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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

In terms of closed centralized services, I’d say Telegram is my top pick, followed by Signal. But I would take open source decentralized networks over them anyday, and my favorite is Freenet, or the much newer network, MaidSAFE because it is the most secure thing I have ever seen (but that’s not mainstream yet).

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Telegram is not encrypted E2E by default at all.

And the encryption they are offering is custom, which is always at least suspect.

I actually trust it more to not have backdoors. Signal is written by the same guys who sold to Facebook, and although both Moxie and Pavel are anarchists, I trust the guys who were actually ousted from their own country and yes, rolled their own encryption (with bounties to break it) rather than use an officially approved one

https://twitter.com/durov/status/872891017418113024?lang=en

https://telegra.ph/Why-Using-WhatsApp-Is-Dangerous-01-30-4

Besides - Moxie is kind of against decentralization, he thinks that by centralizing trust in a certain entity, things can be better. I am not convinced that such an approach leads to a better model for me to have encrypted communications:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21904469

I like that Signal started using SGX though. It’s not ideal (now I have to trust Intel instead) but at least if you’re going to be running some code on a centralized service instead of byzantine consensus, let me know you aren’t backdooring it:

https://medium.com/@maniacbolts/signal-increases-their-relia...

I don’t need it encrypted BY DEFAULT. If I want to encrypt something, I can. It also means the chats aren’t available on other devices and you lose other capabilities

> It also means the chats aren’t available on other devices

Not, it doesn't. You would just need to copy the private key to the other devices.

How to do it?

This is currently only a hypothetical possibility AFAIK.

I don't see the allure of Telegram over anything; can you elaborate?

it works very well on every device/os and can easily be extended

More user friendly

Crypto that I trust more than Signal

Far more documented and open (even though backend is not)

Supports many clients

How about Ricochet instant messenger or I2P?

Think Ricochet got replaced by cwtch.im correct? At least the binaries I can find of Ricochet are super stale.

https://www.ricochetrefresh.net/

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