Comment by skrowl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skrowl | Hacker News Reader

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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!

And all of it is free no matter how large the herd of cattle grows right?

That narrative time and again has proved to be bullshit as things scale.

The larger the scale the larger the problems. No free lunch. Just a matter of time.

The only people who cling to the free scale narrative are people who personally benefit from it at the expense of everyone else.

https://t.me/durov/142 - Telegram is going to be monetized. Not on the current features though. For example, new paid stickers.

- instant search. I use tg for notes. It blazing fast. Just try to search in Skype for something to compare

but full text search of Telegram is still buggy, especially on CJK character:

https://superuser.com/questions/1374761/telegram-message-sea...

https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/issues/7096

https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/issues/7022

You'll need to build a bot to leverage elastic search to index text and provide search via a bot (I didn't built the whole thing but providing supporting infrastructure - a host for the guy who wrote the integration to do docker-compose style deployment), it works pretty well, only problem is that running elastic search requires at least 2GB of RAM -_-z

Well summed up. Telegram in general provides more features and best of breed UX (among messaging apps) for the majority.

I've been using Wire (also using Signal protocol) but does not require mobile number to register (email and a @username), so 1 to 1 and group chats are end-to-end encrypted, but the UI really sucks, only using it to transfer files and messaging with a specific group. Telegram is a balance between security/control and eas of use (adoption).

Signal is open source, Telegram isn't.

Signal is closed source, considering their server code hasn't been updated in 9 months yet changes have been made on production since then. [1] This is a really dishonest argument.

[1] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

Why hasn't this blown up everywhere? This is an egregious abuse of trust.

related from telegram author: https://t.me/durovschat/515221 (most his stuff is posted in telegram)

He is saying telegram clients are open-source AND verifiable so you can prove the app store is giving the pushed source.

And there is no point of open-sourcing the server because it doesn't allow you to prove more about the encryption and you can't prove the published source matches reality.

Obviously there are business/brand reasons as well, but I think Telegram is being honest here.

https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop

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