.
Intriguing (and surprising to me that they offer E2EE at all), but there is seemingly no Linux build. I can't seem to find source code either (Telegram Desktop's is released under the GPL).
They used to have a page wittily named "feature matrix", which made it apparent that only Element was really kept up to date, with other clients missing features ranging from channel search to embedding images. I don't know if this situation has improved and whether the original page still exists somewhere.
Several of them have been reporting improvements over the past couple years in the weekly Matrix development blog, and I know at least one of them has both search and embedded images. You might want to have another look some time.
> which makes it an inferior choice compared to even whatsapp
I'd rather have a good privacy policy with a good enough server-side encryption than some closed-source implementation of E2EE, that we can never audit.
WhatsApp actually disallows you from reverse-engineering the app and looking into the algorithm. That begs the question, what percentage of E2EE is it really? 20%? 50%? 100%? Because there's still no way to confirm their claims of E2EE. All we have is a company with a really good track record in lying publicly, telling you that it's safe.
This is no longer true, whatsapp have taken steps [0] to make their e2ee auditable and honestly I disagree with the idea that no e2ee is better than closed source e2ee. I'm not sure why you would trust a privacy policy more than you would trust encryption, with a court order Telegram would provide your chats to law enforcement, while Whatsapp would not be able to.
This is not the algorithm being audited, it's the key. Telegram's complete algorithm is auditable, including the open source client apps. Server code is always unverifiable, so let's not bring that up.
Secondly, WhatsApp channels and large groups (copied from Telegram) are not encrypted in any way (cmiw), as opposed to Telegram's MTProto 2.0 Cloud encryption. The app is completely closed-source even with all their claims of privacy and its TnC even discourages you from reverse-engineering it.
WhatsApp Communities are indeed E2E encrypted. About channels, why would you want a channel to be encrypted when you are just a follower and cannot communicate back? In fact WhatsApp's guidelines explicitly state the following:
> Channel updates should be used to share information with followers and viewers, not as a way for admins to communicate back and forth.
Signal for mobile and Signal for desktop are different apps with different code bases. Neither is as good as Telegram's, in my opinion.
Signal is fine for messaging. Not bad, not amazing. I'd have a much easier time convincing people to switch to Signal if it would've had a client as good as Telegram's, especially for the desktop application.
That said, Telegram has been adding more and more annoying premium features that distract and annoy.
On iOS, if you turn off your Internet connection and receive a message, you won’t get a notification when you restore your connection. This problem doesn’t exist with WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram. Quite strange.
Maybe because tech-savvy people understand the need and importance of encryption? There's of course always the exceptions that say they don't care about privacy, but that is fortunately usually a small group, at least in the tech-savvy world.
Both tech savvies and laypeople expect private/encrypted messaging app to provide the basic property that only the sender and the intended recipients can read it. This is achieved with end-to-end encryption. Techies know the term, and can understand it's not present. Non-tech people don't understand, and just rely on word-of-mouth that it's super secure, when it's not.
At least on the beginning, when I looked into it, it had a very simple and well documented API. I guess it was the only messenger you could send a message with one line of code (of course not e2e encrypted). So it's very simple to send you a message from your home project.
WhatsApp doesn't save my history. And secret services of governments of certain counties are not a realistic adversary that I'm trying to defend myself against. The usual scammers which are going to steal my identity are not the people Durov will sell admin access to his server to.
Almost all conversations that most people have are benign. I used telegram to follow journalists (essentially as a twitter replacement), how would E2EE benefit my use case?
Yeah no shit. But sharing cute cat pics deserve human right to privacy. Also, when everything is E2EE, that reduces the metadata about when you say something private. You don't want your opt-in encryption to reveal metadata about how close you are to someone.