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Comment by sergiolp | Hacker News Reader

Telegram-FOSS (the FOSS friendly fork you can find on F-Droid, not the official app on Play Store) maintainer here. Telegram is NOT a "secure messaging app".

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Quote from the Telegram-FOSS Github Page: "Telegram is a messaging app with a focus on speed and security..."

That comes from upstream's README.md. I've never payed any attention to it, but now that you've pointed it out, I'm seriously considering changing that paragraph, or adding a note/disclaimer somewhere.

After all these years and promises, server's code is still closed, federation is nowhere to be found, their update/commit policy for the official Android app is a joke [1] (they even closed its issue tracker), and I'm really tired of their "trust us, we're not evil" policy [2].

If you haven't switched to Matrix/Riot, do it right away.

[1] https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/commits/master

[2] https://telegram.org/faq#q-who-are-the-people-behind-telegra...

As one of the resident cryptography nerds: Matrix/Riot seems to be in every way better than Telegram. I still need to review it before I can wholesale recommend it, but it was audited by NCC Group previously.

I don't seem to understand Matrix/Riot.

It appears to be like IRC, but also integrates with Gitter, and IRC and has a identity federator called vector.im.

Matrix is a federated chat protocol. It is like IRC or XMPP but synchronizes history and uses HTTP-based protocol. There are bridges to IRC, XMPP, and Gitter.

Riot is a client. It used to be named Vector.im.

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