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Comment by hojjat12000 | Hacker News Reader

hojjat12000

To be fair. It's the best messaging app out there (feature-wise). It got banned in Iran because it was so influential in the protests. The channels are great for being up to date on the latest news and seeing what is happening in different cities. Groups are awesome for coordinating gatherings. It allows you to send huge files and documents. It has bots (which people used to get info on the current police location, or get VPN and proxy information). It's a great app. I wish the people behind it and its security was more transparent.

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The word ‘platform’ is being abused so much it does not mean anything today, but telegram is a platform indeed: 1. Bots allow you to develop automations and services inside 2. Channels allow publishers to have very easy to use blogs 3. Chats (with bots! Admin bots!) allow unlimited collaboration. Have you ever seen tens of thousands people in a chat? Public chats with anonymity protections?

It is a real platform.

Facebook is also filled with great features, but since they're not private we don't really consider those features but tasty baits for stealing our personal data. The question is, why should Telegram whose author is literally called the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia, be exempt and handed all that data. Of course he wants to make the app that gives him all that valuable data easy and fun to use. The real engineering starts when you want to achieve those fun features in a secure way -- people should ask WHY is it that it takes a bit of time from Signal developers to implement same features. That's precisely why. They're actual features with painstaking security design with clear rationale and security proofs, not a dish of spyware served with the side plate of bullshit that is damage control.

I guess it's because Durov attended the St. Petersburg military academy and studied propaganda and information warfware that makes him such a chef when it comes to the latter.

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