Telegram surpassed 500M active users. 25 mil new users in the last 3days

Telegram advantages over Signal:

- The ability to message someone with just your username / without revealing your phone number

- Easy to use from multiple devices (with full history the minute you install it on a new device)

- Great bot api

- Channels (like an rss feed, people may join to get info, but only the admins can post)

- Much larger groups

- Much larger per-file size limit when sending files

- Message scheduling

- Multiple accounts in the official client

- Polls / quizes

- Hashtags / stickers / animated stickers / etc

- Uses an encryption protocol (now in it's 2nd revision as of 3 years ago) that's been independently audited. (For comparison: Signal's encryption protocol was sponsored / paid for by the US Govt and is used by Facebook's WhatsApp. Telegram has been banned in multiple countries for refusing to turn over data to the govt as well)

Signal advantages over Telegram:

- E2E chats are the only type of chats offered.

TLDR - If you use mostly 1:1 chats and E2E is important to you, use Signal. If you use mostly group chats or want ease of use to get your friends / family on board, use Telegram. Both are open source and have had independent security audits, which is better than WhatsApp!

I would love to hear more about the bot api. What did you use for reference documentation? Is your code available online?

You can turn off notifications for your contacts joining Telegram in settings, but what’s annoying is that it will still create a new empty chat for the both of you and that cannot be disabled. It’s annoying to have to delete that chat manually for contacts I’d never even chat with (but are there for non-Telegram purposes).

The other solution for this is more of a nuclear approach where you disable contact sync and manage contacts in Telegram manually.

Do you know Signal-cli? I'm using it for all my Signal bots. https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli

First off: Correct. Off all the people trying to say this you are the first I've seen who has nailed it!

That said: Neither is mail.

Mail is still useful for a lot of things.

See also tptaceks take:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22371316

Which is why, as crazy as it may sound, telegram is genuinely less secure than WhatsApp for most people

You cannot really do this when telegram is available on many devices at the same time. I can use it on 5 devices or even more at the same time. A feature that WhatsApp does not offer. The data is on my phone and maybe (if the backup works for once) in google drive or iCloud.

Unsure if you’re a signal user and/or joking but I’ve had a steady stream of “X is on signal” messages the last week

Yes, Signal has also seen a large influx, so much so that the registration OTPs failed to deliver and Signal was working on that (with carriers) to sort it out. This was in the news a few days ago.

You can find it on Wikipedia as a start and read the founder’s (Pavel Durov’s) posts. The founder is in exile and is a citizen of St. Kitts & Nevis. The Telegram team is currently in Dubai, but has been in other locations before. Telegram was attempted to be banned in Russia a few years ago, but that failed terribly.

As a U.S. person, you have a lot more to worry about the three letter agencies there than about Telegram. And theoretically, you’d also have to worry about Signal being based out of the U.S.

And you would be smart not to. It's like people haven't learned from history and what happened to Facebook and WhatsApp. Moving to Telegram is simply moving to a new Facebook and hoping that they don't sell out or get compromised. All your data is stored by default on their servers and out of your control. Switching to Signal is the only real viable option going into 2021.

I guess this is a wave of WhatsUp-privacy-gate

No, the second half of the headline is "38% came from Asia, 27% from Europe, 21% from Latin America and 8% from MENA."

Some for sure, there have been rumors of Telegram groups starting up in the aftermath of Parler.

Almost none of my conservative friends used Parler. It really was a ghost town until Twitter banned President Trump and many signed up, hoping they could read posts from him there, but he was never on Parler.

As for the surge in encrypted messaging, yes, a lot of this is conservatives no longer willing to use Facebook and Twitter out of anger or fear. Of my conservative friends, I would say that at least half have moved to platforms like Wickr and Signal in the last week. They are using it to replace private Facebook Messenger chats.