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Comment by s_dev | Hacker News Reader

As a reminder encrypted messages aren't easily searchable -- this is a simple trade off and not some dark pattern default.

Many Telegram users are away of it's quirks and how it operates differently to other IMs. Any tool will do damage in the hands of a bad workman.

A good way to infer Telegram is reliable is how many despotic tyrants and corrupt countries ban it.

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> As a reminder encrypted messages aren't easily searchable

That's false. Encrypted messages aren't searchable by third-parties. End-to-end encrypted messages are searchable by only the communicating parties regardless of where they're stored.

There's also the issue of mirroring by third-parties, but then we're talking about data in transit versus at rest, your backup methods, and so forth. (And I don't have time to get into that this morning.)

Building and maintaining a super fast searching index on a phone is not an easy task or even doable.

Telegram is used a lot in developing countries which are using phones made 3-7 years ago. Or phones that are made recently but with old chips and tech. Maintaining a search index across literally millions or billions (some groups are really really big) messages isn't something your phone can reasonably do.

I do wish telegram was e2ee for IMs, but for groups and super groups and channels I don't particularly care.

Assuming a message is 200 bytes or so, searching millions of messages is trivially doable on your phone (200 MB full text index). Billions is pushing it a bit, but you can work around on the app level (e.g. only index the last month in high traffic groups).

How do you handle message history? Do you download every single old message to your device? Who hosts these messages? How are the backups handled?

This is patently false. Local indexing and search will always outperform a network call

How are you indexing literally billions of messages on tiny mobile devices? What happens when you wipe your device and you want to have your chat history from before? How do you download all the previous chat messages? Who hosts the chat index?

I think it is very unlikely for a conversation to reach billions of messages. There are less than 32 million seconds in a year. So, Yoigo would need to send a message per seconds for decades to reach a billion.

Of course there are people who are much more popular than me, so it might be possible and I am not aware of it. :)

These are channels and groups with thousands of members.

https://t.me/durovschat Has 9500 members

https://t.me/swhkdemocracy Has 6000 members

https://t.me/linux_group Has 6000 members

https://t.me/PublicTestGroup Has 18000 members

There is no limit to joining these chats. These design decisions Telegram has picked has allowed the app to be quasi social media, rather than just IM. You can't index these and maintain chat history locally. You'd need way more bandwidth and energy and computational power than the average cellphone has.

All Signal clients have a search feature. Its about as easy to use as any other search tool. You can have end to end encryption on messaging and still have a client-side search feature.

> Many Telegram users are away of it's quirks and how it operates differently to other IMs

That's probably true, but a significant proportion of users are not, and do not realize that their chats are not encrypted. It's no surprise either, given that security is one of the core things that Telegram markets itself on -- unfairly so, in my opinion.

Source: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1560501/1/Abu-Salma%20...

>A good way to infer Telegram is reliable is how many despotic tyrants and corrupt countries ban it.

No, this only tells you that it's used en mass in those countries.

Not really since when it's banned people flock to other platforms.

E.g. Whatsapp has now taken the place of telegram in Iran but it's still not banned. Despite literally everyone using it.

Not really. Whatsapp is used by every person in Brazil, yet didn't get around a temporary ban [1]. Telegram gained about 1.5 Million people switching to telegram in a day. [2]

Whatsapp didn't win many users, even when Telegram was banned in Russia for months.

Telegram even worked in Belarus despite the whole internet shutting down there. [3]

[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/19/whatsapp-blocked-in-brazil...

[2] - https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/17/10386776/brazil-whatsapp...

[3] - https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-08-21/telegr...

Encrypted messages are searchable, it's just slower and has to happen on the client rather than the server.

>As a reminder encrypted messages aren't easily searchable

Pretty much what I said.

But they are easily searchable for the vast majority of scenarios. I've got years worth of message history on my $300 phone, and yet it has no problems returning search results nearly instantly.

encryption is only and-to-end, and searching on your device is easily doable

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