where does Telegram fit in your opinion?
genuine question from someone oblivious to messaging advances in the last decade.
genuine question from someone oblivious to messaging advances in the last decade.
Cryptographers praise Signal because the protocol makes sense and because it's not run by someone as data-hungry as Meta or Alphabet (though I think it's hosted on AWS).
Threema is a good alternative if you want username/password, but has less users (probably since it's a paid app) and less neat security properties (not even forward secrecy).
I agree Signal is not perfect and has never played the Open Source game very well (even under Moxie reports from the community were largely ignored) and the MobileCoin move is weird. I also have not followed the direction the project has taken since Moxie left. However, the _entire_ code is open source (which iirc is not the case with Telegram) and the protocol makes sense (and has been extensively studied), and there is a lot of eyes on the development. I remember code changes that suggested a pivot to not using phone numbers as identifiers (i.e. maybe requiring them for registration but not showing it to everyone you talk to).
I wonder whether MLS will go anywhere and actual projects will adopt it. Last time I checked it did require consensus on message ordering, which seems to make it less well-suited for non-centralized protocols like Matrix, but we'll see.
Services like Signal, Whatsapp, Keybase, or iMessage that provide e2e encryption for all chats, group or otherwise, (albeit with differing levels of implementation security) have chosen to do so at the expense of things like mobility of chat history across devices and the ability to easily discover and join new group chats and instead focus on a less organized, more ad-hoc form of messaging that's a rather different use case than Telegram's.