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Comment by bilal4hmed | Hacker News Reader

How many are left after whatsapp returned ?

The same thing happen when Signal took off, followed by 3 days of outage that to date has had no explanation. All those people joined and promptly returned to WhatsApp

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From my experience, many friends in Iran strongly prefer Telegram even though it is blocked there are WhatsApp (inexplicably, since they are nearly the same service) isn't. So there does seem to be some brand loyalty in the chat market besides for convenience.

I suspect in general their losses were far greater in chat than in Instagram. Most students in the US use both Insta and Snap already and just have some overlapping and some different content on each, so I don't think one being down for a day will seriously bug anyone enough to stop using it.

Telegram offers the absolute best user experience IMHO.

I would love to use Signal, but I can't really stand it.

Are they competitors? As far as I can tell, Telegram focuses on non-E2EE messaging and is more of an alternative to Facebook Messenger, Google Talk, etc. for non-private messaging.

That's fine, but its support for E2EE is incredibly limited compared to Signal (or even WhatsApp), which includes multi-device support, a fairly-functional encrypted backup method especially in the case of Signal, etc.

Multi device yes. The unlimited member functionality and seemless sync without having the phone turned on are the biggest pros. Also, in e2e the contents aren't revealed in notifications.

Assuming I'm interpreting your comment correctly, I'm not sure I understand. Telegram doesn't have the option to backup and restore E2EE chats, let alone sync between devices, unlike Signal and (beta) WhatsApp. It very much feels like an afterthought in Telegram with the focus remaining on usability, compared to the often privacy-first approach of Signal which can come at the cost of end-user functionality.

https://tsf.telegram.org/manuals/e2ee-simple

Usually i find Telegram side by side with Discord for communities groups.

> The same thing happen when Signal took off, followed by 3 days of outage that to date has had no explanation.

Wasn't it that Signal effectively DDoS'd themselves? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25803010

It was never officially acknowledged, just people guessing over git commits

The difference is that Telegram has better UX than Signal. Actually Telegram has even better UX than WhatsApp.

Signal did explain what happened. I can’t remember but there was something about the initial auth that got screwed up on Android and kept retrying. And the retries kind of ddos’ed themselves

People explained but it was never officially explained by Moxie or Signal with a write up of sorts.

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