Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

I don't use WhatsApp. I use Telegram almost always and am impressed with the speed of development and introduction of new features. In my limited trials with Wire and Signal, Telegram just blows them out of the water in features, reliability and speed. I know the background about its crypto being criticized, but until other apps catch up, I can't move to them. I've already spent a lot of capital to push a few people to use Telegram and haven't regretted that move from an user experience point of view.

On topic, I don't like these third party login systems much. Yes, they could provide better security compared to what smaller websites with less competent teams could, but associating a login with a provider also means I'm putting more eggs in one basket, so to speak. I also don't like the privacy implications, regardless of what Telegram states. It's sad that Mozilla Persona didn't take off and was shelved. It seemed like the best solution for this requirement.

> In my limited trials with Wire and Signal, Telegram just blows them out of the water in features, reliability and speed.

When you say features, which ones do you mean? Do you mean the user interface?

They certainly can't mean the security.

But comparing to e.g. Line or WeChat maybe the entire social & stickers & attending services thing. Signal is a pretty bare-bones chat client, and WhatsApp only slightly less so.

I personally love their bot API and the option to create custom stickers.

Although not "features", having an open API for writing clients for whatever platform I choose and the fact that their official clients are open source are also a big plus.

So you use an encrypted messenger, but your choice on encrypted messenger is influenced not by the quality of the crypto implementation but rather by the ability to add bots and custom stickers.

Why don't you just use Snapchat?

To be fair telegram is probably better than snapchat as a messenger.

In my case, these are some of them: 1.Many utility bots(including those admin bots to manage large groups if you have groups). Some examples of these bots are @gif @imdb @bing etc to instantly share gifs, movie ratings and images respectively. 2.No sharing of phone numbers with unknown people. Username handles will help to connect with anyone. Can chat with any of the members in the group (among 100000 people) without fearing lose of your number unless you chose to share. 3.Can download movies, songs, and videos from different channels and groups where they are shared. There are bots which can aggregate the search results from many channels to get them at one place. 4.I get those hackernews posts which gets more than 100 points in a channel. 5.Feed reader bots which get me feeds from my favourite websites. 6.Unlimited cloud storage. You could save movies,songs, pdfs,apps or anything you want there unless they don't exceed 1.5gb size per file. 7.Global search among the chats you have including groups, bots, channels and personal chats. 8. There are many niche groups or channels. Like programming, web development, crypto, reddit, regional, and not to mention porn too.

@daredevil_kohai has already mentioned several. What I most like about Telegram, though it does require a phone number to get started, is that it allows messaging anyone else without revealing one's phone number with the use of usernames. For me my phone number is a precious piece of information that I guard (despite the fact that I still get spam SMS and such) because it's increasingly used in many contexts as a unique person identifier for behavior profiling and surveillance (which I'm against). With Telegram, I do have to trust the platform on not leaking my number, but that's the extent of my worry.

Wire went two steps further and allows a) signing up with email addresses (without revealing phone number to Wire) and more recently b) multiple accounts for a person. Telegram has just started catching up on multiple accounts, but is still tied to a phone number.

A minor feature in Telegram that I use a lot is to edit my messages after sending them. No more re-typing messages with corrected typos prefixed with an asterisk. This either doesn't exist or came much later in other platforms I've listed in my comment (including WhatsApp).

This is anecdotal, sharing photos in Telegram means it gets through with the same resolution instead of being re-compressed and losing detail. I've heard from some others that re-compression happens on other platforms, but I don't recall on which ones right now.

Speed of message delivery, which is the most basic thing for any messaging platform. While Telegram has slowed down over time (it used to be almost instantaneous a few years ago), it still seems faster than the other platforms. This may just be my experience, since there are multiple factors that affect this.

Multi-platform and multi-device support with synced conversations across all of them. Telegram did it this way from the beginning. Wire is also similar, and better, since it has end-to-end encryption as well (but it doesn't store all conversations forever, and so newer devices will start with the most recent messages). Signal is way too behind in this department, and doesn't even allow carrying over received messages from one phone to a newer phone (this is true in iOS, and on Android it involves some work by the user). Signal actively prevents data from being backed up from the device!

Telegram's search, both within conversations and across conversations, is very fast and reliable.

Telegram allows chatting with oneself, which was renamed to Saved Messages a little while ago. I use it as a bookmarking feature to store interesting information. Combined with great search, it becomes a reference repository.

I'm sure I'm forgetting some other stuff, but the overall user experience is much better, right from application startup.

> I know the background about its crypto being criticized, but until other apps catch up, I can't move to them.

Security with fewer features is still useful; features without security are unusable.

Seriously, I can't sell this to others. Getting people to use another platform is extremely difficult due to network effects and laziness. As I said above, I spent a lot of my personal capital to move some people to Telegram and they haven't regretted it because of the features (which I also tell them about). Without richer features and without large marketing and advertising budgets, any of these will only be niche platforms.

I'm still waiting for Signal to come closer to being relevant, as per my expectations, before moving to it and pushing some others to move to it. But every time I look at a new release and compare, Telegram still seems about a year or more ahead.

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