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.
Good for you. I 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.
And that irony now is that messenger on Android is RCS compliant and currently has this exact functionality, except it’s less trustworthy.
Once again I’m using one messenger and everyone else who’s using an RCS messenger gets encrypted, but SMS (clearly marked as such) is a viable fallback.
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)
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 came out a year earlier in that signal, and because immediately popular amongst young people and drug dealers in Russia
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.
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.
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.
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…
EDIT: lmao people Just downvoted me for asking… what a world
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 nothing
