Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

It's really cool that Telegram is growing, even if it seems nowhere close to WhatsApp or Facebook. I keep recommending Telegram to people I know, but familiarity and the network effect keep most people on WhatsApp/FB.

My ultimate goal has been to move to Signal, but Signal being quite slow in the development and the infrastructure fronts, it's not a viable option for mass adoption right now.

For all its cryptographic weaknesses, I find Telegram to be a better choice. Message delivery is super fast. It syncs messages across devices. It's available on popular smartphone and tablet OSes and also on the major desktop OSes. It's also available on the browser (need phone to activate it for use, whereas in the other cases one single activation will hold good almost forever). Telegram has been adding new features (some of them are probably catch ups with WhatsApp) at a good pace.

My wishlist for Telegram is two fold - a) make the crypto better (or try to work with Signal and adapt that) and b) introduce a monetization plan so I can support the app financially for all the worth it has provided and keeps providing.

This. Telegram got a lot of things right. They have clients that work well on all platforms. Features like the Bot API and Channels have a lot of potential. However, their home-grown crypto and dismissal of feedback from the crypto community makes it hard for me to recommend it to anyone.

I recommend it just because it has questionable crypto, to feed at least some data into Russia and not only to USA. Just to not have only one unchallenged world surveillance power.

The only thing that bothers me more than the homebrew crypto is their claims of security. False sense of security is worse than no security.

No one has cracked it, specially in the time they offered a $300.000 prize.

So far Telegram has done everything right. They have awesome native apps on all the platforms, no stupid web-wrappers that are slow and buggy. I haven't had a single bug, it's always been extremely fast and reliable. This is what makes a truly great user experience.

it would be great if open source solutions like Telegram, Signal and Matrix (and others) would all interoperate. I work on Matrix (https://matrix,.org) but I don't really care which client you want to use - as long as we can still talk to each other!

I wish Signal would hurry up with their web client. It would really boost adoption.

At least you're calling it web client.

Signal seems to consider that Chrome extension a 'Desktop Client'. Which it isn't, and unfortunately it won't help users that aren't using Chrome (a lot of my non-technical friends are on Edge now with Windows 10, the rest is split roughly 50/50 between Firefox and Chrome).

Signal, with decent support for multiple devices (and ideally: Without requiring a phone number!) would be awesome. Until then, Telegram works best for me.

Or you can wait for Actor - we are working on porting Signal's crypto to our platform and we are already have much better UX, Servers and full featured slack-like (but easier) desktop/web clients.

Why not just help fix Signal?

We are much more powerful team for UX/performance. We build entire platform from scratch. Signal uses simplest existing technologies on top of only pubsub. We are just working very differently. Making correct multidevice/federation/apps/etc are larger part of the work then crypto (specs are ready). It is much easier for us to integrate signal protocol to Actor instead of doing opposite.

It might be easier for you to do, but it seems like a worse end goal.

We can discuss this if you will explain why goal is worse.

Because people already use Signal and fragmentation of the secure messaging space makes it less useful.

When Signal will became federated network we can join networks together no problem here.

If you are going to build something new, I guess I'll throw my suggestion of Signal+Ricochet+Burner in.

* Signal - the crypto * Ricochet - no metadata leaking * Burner - the ability to have multiple IDs without trying to tie to PII

Last but not least, a commitment to have Actor code evaluated by credible outside security firm.

I have have a look after Ricochet it just uses Tor for clearing metadata. We had in the past prototypes with tor enabled messaging on mobile and it is not work as expected. Always too long to start on iOS (that can't execute in background), but we found a way to make it work much better i hope in some day we will be able to make it work together, but now it is much better to use tor proxy somewhere and point app to it. Not very user friendly.

Is there any documentation about what Actor is? Can't immediately find one. Some sort of non-marketing overview that gives rough ideas on how everything works, with pointers on where to read for the fine details.

I mean, are you interconnected with something (Signal interop a-la WhisperPush on CM? XMPP with OMEMO and GCM/APN via XEP-0357? Telegram network with Axolotl overlay? Something else?) or you're yet another proprietary standalone network?

We have everything in our repo: https://github.com/actorapp/actor-platform

Protocol, for example: https://github.com/actorapp/actor-platform/tree/master/docs/...

Thanks for the links. You should really update the website. No need for long fancy writeups, just add a section "for the curious what's under the hood" with a bunch of links, somewhere at the bottom.

My wish is for Signal to provide what Telegram provides for messaging (multi-platform, sync, speed of message delivery, etc.). Just a web client alone is not going to be a convenient replacement (if it implies that the phone should be around or that activation has to be done every time the browser is restarted or cookies are cleared).

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