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Comment by kylehotchkiss | Hacker News Reader

I hope this works for telegram! They were going to need to launch ads at some point and this transparent plan to get started seems like it considered the user base. It’s become my favorite messaging app and I enjoy the pace of innovation. I get it’s not end to end encrypted but that’s not what I am asking for with telegram - just a decent messaging app that makes it easy to remain anonymous (not sharing phone number), great group support, and not domiciled in the west.

I know the ads plan will expand (I could see ads in 1000+ person groups and not limited to only channels)

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I'll be waiting on the sidelines. Telegram has grown way beyond what is sustainable by just the founder's funding. It has also managed to avoid government scrutiny and any legal oversight by running behind a web of proxies and servers. While that has served it well for growth, it can't scale forever as infrastructure costs catch up.

My personal thesis has been to wait and watch as telegram is forced to either shut down or turn evil to raise enough money for their finances. They tried to stay away from fiat by launching <del>TRON</del> TON but that got shut down, and now they're asking for money in euros.

Once this ad program succeeds (it better do, telegram badly needs a revenue stream), it becomes a lynch-pin in telegram's model of success - their bank accounts are prone to seizure the next time a scandal blows up on telegram.

Edit: The ToS defines "Company" as "the legal entity which belongs to Telegram group of companies and has a right to enter the Agreement with the Advertiser for the Services". Sounds like they're extending the "hidden-hosting" to "hidden-shell-companies" as well. Would advertisers be okay entering an agreement with an unknown legal entity?

> They tried to stay away from fiat by launching TRON but that got shut down, and now they're asking for money in euros.

TON. Really not sure why the ended up shutting it down, but I wonder why they would not go directly with Bitcoin on Lightning instead of reinventing the wheel.

> Really not sure why the ended up shutting it down

They were sued by the SEC: https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-146

The project has actually re-launched independently under the name of FreeTON, and now EverScale: https://docs.tonalliance.org/

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ton-crystal/

Not really, this is a fork. Original ton.org is online.

Yes telegram is so much better than WA from a customer's point of view.

The best thing I like about it is that it's an instant setup on every phone and doesn't require the Google backup integration which can take an hour to restore. Also the fact I can run it on multiple devices simultaneously is also kind of a big deal. Their API is also pretty amazing tbh.

I wish all my friends were on tg instead of wa and i would uninstall the later in a heartbeat.

  > I wish all my friends were on tg

Just send them all a message that you prefer to be contacted on Telegram now. That works surprisingly well, so many people are on the fence waiting for somebody else to make the first move.

That's what I did, then deleted WA account. Worked fine. Everyone I cared about came over. It also lowered my noise.

What I think is interesting is that the barrier to entry to join a new messaging service like Telegram is very small. The barrier to leave WA is very high. So to ask people to join Telegram and continue to run WA is trivial for them.

Hopefully at least some of them will understand the technical details about Telegram's security models and decline.

Don’t worry, even if they know, they won’t care, because 99.999% of people just want to talk to their friends

So you expect them to care about your preferences, but you don't care about theirs? That seems pretty selfish.

I am not installing an application which collects my data and spoonfeds it to entities with the explicit intention of influencing my behavior. No matter what side benefit that app provides.

And yes, I prefer to not communicate with people who would make such demands of me.

Isn't that precisely what Telegram does? Unlike Facebook, they actually have all your data.

I trust Telegram with my data like I trust my wife with my credit card. So far Telegram, like the wife, has been responsible.

I trust Whatsapp with my data like I trust 409 internet princes with my credit card. Their reputation precedes them.

I wouldnt trust my wife but I trust Telegram

That's precisely how most people joined WhatsApp

Not all about Telegram is golden however.

At some point last year, amidst the skyrocketing popularity of the app and WhatsApp coming under heat for various reasons, someone at Telegram thought of a fantastic (read: user-hostile) way to "increase engagement" - Show a persistent panel on the home screen with the name of every contact on your phone who uses Telegram, in the hopes that you would click one of them and engage them in a conversation.

It's such a wild invasion of UI that it continues to blow my mind that it was greenlit. The panel cannot be disabled and lives right underneath your chat list where it has no business of appearing. They refused to remove it or at the very least, make it optional, and instead asked everyone to use their suggested workaround which, spoiler alert, isn't applicable for a large userbase [1]. I had to revoke "Contacts" permission to get rid of the panel.

This single change has made me quite bitter about the direction of Telegram.

[1]: https://bugs.telegram.org/c/1316

I didn't give it Contacts any permissions. Works fine.

Interesting, I've never seen that panel.

Is it possible that they pushed that updated only to certain regions ?

You likely have more than 10 chats, in which case the panel does not appear. This is mentioned in the thread I linked above.

Sorry, what's the problem there? I don't use Telegram, but it seems it's just putting that where otherwise would just be empty space?

> I get it’s not end to end encrypted but that’s not what I am asking for with telegram - just a decent messaging app that makes it easy to remain anonymous (not sharing phone number)...

Big thumbs here to TG: I don't use WhatsApp. Never installed it, never will. TG is not just about "not being FB": the UI is really cool and the synch between several devices (say phone and laptop) is flawless.

Now... You wrote "easy to remain anonymous" but AFAICT you cannot register a TG account without a phone number? Or can you now? As in: can you only download the desktop app and do all your messaging from you computer, without ever installing anything on your phone and without ever giving out a phone number for verification?

AFAIK you do have to use a phone number to sign up with Telegram, but you never need to expose it to other users. I assume that's the kind of anonymity that OP means.

That doesn't hide your identity from a government that wants to arrest you for unapproved speech.

If you're an LGBTQ user in many countries, you might want more anonymity than a "please don't show this to other users" button.

In theory one could use disposable sim cards, but they're easily traceable and even if you rotate the cards very frequently, it'd still be easy to pinpoint who and where you are. The logistics is also infeasible.

But I wouldn't trust TG on that area either. If a government really wants to, they can certainly exploit encryption flaws in the TG protocol and get you. Not as easy as tracing SIM cards, but definitely possible and within govs reach

The sync is so great, especially if you're trying to message with in-flight wifi. In-flight wifi usually only works on one device at a time which means you can't use Whatsapp from your iPad or laptop on the plane.

You do need a phone number to register (I use my google voice number), but you can select who can actually see it on your profile. When you join groups, it isn't exposing it to others unless you add them as contacts - and even then you can disable from sharing with those contacts.

I think they meant anonymous with respect to other users. With Telegram you can create a username and be contacted through that without revealing your phone number. As far as I know that's not possible with WhatsApp.

> not end to end encrypted but that’s not what I am asking for with telegram

Why not? Why allow any third party to collect data on you and store it for an unlimited time?

It has some convenience tradeoffs. E.g. I can read the same chat on phone and desktop without hiccups.

WhatsApp does that too now, even on the web.

Signal has a desktop client as well (no web one, unfortunately) – I also haven't seen any hiccups there.

Yes, this is 10 or 100 times more complicated to get right when using end-to-end encryption, but it's clearly doable, and Telegram has finally been proven wrong empirically about there being a dilemma of security vs. usability in messaging.

Yes, they still lead the field in usability, but the encrypted competition is past the hard cryptographic hurdles, allowing them to focus on the front end.

How good is WA/Signal message search?

Very good in my experience for WhatsApp.

In the new multi-device beta, desktop clients only sync about a year's worth of messages, though. Not sure if this will change in the final product.

Without limited options for backup and cross-device migration, I don't use Signal for anything too important, so search is less important.

Whatsapp UI and search are OK but if you have a very long chat history then simple things like jumping to a specific date are difficult. I end up guessing a medium-to-rare search term and using the search history to jump back.

I'd much prefer having control of the data with simple export to my own device for my own search/analysis, but none of these apps do it.

With Matrix you can even browse E2E history on a brand new device.

> WhatsApp does that too now, even on the web.

It just doesn’t work right. It’s good for typing with a keyboard, but other than that, it’s always lagging behind the phone, which has to be online.

Not anymore!

https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/download-and-installation/a...

I agree. Making a decent messaging app with privacy first, they need to make money somehow. I don't want them to go out of business. Though I hope, the ads are not right in your face like youtube does.

> privacy first

This is an unsubstantiated marketing claim, nothing else. It's sad to see it get repeated here, by and for a technical audience that really should know better.

First real ads that I see is everywhere. From my perspective it's too much of them. There need to be some frequency filter. And quality of those ads are very bad: casino, crypto channels. Some of those channels have less than 10k subscribers.

Consider the fact that to many people and especially advertisers that Telegram is primarily known for stuff like this: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/hope-not-hate-telegram-nazis

No reputable brand is going to want to touch this for a long time unless they clean up their service which they have been notoriously reluctant to do.

> I get it’s not end to end encrypted

Even E2E encryption is supported via the Secret Chat feature!

Telegram is pretty good.

Except that if you enable Secret Chat, a bunch of useful features are no longer available. For example, there's no Live Location possible if you're in a Secret Chat.

>not domiciled in the west

Its legal domicile is in the UK.

Aren't they the ones "jurisdiction shopping"/"domicile hopping" in a ridiculous game of cat and mouse with courts and authorities?

I much prefer the model of e.g. Signal: Just don't store any data of your users that is none of your business to begin with.

Yeah, they mention various (sub-)companies: Telegram UK Holdings Ltd in England, Telegram Group Inc in the British Virgin Islands and Telegram FZ-LLC in Dubai. Source: https://telegram.org/privacy

Looking elsewhere I can find mention of other companies and domicile hopping, including an American LLC.

The main one seems to be in the British Virgin Islands right now. I don't know how much that's separate from the UK or if the one in the UK being only a sub-company exempts it from surveillance, but it's not something I would rely on for sure.

I checked the UK Registrar of companies and all the companies seem dissolved.

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