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Comment by perardi | Hacker News Reader

I quite like Telegram, because I am apparently an old man at the age of 37, and I greatly prefer typing on my real physical keyboard, and not on my phone.

Telegram’s desktop client for Mac is great—it’s fast, it has feature parity with mobile clients, and it works. Messages get delivered and stay in sync, and I don’t need to somehow link my phone to my main machine via QR code to act as a gateway.

And if they introduced ads, with an option to pay a subscription to remove them? Here’s my…well, it’s Telegram, so here’s my cryptocurrency, I guess…but here’s my money.

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Telegram's clients are amazing (including the ones developed by the community, such as telega.el for Emacs). It is miles ahead of any other messenger in the UX department. Friends of mine who have (reluctantly, in some cases) tried it out quickly got stuck because of this single point.

The other thing it's got going for it is that its protocol is designed to work in low-bandwidth environments. Yeah, the protocol looks crazy - but it really does work. Imagine being on an underground train and only occasionally getting a few seconds of internet while passing a stop: Most messengers will at most start showing you a "Connecting ..." status, Telegram will do a full state sync (minus media files, of course) in the same time.

Telegram actually provides a fully featured C++ library you can just include - it has a pretty good API that does most of the complex things for you.

You just register callbacks for message lists / chat messages and notifications and you're all set.

This allows people to easily build full-featured clients for pretty much any platform and it makes it easy for everyone to keep up. Very smart platform design.

I'm very disappointed that something made to be more open like Signal completely failed in this aspect and has ended being a walled garden with poor quality clients.

Exactly, Signal creator is actively against 3rd party clients, because they use his infrastructure for free:

https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

The issue was branding, not bandwidth. There’re 3rd party clients:

https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android

No, not just branding. Read the message I linked to.

He explicitly says he doesn't want other clients to use their infra.

There is nothing, technically, that he can do to prevent third party clients. That's the same thing we did in the times of ICQ, AOL and MSN Messenger.

And there is an actual demand for features not provided by the official client, as stated by the amount of PRs contributed by non-Signal developers waiting in their GitHub repo, so people will continue to come with their own changes.

> There is nothing, technically, that he can do to prevent third party clients.

There are plenty of technical ways of detecting and blocking 3rd party clients (using both in-channel and side-channel, uh, signals); the only challenge is that it becomes a never-ending arms-race

and the clients are open source[0], so unless the close source it, the arms race is mostly in commit speed. :)

0: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/commits/master

Your link is a comment in 2016, but it’s 2021 now and there’re alternative clients using their infrastructure.

That’s my point, I’m sorry if you consider some wording five years ago is more relevant than what’s going on in present time.

Marlinspike in the linked comment is clearly also disapproving of the use of Signal's servers, so it's more than branding. Unless he's blessed 'MollyIM' explicitly since, there remains some risk it could be locked out at any time.

Yes, certainly, but Telegram states officially in their FAQ, that Durov’s fortune pays for their servers and now it seems there’re creditors too. Risk are everywhere, but an unofficial opinion doesn’t alters the fact that there’re third party clients that are promoted in the official community forums.

When the foundation co-founder & CEO of the development LLC says something – and the same thing, repeatedly, when the topic comes up – that's not as weak as an 'unofficial opinion'.

Of course, it could be reversed, and if you find any more-recent official welcomes from Signal for third-party clients to use its servers, I'd love references.

Are there any clients that will run on older versions of Android.

> Telegram's clients are amazing (including the ones developed by the community, such as telega.el for Emacs). It is miles ahead of any other messenger in the UX department.

Many of Telegram's official clients do not support Secret Chat, an issue which has been open for at least five years now. Their community picks up the slack.

Telega.el for Emacs is really cool with some very unique features.

https://github.com/zevlg/telega.el

Yes indeed I use it, it doesn't refute my statement.

Which ones don't? I used the Android client and telega, both of those do. I believe the iOS one does, too.

For sure: Linux.

I use telega on Linux, I guess this is the Qt-based desktop client?

The web client doesn't seem to support it, or at least I can't find it -- it's definitely not in the contact/profile screen like in the Android app.

That's because there is no support for multiple devices when you use secret chats.

That doesn't help if I just want to use one device and yet it still doesn't support secret chat.

“designed to work in low-bandwidth environments”

And I have actually experienced this, fairly frequently.

T-Mobile international roaming, at least on my provided corporate plan, is throttled to 128kbps. And Telegram works. Messages come through quickly, and it seems fairly smart about deferring media loading.

Yeah, I've been on occasionally shitty mobile networks in Africa for the last months and Telegram almost always works when other things don't. Experiencing this kind of connectivity for a while really is perspective-altering.

It's funny to see this towards the top of the comments here. Feels like not that long ago that Telegram updates would be downvotes on HackerNews because "you should never trust an app that designed their own encryption protocol."

This is not about encryption; I personally do not rely much on Telegram encryption being bulletproof.

It's about the right UX choices. Speed is a first-tier feature.

Telegram's UX is outstanding. Their E2E encryption (for "secret chats") is also questionable. Both are simultaneously true.

It depends on your needs.

I use Telegram like an IRC client, primarily participating in medium/large (20-200 user) group chats. In that sense, I don't really care about encryption because the channels are semi-public anyway. I just want whatever client gives me the best experience.

(On the other hand, if I were discussing sensitive topics, I'd probably pick something else.)

As the author of the parent comment…

…yes, I am aware Telegram does not use the absolute best practices, and at the very least, I imagine it can be cracked wide open by a nation-state intelligence agency.

Which is why, for my occasional super-secret must-be-hush-hush chats, I use other clients. For my day-to-day chats? Telegram. Because, to be privileged, to be flippant: the NSA is welcome to read my texts about what I’m buying at Target this afternoon.

Only if they work hard for it.

So weird

I personally would trust Telegram way more than even Signal for encryption.

Armchair sneering doesnt count for me

Why do you trust Telegram more than Signal?

It is built by an anarchist person who always refused to give out personal info of people to the point where his company was taken from him, and he ran away to France. He and his brother hired a ton of PhDs and made lots of paid challenges that no one could break their encryption. Their software is open sourced. The encryption Moxie Marlinspike uses was conveniently funded by the very US government agencies interested in breaking encryption.

https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/government-backed-privac...

https://twitter.com/durov/status/872891017418113024?s=21

Or if you want just a track record of the most RECENT bugs and backdoors that were exploited, look two months ago:

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2021/01/21/bugs-video-chat-a...

Find me the same for Telegram!

That tweet you linked is from the CEO of Telegram. Seems likely he wants to sow doubt about his competitors.

He is simply pointing out what others have as well - that using the crypto whose development was financed by the very people interested in breaking it, may not be that smart.

And is the story about from Jan about vulnerabilities in Signal that are absent in Telegram also planted by him? Want to see more incidents like that?

Signal is a US company and „do not roll your own crypto“ is an NSA meme. It translates to „only use crypto we probably know how to compromise“. That doesn’t mean the algorithm itself must be wrong, it could just be that the implementation has subtle bugs.

I would pay. I like Telegram too, for some reason I find myself liking it much more than WhatsApp, it feels snappier, web and desktop Telegram fells nice, and I don't need having my SmartPhone connected. Some time ago it was unthinkable due to network effects, but now many of my peers have Telegram too, even non-tech people.

WhatsApp doesn't let me login from two mobile devices. Can't use it from phone and tablet at the same. It's moronic. Telegram does, so...

You may not prefer it, but I don't think it's moronic; it was a design choice.

Whatsapp messages pass through their servers, but do not remain there. They are effectively sent from the sending device to the receiving device. This means that your messages reside on your device. When you use the desktop or web client, it's basically remote operating your phone.

This famously allowed Whatsapp to achieve massive scale with relatively few resources. [1]

Telegram messages reside on their servers. This allows for features such as those discussed above - multiple synchronized clients etc. The downside (aside from potential privacy concerns) is that it requires much larger amount of infrastructure, which presumably is one of the reasons they need $700 million.

[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-...

Whatsapp is pretty much proprietary xmpp, and xmpp handles multi-end to multi-end encryption graceously.

Not true. While WhatsApp may have started with xmpp / ejabberd at the beginning, it quickly diverted away from xmpp and has its own protocol

"This famously allowed Whatsapp to achieve massive scale with relatively few resources."

And now they've had a decade to address the issue.

It's also for security reasons.

Telegram is not E2E encrypted, WhatsApp is.

Telegram has the option of E2E encrypted messages, but that then works only from one phone/PC.

I don’t know how true that really is.

I have never used backup for WhatsApp but just the other day, out of the blue, every conversation from late 2017 to now that I had deleted popped back into my inbox.

Can’t explain that one easily

I wish my buddies who are hung up on Signal's E2E, and rightfully so, would at least try Telegram to see what they are missing. An E2E-default version of Telegram would put the final nails in Signal if you ask me. The decision to resist this, and they could implement it fairly beautifully for new devices like iMessage does, and the in-house MTProto protocol do seem kind of bizarre to me. But look how far it's taken them. A beautiful product.

Last I tried, telegram desktop on Linux didn't support e2e encrypted chats which is sad.

telegram desktop doesn't support e2e chats at all. it's a mobile only feature, and it doesn't sync between devices, even between phones.

Actually the Mac client supports it for some reason.

Signal user here, on iOS and using the Mac client. What am I missing?

- Seamless sync and backup

- 100x more people use it (I joined Signal years ago and I still have 1 actual conversation)

- The speed and the level of polish is unmatched

Of course for any serious Signal user it isn't an alternative but for many of us we only use it for postcard level anyway.

The problem there is I see no reason why Telegram doesn't just creep up to Facebook level intrusiveness.

They have the opportunity and a need for profit from a smaller advertising base.

I'd bet on it actually: in a few years we'll get a big fuss when Telegram reveals their new targeted advertising functionality...

We'll see. I'll leave if that happens.

For now Durov has kept his word for 7 years which is a whole lot longer than most. He was also clear from the start that he would, if necessary, find a non intrusive way to fund it and I feel he might be onto it.

Telegram just promises to behave though. Nothing enforces that.

WhatsApp was great too right up till Facebook bought it.

Anyone who buys Telegram is buying those servers and any messages you have stored on them.

Give Telegram or Matrix a try. They are both miles ahead of Signal and their teams on both sides actually seem to care about openness and usability.

Signal actively discourages third-party clients and doesn't accept community contributions in most cases(not that you'd actually want to, because their codebases are trash.) We can do better.

Matrix with bridges and your own server is quite a nice experience. Have a look at beeper: https://www.beeper.com/

Adding to this, Element is a great first Matrix client :) Not involved with it, just a very happy user.

https://element.io

I’ve been having an issue with E2E encryption in a Room on a self-hosted homeserver with ~10 users. It has to do with a user having multiple devices, I think. There’s an ongoing issue on GitHub [0]. It’s been the only downside to Element for us, so far. Other than that I’m happy with Matrix in general. Kind of a pain trying to troubleshoot decryption keys cross-country with my mom.

[0] https://github.com/vector-im/element-ios/issues/3393

I've found that issue can be solved by opening the same chat on your multiple devices at the same time, and it will send the E2E keys across.

I'm thinking this may be a messaging issue rather than a technical bug in some cases - `Unable to decrypt: The sender's device has not sent us the keys for this message` isn't very helpful.

I think while this isn't ideal, it's important to note (for those following along) that neither Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp support end-to-end encryption across desktop and mobile, history syncing to new devices, and a self hosted OSS server with multiple client apps.

I get why Signal's approach can be unpopular, but I don't understand the fascination with Telegram to be honest. Sure, the Android app is nice and fluid, but if I needed to use an app that is not e2e encrypted, I can use sms, or Facebook Messenger. Both have much wider adoption than Telegram.

Facebook Messenger is tied to Facebook. Which is necessarily tied to a real name identity. Ditto for SMS. Telegram on the other hand is only minimally connected to a phone number (only need to be used once), with no real name requirements. It offers sufficient anonymity while allowing public gatherings. And of course, Facebook is much more likely to cooperate with law enforcement & national security apparatus in any given country compared to Telegram.

Telegram now has 550 million users according to the article. Facebook Messenger has 1.3 billion users - more twice as many, but I won't call that a "much wider adoption".

> I can use sms, or Facebook Messenger

A large part of the world can't afford sending images (and even videos) via SMS.

And no, Facebook Messenger is not fluid, it's laggy as fuck.

Ability to send pictures without lossy compression, for one. Scheduled messages, group chats that preserve history (allowing one to rotate a phone number without losing access to history). Video calls that allow one to sync the video orientation. UX that is just better designed for the lay person (at least as far as my rudimentary a/b testing goes).

I’ll probably use whichever of them manages to allow me creating accounts and logging in without handing over my phone number.

> The decision to resist this […] and the in-house MTProto protocol do seem kind of bizarre to me

It's so bizarre indeed that it actually looks suspicious.

I'm honestly not sure what I'm missing when avoiding Telegram's non-private conversations. There's no desktop client support (unlike Signal which works on a desktop mostly seamlessly, including group video) and no option at all to backup and sync conversations between devices (unlike Signal's rather limited options).

If I was alright with Telegram's non-E2EE conversations, I would prefer WhatsApp for its wider adoption among my contact base.

What do you mean, no desktop client support? There's a fully featured desktop client for Telegram, and I've never had my desktop clients have their sqlite database corrupt itself.

I was trying to emphasize this further which is why I (ninja) edited in the second paragraph, but unfortunately it still isn't very obvious:

> when avoiding Telegram's non-private conversations

Kind of reads like "not sure what I'm missing by avoiding Telegram's non-private conversations" rather than the intended "taking a need for e2e as a given, I don't understand..."

It depends on which desktop client you're using.

Telegram's native Mac app (https://macos.telegram.org/) supports E2E-encrypted secret chats. Their cross platform Qt-based app (https://desktop.telegram.org/) does not support this feature.

Notably, the experience in a Telegram secret chat behaves differently then regular chats. A secret chat is tied to one device; you can't start a secret chat on your phone and pick it up on your tablet/desktop. There's also no server-side message history. Regular (non-secret) chats don't have these limitations.

Windows user here: secret chats are not supported on the desktop client at all.

That's my only gripe. The rest of the app is incredible, and absolutely the most delightful app I use every day. I cite it often as an example of a native app that beats the pants off of anything Electron-based, it's just so damn fast.

Just FYI - they're not supported in the official tdesktop client, but they are supposed in some third party ones, e.g. Unigram (if you're on Windows 10).

Having to QR-code into a web-app is quite a pain. I wish we didn't tie identities to a phone number like that. Messenger offers even more seamless "handoff" between form-factors, and that's why I find myself preferring it. It's easy for web state to go away, so I find myself having to log back in more often than I'd like. Plus, you can't log in when the phone's out of battery. I really like how snappy Telegram's mobile clients are. I like their stickers (probably the most fun of any chat app these days) and their link preview is quite good. So I'm rooting for them.

Only quibble I have with Telegram is their “find nearby” feature, it’s clearly abused by bad actors to funnel users to porn, so my family sees the whole app as not family friendly, bec they don’t want their tweens and teens with phones, that are mostly locked down, having this loophole. There no way to turn it off, or lock it behind parental control, so until then we’re still stuck on WhatsApp.

Good thing your family has no access to the internet, otherwise they might be exposed porn in google image search.

That’s a very reductive take... especially considering I stated that their internet access is pretty limited.

Just because most Americans or even most people in the world think the vileness of R-rated stuff is inevitable and harmless doesn’t make them right. It absolutely warps your view of humanity and imho many ppl today suffer from PTSD and don’t even realize it, just thinking their altered brain chemistry is a normal part of life. The trauma that a constant diet of porn and violence does to your brain is significant and damaging, whether consumed in a pub in 1700s Germany or a random website today.

Just deny location access to the app.

There won't be ads in 1-1 or groups.

There will be ads in channels that opt in (but those already have sponsored posts in some form already often, only manually inserted.)

So, some will say: how long before they change their terms again and the ui is plastered with ads?

We'll see. So far Durov has kept his words to a degree that few others have.

Edit: I also think Telegram has dropped the cryptocurrency-idea now.

As I understood it, there will be official ads in channels. Channels already do ads, but Telegram will step in to be an intermediary and take a cut. So from the end user perspective, nothing will change at all.

I love Desktop Telegram for many reasons but mostly because it's Open Source: https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop

> it has feature parity with mobile clients

There are no secret chats though.

The native macOS client (not the Qt port) does have secret chats. Or at least it used to. The only other platform besides Android and iOS.

its so crazy to me how big Telegram is to crypto, while there are people who only know about Telegram for giant conspiracy groups like Q-anon which I never run across

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