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Comment by fwdpropaganda | Hacker News Reader

EDIT: For clarity, the comment below has nothing to do with Telegram Login, but Telegram itself.

Telegram gets a lot of hate on HN, but I have to say that of all large messaging apps Telegram has by far the best UX. That said, I can see it slowly turning into a walled garden. For example, in public channels (distinct from groups, they're broadcast only) it should be possible to link to their content from the outside. Instead if you try that they force you to download the app to see the content. EDIT2: As someone noted you can link each individual post on a channel, but you can't see and scroll through a list of posts as you can from inside the app.

I wish we had a messaging app with a market as large as WhatsApp's, UX as good as Telegram, security as good as Signal, run by an organization like Mozilla.

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> I wish we had a messaging app with a market as large as WhatsApp's, UX as good as Telegram, security as good as Signal, run by an organization like Mozilla.

An open protocol is a prerequisite. There's a 2018 IETF proposal for interoperable E2E messaging, initiated by Cisco, Google, Facebook and Wire:

Architecture: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-omara-mls-architectur...

Protocol: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-barnes-mls-protocol/?...

"Messaging Layer Security (MLS) ... is not intended as a full instant messaging protocol but rather is intended to be embedded in a concrete protocol such as XMPP [RFC3920]. In addition, it does not specify a complete wire encoding, but rather a set of abstract data structures which can then be mapped onto a variety of concrete encodings, such as TLS [I-D.ietf-tls-tls13], CBOR [RFC7049], and JSON [RFC7159]. Implementations which adopt compatible encodings should be able to have some degree of interoperability at the message level, though they may have incompatible identity/authentication infrastructures."

It's not a good plan. They propose to design, de novo, in an open standards group, a cryptographic secure group messaging protocol based on a design that has never been deployed at any scale. The underlying design is cool --- it's basically Asynchronous Ratcheting Trees, which was presented in a paper at RWC just a few weeks ago. That's how de novo this particular "standards" effort is: the underlying theory is just 28 days old.

Already, in the starting point draft, it's been crudded up: it has "ciphersuites", and comes with support for the NIST P-256 curve --- despite the fact that the underlying design wants to take byte strings to curve points, which is tricky to do on the P-curve. It will only get worse from here. They'll figure out some reason to bolt a PAKE onto it soon enough.

Signal Protocol is exceedingly well-documented (and even before those documents were written, it was open enough for Wire to lift the protocol wholesale).

The IETF is bad at cryptography. Your default position should be distrust of IETF crypto standards.

Can Signal contribute to the IETF design, discussion and documentation?

Since the underlying standard is really a political maneuver meant to thwart Signal, this seems unlikely.

(I like my source on this, but can't share it; I expect to be able to this year, though. In the meantime:

0e49002152a374d9c11251cf856a7ccf25ef9bd0db54c3e97bef2a4109dad4f0)

Isn't Facebook (Messenger and Whatsapp) already using Signal Protocol at scale?

Yes.

Why would Facebook by trying to thwart the open Signal protocol that they are already using? In a standards discussion like IETF, wouldn't they be more likely to specify Signal interoperability (i.e. Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp interoperability) as a requirement on any proposed standard? That would be good for Signal.

1. Facebook is a big place.

2. Facebook's interests in the standard are not necessarily what drives the standard; Facebook can just be along for the ride.

I think what's going to happen with this is what happens to all de novo IETF designs other than TLS, the one that the market requires actually work: it's going to fail. That's also the outcome that I'm hoping for.

In the meantime, if Millican wants to get together with Katriel Cohn-Gordon and do a Facebook-only ART protocol design for Facebook Messenger, with an eye towards replacing Signal Protocol in WhatsApp, that would be a great development. So would a Cisco-only ART messenger, or maybe even a Mozilla ART messenger (though Mozilla's motives are the ones I trust least here).

What does not make sense is for a protocol whose service model we barely understand even in theory to be designed from scratch in an open standards group. The IETF motto used to be "loose consensus and working code". Now it's "take an RWC paper, add the P-curves to it, and use it to fuck over the most successful secure messaging protocol".

We shouldn't be cheerleading this. It's capture, not progress.

> wish we had a messaging app with a market as large as WhatsApp's, UX as good as Telegram, security as good as Signal, run by an organization like Mozilla.

This would be ideal. Until then I still feel Signal gives me the best balance and I haven't had too much issue with friend/family adoption.

I feel like Firechat could take this role if they gained a large market share.

https://www.opengarden.com/firechat.html

Compared to e.g. KakaoTalk the UX is fairly poor

Edit: To perhaps stem the downvote tide: The impulse for my comment is that OP probably hasn't tried it, even though Telegram and KakaoTalk have similarly sized userbases and the emotion-inspiring stuff in the Telegram client app is mostly a timid knock-off of better Asian messengers (the Telegram team faces the challenging task of slowly acclimatizing Western audiences to features it knows will eventually be popular, by example). The West-centricness of such statements is grating to me.

The reason my comment doesn't substantiate the UX difference further is that I can't think of a single feature or screen that isn't better realized in Kakao's Android app than in Telegram's. General performance, group management, galleries / archive retrieval stuff, cross sharing, search, stickers, etc. It's available with a full English UI, go have a look. (From a privacy/security/freedom POV Kakao is terrible, though.)

Your last paragraph is a tall order. Too many conflicting priorities.

The only way I could see this happening is some open/decentralized chat protocol takes hold and private companies build nice UX on top of that.

Sadly, strong UX is not the strength of opensource/foundation driven development. (For the love of god someone please prove me wrong on this)

The impression of a walled garden hardens for me when it comes to interoperability. For instance, instead of providing gateways to standards such as XMPP or IRC, as a developer I am confronted with an absurdely complex API. It is rich and versatile, but impossible to implement a client in a couple of hours (not talking about their bot API, this is not a full client).

Even worse, one can only participate in their network with a mobile phone number. In my country, land line numbers do not even work.

With their recent release of tdlib, implementing clients should be easier than before. Still a pain, but easier.

Yes – if Mozilla owned a "WeChat of the West", that would make me very happy.

It is possible to embed posts from public channels in web pages. In fact, if your group is public, you can even embed conversations in your web page. Try the announcement link here https://t.me/telegram/83

Well I don't put much hope in Mozilla lately - they really seem to have lost direction. We had Persona and they dropped it far too quickly. Then they tried to offload Thunderbird.

To my mind Mozilla should have had, and kept, a set: Firefox, Thunderbird, instant messaging, Persona. Not forgetting Lightning etc.

>it should be possible to link to their content from the outside

But you can link the content, no? (example: https://t.me/dailyeng/1402). You see the full post, you don't have to donwload Telegram for this.

You can't see the list of posts. I had in mind something a la Twitter.

But you're right. I'll edit above.

> I wish we had a messaging app with a market as large as WhatsApp's, UX as good as Telegram, security as good as Signal, run by an organization like Mozilla.

I would donate some money for such an initiative if it also had strong privacy protections from the start.

Agreed. I love the UX. And it's also a less evil choice compared to many US centric alternatives.

Edit:// Evil might is the wrong word. But if you have the choice between a self enforced world police with a history of using information against people in foreign countries and a country that is mostly involved in their own shit and area the choice is IMO easy

>a country that is mostly involved in their own shit and area

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_military_intervention_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Georgian_War

By using telegram you are directly supporting the Kremlin.

You realize there is a difference between reclaiming land and claiming or fighting wars in foreign land.

Not that i think any of both is right. But only one directly changes _my_ life.

Ah, so Signal devs are aligned with the US government in the same manner that the Durovs are working for the Russian government?

See, for me it makes sense to link Telegram to Kremlin, as it's very obviously ran by Putins buddies.

If Signal devs are in a similar situation, it's certainly not nearly as obvious as with Telegram.

> See, for me it makes sense to link Telegram to Kremlin, as it's very obviously ran by Putins buddies.

Do you have any reason to believe this, other than the guy's nationality?

Durov was the founder of VK (Russia's version of Facebook). He was approached by the Krelim and "forced" to sell his stake (nice social network you have there, it would be a shame if something happened to it)

https://www.theverge.com/2014/1/31/5363990/how-putins-cronie...

I would imagine if there's someone who hates the Kremlin, it's Durov.

So I'll ask again, do you have any evidence to support your claim? Because if it all hinges on his nationality you're sounding a bit biggoted.

>Because if it all hinges on his nationality you're sounding a bit biggoted.

lol.

>Do you have any reason to believe this, other than the guy's nationality?

It seems bigoted to assume that his nationality would have anything to do with this.

Durovs have spent years cultivating this lie of them having been forced to "exile" from Russia, despite being a regular sight in Saint Petersburg.

Pavel even went as far as assaulting someone and taking their phone after he was spotted in a local mall. https://lenta.ru/news/2017/03/20/durov/

>https://www.theverge.com/2014/1/31/5363990/how-putins-cronie...

>I would imagine if there's someone who hates the Kremlin, it's Durov.

Well then you probably wouldn't imagine that Telegram is being developed in the VKontakte HQ building, but nonetheless that is the case.

https://tjournal.ru/52954-durov-back-in-ussr

Maybe Durovs genuinely do hate the Kremlin, maybe not. It doesn't make a difference. They've spent years cultivating their false image as dissidents while remaining extremely close to Putin, whether or not they do so by choice makes little difference.

Its a day later but i did some reading.

Essentially:

> By using Facebook/Whatsapp you are directly supporting the U.S.

is just as valid isnt it? Because you know Zuck has been to the White House and has followed requests by U.S. gov agencies.

Thats my whole point. If you have to choose between 2 evils, you choose that that is less threatening to yourself.

PS: I dont compare with Signal as they have neither spread nor common features.

>See, for me it makes sense to link Telegram to Kremlin, as it's very obviously ran by Putins buddies.

Pavel literally fled the country and bought himself a different citizenship only to be best Putin buddy, yeah.

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