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Comment by kome | Hacker News Reader

Also: Facebook works on every platform, while at Signal they have a strange cellphone fetish.

I would love to use Signal, but I have to use Telegram. The Telegram desktop app is awesome, and it doesn't need a cellphone.

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Signal has a desktop app nowadays and Telegram still requires a phone number to use.

While Signal's QR code pairing method is more awkward than Telegram's SMS one, it also prevents your account from getting hacked remotely in Iran by stealing your SMS messages: https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/49976/intelligence/tele...

But with Signal you still need a smartphone (i.e: very bad for privacy); while with telegram you don't. Also, with Telegram you can protect the account with a password, so you can use a burner phone, literally once, and then forget about it.

With Telegram you have no privacy - no one uses the e2ee (secret chats). Perhaps because the desktop client doesn't support the feature, and even if it did, secret chats wouldn't sync across devices.

it's not like the chats are in clear text, because they are not. They aren't encrypted e2e, but they are still encrypted.

Wire works on every platform (you don't need a cellphone to sign up, only e-mail), and they released their server code a while ago as well, and documentations on how to set it up is work in progress, which means that in the future (actually even now, but most people don't know how to set it up :P) you won't even have to rely on their servers, you can easily self-host one.

https://wire.com/en/download/

https://github.com/wireapp/wire-desktop

https://github.com/wireapp/wire-server

https://wire.com/en/security/

WhatsApp didn't work on every platform. Not really. The web interface is just a remote control for your phone.

good point.

Unlike telegram, signal supports e2e encryption on Linux, Mac, windows, Android and ios.

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