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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

It shocks me that non-open-source or non-e2e-encrypted options are included in this list.

Listing Telegram (effectively not encrypted) in a list next to Signal/Threema makes no sense to me.

TBH Telegram makes the right kind of tradeoffs for me - I like having cloud based chat sync between devices way more than I care about someone reading my shopping discussions with my wife or my friend group chats.

And then if I need to make something private I can start a private chat.

And the interface is easy to sell to non-techies, especially compared to Signal.

This is all in theory anyway - it's entirely possible that Telegram sends everything to some government entity somewhere even for private chats - but frankly I don't care that much so I'll trust the claims and audits.

> And the interface is easy to sell to non-techies, especially compared to Signal.

Could you elaborate on this? I personally find that Signal's interface couldn't be simpler, and have on-boarded hundreds of "non-techies" without support or explanation beyond "download an app called Signal and message me on the same number, but on there".

> TBH Telegram makes the right kind of tradeoffs for me

Given those tradeoffs, Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp is probably a way better choice than Telegram.

>Could you elaborate on this? I personally find that Signal's interface couldn't be simpler, and have on-boarded hundreds of "non-techies" without support or explanation beyond "download an app called Signal and message me on the same number, but on there".

Telegram feels more polished and distinct, for example it has very nice animated emojis. Signal looks like programmer art and a random system SMS app - it's hard to convince people to use it, I started using Telegram with my wife just for the animojis and stuck with it because of a nice desktop app. I got my entire family and some friends on it eventually.

>Given those tradeoffs, Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp is probably a way better choice than Telegram.

I actually like Telegram as a chat app more than those two - Messenger is bloated garbage tied into Facebook which is another bloated garbage platform so I avoid those if I can.

WhatsApp doesn't do cloud sync well actually, my phone needs to be active for webapp to work and when I switched from iPhone to Android and back I would lose history between the two.

I would say non-techies won't even notice the difference between WA, Telegram or Signal. I'm not sure which differences you mean. PS: oops I found a difference: in Signal you need about 7 clicks to send a local picture.

>it's entirely possible that Telegram sends everything to some government entity somewhere even for private chats

No, private chats use end-to-end encryption, and unlike WhatsApp the Telegram client is open source so this can actually be verified.

Unless I spend time to look into who verified it and decide if I trust them - this doesn't mean much - for eg. the article above claims their crypto is criticised - since it's their own implementation it could be intentionally weakened for all I know, even with a review it's possible to sneak by a backdoor vulnerability - security projects with a lot more users had major flaws discovered well into the project lifetime (eg. OpenSSL heartbleed).

Telegram private chats are not end-to-end encrypted. They are opt-in, in the name of "secret chats". If that's not done, chats are stored on their cloud in plain view. While Signal can offer synced end-to-end encrypted messaging, I wonder why Telegram cannot. Probably comes with a few tradeoffs like slowness and loss of features?

I used to like Telegram for their cloud sync as well, but Signal does an equally nice job (at least for me!) in syncing my chats across all devices. The messages are end-to-end encrypted too, unlike Telegram. It has become the standard for me.

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