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Comment by Semaphor | Hacker News Reader

Most people I know are on Signal here (Germany), that includes older relatives.

Alas, for group conversations or bad connection situations (e.g. at a festival), everyone uses WA. Not sure why groups are always WA, but Signal (and actually any other messenger) sucks for bad connections.

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In my experience, Telegram excels at speed and bad connection situations.

and at unsecure communication. Their chats aren't e2ee by default, making it worse than Whatsapp. Also, videocalls in telegram are much worse compared to said messenger

I could have sworn WA isn't true e2e. As in it's encrypted over the wire, but the Meta servers decrypt the data during relay.

No, WhatsApp is truly e2e encrypted and uses the same Ratchet algorithm in Signal, IIRC. That's why tptacek and moxie were generally positive about it.

I think there's something about key rotation and a default setting where it doesn't notify you if the keys change, or something like that, at one point.

It's most likely e2e up until the moment LEO requests information on a particular user and then Meta updates your app to a trojaned version, that just APPEARS E2E.

It also heavily encourages you to “back up” your messages to them in an unencrypted manner. It will bug you literally every time you enter the app if you opt out of this “feature”.

Can’t confirm, it’s disabled for me, and it has never again asked me to. It also offers the option of encrypting my backups.

I guess that could be, I only know one person using it, though, a US American who also uses WA. Everyone else is Signal/WhatsApp, and maybe Threema.

For what it's worth I have a few Signal group chats going. We had our video call to talk to the owners (we're moving to the Netherlands from Ireland) over Signal and it worked well, but that was on a strong wifi connection

Didn't mean they don't exist, just that everyone creating groups in my circles uses Whatsapp, even if they otherwise use signal.

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