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Comment by tazjin | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

“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.

> 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.

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