It was a many months transition, and it’s finally done
Fun thing, you can actually make a backup of all* your messages, groups, contacts, etc. So before leaving you can have all of your data in case you need that one contact or something
The final red flag was as that allegedly Russian authorities were messing with people’s deleted messages. Not for the first time there are news that they could read, modify, delete, see location, and etc. Screw it, this is unsafe, I’m out.
Also, these days telegram is really at the state of a pile of garbage, bloated, buggy, and shady messenger.
You forget to mention they gave informations to german police, seems like they forget the point of the app
Why did Telegram get so popular in the privacy scene compared to Signal in the first place? To my knowledge Signal came out first and never had a history of breaches or leaks.
Telegram got its popularity because of piracy and having your chats on cloud. It was never intended to give privacy to user but due to WhatsApp breaches they started promoting telegram as a secured chat app which is a toatal joke till this day.
Telegram came out a year earlier in that signal, and because immediately popular amongst young people and drug dealers in Russia
I can’t speak for the privacy scene but in my country it’s pretty popular merely because of anonimity (which boils down to not having to use a phone number) and Discord-like server/groups. For porn and other NSFW content, it is pretty popular.
Ah I did not know Signal required a phone number compared to Telegram not requiring one. Thanks.
At least they have usernames now…
Telegram still requires a phone number to sign up, but they have had usernames that can be used to contact people without needing their phone number. Signal is only now finally rolling out usernames.
And they still want your phone number.
Maybe because it offers public chats and channels? Something other apps lack.
Also the best desktop experience out of all apps I’ve tried.
Honestly, UI and PC client experience.
I find the UI in signal a bit off putting. Telegram grabs you with their funky stickers, clean UI and dumb features. I alps hate that Signal won’t bother copying the messages to a new client… Like, I have a 1Gbps connection, surely we can copy my chat histories from my phone to my PC? Nope, gotta start fresh on every new client…
If they did less dumb shit like adding statuses, and put some more effort into making the UI nice, more people would use it.
And I get these are dumb reasons, but they’re real none the less
I think Signal shot themselves squarely in the dick by removing SMS functionality.
Previously, you could use Signal as the primary SMS/messenger app. Any conversations with other Signal clients secure. Conversations in SMS/MMS? Marked as not-secure.
But, out of some purity concerns, SMS functionality was removed and the dev team focused on adding useless shit like “stickers” and then the pin-code harassment.
Signal adoption plummeted as intended (?)
By lying aggressively.
Lying about being the first phone app with E2EE (they’re not even close, by over a decade if we count J2ME apps) because Signal was called TextSecure back when telegram didn’t even exist yet. Lying about their protocol, lying about their backup system (if you’re using group chats or regular chats which are backed up they are visible to the admins and any other claim is a lie), bullshit propaganda against Signal, etc…
Oh and by the way, Signal has now finally launched usernames, so you don’t have to share your phone number to use it anymore.
I assumed the popularity was not in the privacy scene, but rather in general population, just because of usability. It is just a more usable alternative to Whatsapp or VKontakte. It is pretty much the default messaging platform for young people like Whatsapp is for older ones.
in some circles yeah.
In Germany it actually became famous because it allowed for huge groups and it’s where covid misinformation breeding grounds took off. People thought you were a nutjob if you had telegram lol.
Which, while that is the dumbest reason to reject a chat app, at least meant that Signal was able to get more popular with uhhh smarter folks.
Honestly it was mostly a Discord competitor if anything. One with FOSS clients for desktop and Android.
The private chat is baseline implementation just to tick a box rather than anything practically useful.
Telegram, while often hyped as high privacy/security got popular because it was/is fully featured and isn’t Google or Facebook. That’s it
It’s less invasive, less annoying, and can do all the stuff like gifs and stickers. So it was very easy to get people onto compared to pretty much anything that was actually private or secure.
Once enough people started using it, it snowballed into its own monolith of bloat.
It was also very fast and transparent – not a lot of stuff separating somebody from the other people in their conversations, which was pretty solid even compared to other messaging apps of its day. Most people didn’t feel the need to fact-check its privacy and security claims because it worked good enough for them!
Besides the ease of registration, the sync between devices make it easier. It can be frustrating not to be able to easily backup/restore/sync all your chats just like Whatsapp or Telegram. Yes, privacy/security, but i believe not everyone is chased by a state actor and you might want to have the option, as an opt-in maybe.
I think the big reason that nobody’s mentioned yet is simply that they were earlier. Back when projects like Tox and Matrix were first starting to pop up, telegram was already fully formed. Signal didn’t come until at least a year later and didn’t have feature parity until several years later. Telegram by contrast was a much closer experience to WhatsApp and Messenger, making the transition much easier, particularly for low-tech knowledge users.
It’s popular with furries because of sticker support. Furries are an anchor population for the larger world of IT/etc. It was never really about privacy, or signal would have taken off.
So what do you use to send, receive and store 2GB ish files to other people?
Magic wormhole, Bitorrent
Depends what people
For family and friends I have nextcloud, many of them are using it (yes, i’m that one out of a million people who made their friends and family use selfhosted stuff and be happy)
The final red flag was as that allegedly Russian authorities were messing with people’s deleted messages.
I don’t know about “Russian authorities”, but the fact remains that if you can login anywhere and see your messages, then your public key is stored in the server.
Since Telegram requires authorization from an extant connection, I don’t know if that means your public key isn’t stored on the servers and it’s being sent from the authorizing device, or if that device is merely authorizing the Telegram servers to transmit that key to the new device.
Since they have a full e2e chat feature (Private Chats), I’m going to assume the latter.
So anyone who can get those keys can gain access to your chats.
I still say Telegram is far superior to anything from Fuckbook/Meta, because it’s not integrated into everying you do (even those of us who’ve never once been on Facebook, and yet have ghost profiles), not to mention the Facebook app integrated into Android on many vendor phones.
Even so, know Telegram for what it is - not ideal, just better than WhatsApp, and a step along the path to moving to more secure and privacy-respecting apps.l
Comparing telegram to WhatsApp is something really 2015 😅
Now we have many alternatives, and let’s just switch, fb and telegram both suck compared to signal, simplex, session, or even matrix (wait for the new matrix’ update where they add some new encryption stuff)
Session was at first a fork of Signal without usernames.
Now by design it uses their own custom tor-like service (instead of just… using tor) and does not support forward secrecy or deniable authentication, so anyone who collects the messages in transit can either find a vulnerability in the encryption scheme, or spend enough GPU resources to crack it, and they have confirmation of who sent and received the message and what the contents of the message are. And is headquartered in Australia, which is 5EYES and much more against encryption than the US. Oh, and the server is closed-source.
Regarding Australia’s 2018 bill…
The Australian Parliament passed a contentious encryption bill on Thursday to require technology companies to provide law enforcement and security agencies with access to encrypted communications. Privacy advocates, technology companies and other businesses had strongly opposed the bill, but Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government said it was needed to thwart criminals and terrorists who use encrypted messaging programs to communicate.
Regarding the ‘vulnerability or cracking them later’ bit…
Messages that are sent to you are actually sent to your swarm. The messages are temporarily stored on multiple Service Nodes within the swarm to provide redundancy. Once your device picks up the messages from the swarm, they are automatically deleted from the Service Nodes that were temporarily storing them.
From Session’s own FAQ:
Session clients do not act as nodes on the network, and do not relay or store messages for the network. Session’s network architecture is closer to a client-server model, where the Session application acts as the client and the Service Node swarm acts as the server. Session’s client-server architecture allows for easier asynchronous messaging (messaging when one party is offline) and onion routing-based IP address obfuscation, relative to peer-to-peer network architectures.
I wouldn’t touch it with a 12ft ladder.
Between forking Signal to make their desktop and mobile clients, and forking Monero to make their cryptocurrency… I’m surprised they came up with Lokinet.
Edit: I’m pretty Session doesn’t even use Lokinet. So much for the claimed resiliency from “hackers”
Session does use the Oxen network which is the renamed Lokinet, unless they made a change I’m wholly unaware of.
I must have been thinking of their past implementations. Their FAQ says things were different:
Proxy routing was an interim routing solution which Session used at launch while we worked to implement onion requests. When proxy routing was in use, instead of connecting directly to an Oxen Service Node to send or receive messages, Session clients connected to a service node which then connects to a second service node on behalf of the Session client… The proxy routing system has now been replaced by onion requests.
It was even less clear to me because this is what it says in the app itself:
Session hides your IP by bouncing your messages through several Service Nodes in Session’s decentralized network.
Not “the Oxen network” but “Session’s network.”
And then it has a graph of
• You
• Entry Node
• Service Node
• Service Node
• Destination
You’re not wrong. Lokinet and Session are both products from the same parent company. Lokinet was renamed to the Oxen protocol, and they run all the servers AFAIK, so it would be like tor, if tor ran every guard, entry, and exit node. AKA worthless. So you’re spot on, it’s a joy to the intelligence community and after the Encrochat debacle and Session stopped using Signal’s encryption algorithms and code, I would suggest no one use it for anything sensitive.
i use telegram, but i agree that signal and matrix is superior from both(i don’t about the others)
then your public key is stored in the server
Did you mean private key?
I automatically read it as private key, good catch
I must agree on the bloated part. Telegram was awesome before Pavel got greedy and added more and more stuff that are just not related to any chat service, for an example payments and crypto.
I installed Snikket on my server few weeks ago and are now trying to move everyone to it. It seems to be a very slow process, though.
But I might keep Telegram only for the porn channels. Mighty good stuff!
By the way. Do you have the source for your claim that Russian authorities were messing with people’s deleted messages?
XMPP, 🙂
Oh, yeah, the porn channels are really good indeed
I’m thinking if I can access them from some telegram channel mirror
Well, Telegram already have a preview feature for every public channels. Just copy the direct link to the channel and add
/saftert.me/(or choose “Previous channel” without opening the link in Telegram) and you’re good to go. If only Pavel will add an RSS feed to that feed. That would be mighty-mighty awesome!More work to save the media files, though. You have to inspect the element and get the direct link to the image through
background-imagefor the classtgme_widget_message_photo_wrap. Much easier and takes less time to just save it inside Telegram, as of now.Good advice, but I will look into converting some to RSS and read in an RSS reader
I only use it for porn grpups🗿
Porn groups? What do you do in those groups? Exchange porn? Is there not enough on the internet?
Now, where might one find those? For science, of course…
You can actually just search telegram porn groups on your search engine of choice. Although google usually leads to better results in the porn department
Porn groups are good indeed!
critical damage to the “privacy-conscious people are not freaks” message
I thought furry groups use discord?💀
Nu uh, I aint no furry❌🗣️
Eww, disgusting!
Where?
I never got with these russian authority claims. Telegram is not based in russia, sure its founders are born in russia but they have taken citizenship of France for a long time now, its based in saudi arabia. I never saw a single proof of them giving data to russian authorities, they were banned in russia for that iirc but eventually got unbanned due to mass adoption. At this point these russian claims just seem racism to me.
- I never said that telegram collaborates with Russia (I don’t know if they really do, but tg is pretty insecure, and Russian govt is happy to crack it)
- They were banned in Russia until they realized why would they ban it if they can read it (unbanning of something in Russia is another sign of something shady going on)
- I’m Russian myself, so your gaslighting won’t work, also are you Russian or Slavic too? 🤣
- Show me the proof, don’t talk on hunches
- They really didn’t care, they are banned in Iran too which is their 3rd biggest market. They got unbanned because Russia failed to unban it, there are no cases known yet in which telegram handed over users data to Russian authorities https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN23P2DY/
- I am not Russian
It’s the usual foreign fearmongering. It’s never phrased this way if the subject is a western company (even though we know they cooperate with the US government).
Specially since we know for a fact that Meta hands over any and all information the US government wants from all their apps.
tg premium user here, WTF? i tought telegram was privacy respectfull and pretty secure, what changed/happened? that’s not the first post i saw abt It. also, any alternatives? with almost same features and as many channels/groups as telegram ofc like don’t suggest me signal or Matrix nobody Is on that platforms…
Treat Telegram as a public forum in realtime chat format. You will be way happier.
ye it’s like a social media that doesn’t spy on me and doesn’t have strange algos to feed me with shit. never used It as a chatting app
Telegram hasn’t been secure since basically day 1. IIRC it went something like
Security experts: Never roll your own cryptography.
Telegram: We rolled our own cryptography!
Security experts: Don’t. And it’s broken.
Telegram: uhhhh… We fixed it.
Security experts: It still looks really bad. Stop it.
Telegram: says nothingSecurity is a spectrum. Telegram has never been the most secure alternative, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any security.
From my first link
The safest way to use Telegram would be not to. However, if you have no other choice, the best approach would be to use a clean burner phone to communicate with another clean burner phone. Change them regularly.
…
In short, for better protection, use anything else.
Good for you. I’m still don’t know how to move my friends and relatives to Signal. Any tips with that?
Easy! Just replace their usual SMS app with Signal, and then every contact they have that does use Signal is private and secure!
Oh. Wait. That’s exactly the functionality that Signal removed in their effort to ensure that Signal is never widely adopted…
I didn’t agree with their decision at all at the time, but now that I realize they made it a little while after it gained widespread adoption and people stopped using it because “Signal isn’t actually secure!” … seems like people were expecting a secure messenger to be, well, secure. So they would chat about anything and everything thinking “I am using a secure messenger, these messages can’t be read…” and tech ignorance is a dangerous thing if you’re trying to be secure. I would’ve preferred a colored window and un-closable message for SMS chats, but oh well. I like that they’ve introduced usernames so you don’t have to give out your real number.
Keep bugging them. I almost exclusively use signal for messaging these days and it’s fantastic. It took longer to convince some people than others
Install a family XMPP server like Snikket or otherwise. Show them the benchmarks of how little battery & data plan drain is used from Conversations forks. Explain how bloated Electron apps are & how you don’t wish that on your loved ones vs. Dino, Gajim, or a TUI client. Sidecar a Movim server so y’all can share long-lived, non-ephemeral posts instead of losing memories like photos in some long group thread. Let them know their data is safe with you as the operator instead of some massive for-profit corporation—and if they don’t trust you, they are empowered to start their own server to interop.
(This tactic has yet to work for me, but I will keep running into that wall til it breaks 😃)
Do what I did. Let everyone you care about on TG that you’re closing that crap, with your reasons for doing so. Inform them of your moving to signal, session, whatever. Be clear that, otherwise, they can try calling you and wish them good luck. Close TG on the day you set as deadline. I did that and whomever didn’t get a Signal or Session account has to call me. I’ve never looked back.
My family is all on iMessage. I told them if they didn’t install Signal I wouldn’t reply to their texts.
At first, whenever they texted I would just reply with something that looked automated like “This user is no longer available via text message. Please install Signal if you wish to communicate.”
That’s freaking epic. Love it.
I did something similar and just sent a link to Signal when IPhone friends and family SMS’d me, worked…eventually :) (am on Android)
Like that, also, a few months prior to the deletion turn off the notifications, and come there every few days, so people need to wait for your reply for days, and when you come you say “oh, I’m not using tg, I switched to signal/session/simplex/bird mail”
These are allngreat suggestions. Another huge advantage is that this help detoxify from the constant pinging with others.
One day I said that in the future I will only be available via Signal. If not there then there is still SMS. And so far everyone I have contact with regularly installed it eventually.
That’s exactly right.
where did you moved to? i tried matrix but their android client (element) is terrible compare to telegram’s.
Try checking out Element X. It’s made to replace Element stable once it’s complete.
Try schildichat it seems more polished
Schildi is planning to be based on Element X later.
Gonna have to disagree. Telegram is the ONLY chat app with ACTUALLY NATIVE code clients on desktop and mobile. Its the only one that isn’t website in a box trash that’s slow heavy and buggy. I use discord mostly because it’s where everyone is but i fucking hate everything about it and wish people would use telegram.
If you think other chat apps don’t read/process metadata from your dms and such your an idiot. Nothing is safe short of self hosted matrix with full E2E encryption or similar and ain’t nobody doing that.
At least Matrix lets you encrypt data. Telegram is hostile to that.
And no, taking your most personal data in a decrypted state for no good reason and promising to keep it encrypted is not the same thing. If anything, it’s worse
Nothing is safe short of self hosted matrix with full E2E encryption or similar and ain’t nobody doing that.
Well, I’m doing that. But I’m nobody, so I guess your point still stands 😅
But also, I don’t judge the chats mainly by their client, but the protocol. Telegram is not open and so can’t be audited properly, that’s my concern.
Afaik the protocol is documented[1] and the clients are open source[2].
No code available for the backend though.
I deleted telegram long ago, but not my account, just the apps.
As of recent, I wanted to log back in and actually delete my phone number from there, so there’s no more association.
I can’t login. I download the app, and it sends a verification code through Telegram and won’t do SMS, but I’m not logged in at all so I can’t get the code.
I’m stuck there. I contacted support and they’re yet to respond. :p
I’m glad I never used it
Russian authorities usually just hijack login sms confirmation codes. This is a common practice in Russia. Not denying that something else shady might be going on, but I do know mobile providers there don’t even bother to ask why - they just provide shit on demand.
Also, these days telegram is really at the state of a pile of garbage, bloated, buggy, and shady messenger.
Every messenger is.
