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Comment by aborsy | Hacker News Reader

Why not Signal? It’s the way to go as far as messaging apps are concerned.

Telegram is more of a social media platform than a messenger. It has public 'channels' - read-only blogs without likes and comments. The biggest Belarusian channel 'Nexta' has 2M+ subscribers.

Because Signal is shit for anything other than 1-1 communications. Group management is extremely cumbersome and large scale channels, while not impossible, require external assistance (with all the security implications).

Signal is definitely more secure than Telegram, but the latter has a far better user interface, API, and social ecosystem, which gives rise to massive networks effects that are simply not available in Signal.

They're working on V2 groups, AFAIK it's in internal beta right now.

That's actually encouraging to hear!

It was internal alpha but whatever:

https://community.signalusers.org/t/beta-feedback-for-the-up...

The community forums are a wonderful place to follow the development BTW.

Much appreciated!

My recollection (can someone verify?) is that Telegram continues to function in limited-connectivity environments, making it a good fit for situations where a state actor is limiting network access.

There isn't magic that hides list of server IP-addresses from state entities with access to clients source where it's listed https://github.com/zhukov/webogram/blob/c5fc5107cad2a476a03d....

and it works? Unlike signal in Belarus right now?

What do you have against Telegram? Do you have a competing app, or are you concerned about security?

Everybody (atleast on HN) knows it is not e2ee. They don't use it for security. They know Signal is more secure. Telegram has insane features.

I use Telegram for unlimited file sharing, pirating movies not available in my country, bots. nothing personal

I can confirm ;-)

Because the belarussian government doesn't have enough power over Telegram to force them to disclose messages, meaning that transport encryption is absolutely good enough for the protester's threat model.

Don't they both require handing over a mobile phone number to use them? This is what has always confused me (and turned me off) about these privacy-focussed messaging apps.

Sort of, there is pseudoanonimity layer in Telegram that doesn't show your phone number to others, so if you can be reasonably sure that Telegram isn't going to give you up to the police of your country - your privacy can be preserved. While Signal literally identifies contacts via phone numbers and there is no mass communication features anyway, so it's both less private and less useful for such purposes.

> Signal literally identifies contacts via phone numbers

that's so stupid.

why people here keeps arguing that Signal crypto is safer when its architecture is SO unsafe?

Their crypto is state of the art, but their ops sec threat model does not include “we’ll torture you or go to your mobile operator and their would cooperate fully”. So signal is good for USA, not so good for 3rd world countries. This people making decisions in Signal live in a different world then most of the people who need secure comms. Well telegram have us covered. Sadly, if you stop trusting Durov - you are screwed. Signal is much better in that regard.

"Sadly, if you stop trusting Durov - you are screwed"

Or if anyone hacks Telegram server, you're also screwed.

Because that removes the need of server to know your contact list?

Telegram knows who you are and who you talk to, they store your contact list. Signal knows who you are, but they don't store your contact list.

Also, Signal is already working on usernames. Your criticism is just silly.

Because they are NSA spooks?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpuRcmPnSTM

When I installed Telegram for the first time, people in my address book saw me and wrote me. How did that happen?

Because Telegram uses phone's contact list for contact discovery. There's nothing unusual about this. This how Signal, Riot, Threema, Wire and dozens and dozens of messengers work.

So just like Signal?

Why is that being brought up as difference?

Matrix has comprehensive encryption now and is decentralized.

The comprehensive encryption is still not something everyone was bumped into. There's still insecure rooms, there's still backwards compatibility with insecure rooms. There's still bots and bridges and all the possible things to break the E2EE. Matrix just isn't on par security-wise when compared to Signal. The freedom starts to matter once everything in Matrix ecosystem is always E2EE with no fallback options.

Matrix really does seem like the ideal future platform to build on, I've started poking around it and really like what I see. Does anyone with more experience want to chime in on what they've found using it?

It has the best protocol I'd say, but other than that everything else is worse.

All the clients suck, features are missing/buggy, nobody is sure if it is supposed to be a discord/slack or whataspp replacement, giving a half-ass implementation of both, and confusing to users security stuff(asks random users about their keys).

That being said, I still love the project and hope they sort out their UX problems.

I really like the idea of Matrix, but in practice I don't have anyone to use it with. At least with Signal the on-boarding experience is super low friction, so I can just tell someone "message me on Signal" and they'll figure it out.

Matrix on-boarding is more complicated and would probably require hand holding through which client and server to use.

I don't think matrix can scale to hundreds of thousands of users in one channel at the moment.

@nexta_live, the main channel for Belarusian protesters has well over 2 mln subscribers.

and federated, and way better for group chats, and actually cross-platform

They probably have higher priority concerns than bike shedding messaging apps.

Because it's down along with the rest of the internet. Because connection resilience is more important than encryption.

Connection resilience. You mean when Telegram's EU server had an issue last time, it was down from Ireland to Egypt to Israel to Finland :D That resilience?

I am talking about it's ability to resist attempts to block it's connection by the ISP. Why do you conflate it with reliability of their servers?

Signal seems to be more secure. I prefer it.

Telegram is really really well made ux wise though, scales effortlessly and is in use anyway for everything else in certain groups so it is easy to reach for.

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