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Comment by rurban | Hacker News Reader

> The company wants to ‘focus resources on those most widely used by our customers.’

I wanted to do the same last year, but interestingly nobody of my audience went off from X to mastodon, so I still have to post my film industry updates to X.

Similarily when WhatsApp changed its Terms of Use to be incompatible with german privacy laws (using whatsapp content for facebook profiling), I had to give up whatsapp as primary communication medium in the local club I'm leading. But nobody else went to Signal, so now we are back again with whatsapp. Nobody cares

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On the other hand NPR found that leaving twitter had no impact on traffic[0]. I'm sure the millions of accounts following NPR didn't move to other platforms, so that leave the conclusion that Twitter was never a great driver of traffic for certain platforms to begin with.

Of course I'm sure this depends on each accounts circumstances.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37848074

NPR found what we all know, people just read the headline very few actually click the article.

"No impact" doesn't seem quite accurate considering they lost more than half of their Twitter traffic. It did only account for a small part of their total traffic though so I understand what you mean.

With this said, it sounds like NPR had no idea why they used Twitter. My best news source is a paid service that summarizes every article in the headline. It gives them both money and tremendous power to set the narrative but few clicks. NPR instead measured their success in CTR which seems like a strange measurement for the genre, especially when you don't get your main funding from ads.

I think it’s just the start of the “the emperor has no clothes” iceberg that is social media. I actually think GP is on to something with their “nobody cares” bit, because if people aren’t going to follow you outside of X then they probably don’t really care about what you’re sharing. There is obviously a lot to be said about the large “community” but in many ways but if it’s just a lot of “talk” then where is the actual value in it? If “hits” don’t correlate to actual product sales then it’s just a waste of time, and how likely are you really to sell your product to people who won’t even bother following you outside of X?

> If “hits” don’t correlate to actual product sales

But that's kinda what I was targeting. I have friends that make a living by successfully funnelling their Twitter followers to Substack. What is a product sale for NPR? For some reason, NPR's KPI is measured by CTR for tweets like this:

"Disney's animated hit movie Moana is getting a live-action remake, the company announced Monday. The new version of the 2016 movie is under development, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who played the character Maui, said in a video."

Why would anyone click on that? It doesn't make much sense to me.

> My best news source is a paid service that summarizes every article in the headline.

Just out of interest, what is that?

> Nobody cares

That’s a mental shortcut. Social circle you decided to be in doesn’t care.

On the other hand I did research on WhatsApp vs. alternatives and decided to promote Telegram. Sure, it’s not that/very secure, but UX is on completely different level than Signal. It was much easier to transition people on aesthetics alone in comparison to Signal which has its own “quirks” (making sense from security standpoint but perceived as anti-features for casual user e.g. history transfer).

>Social circle you decided to be in doesn't care.

I didn't choose the family I was born into, lol

I took the phones of my parents and siblings to install Telegram on them myself ;) My brother and sister use it sporadically, but I still can send them messages knowing they will read them sooner or later. My parents are more proficient with it than me, now :).

If my kid or sibling took my phone and install ANYTHING on them, i would wipe reset the phone and never trust them ever again.

I'm sorry to hear that.

Yeah, do not touch my phone and do not install apps on it.

Sounds like you don't trust them already.

This was always the problem. Your social media environment and opsec too relies largely on your social graph that you have no control over. Maybe LLM based scraping/automation solve this mid-long term?

Moving to telegram doesn't make sense at all if you are worried about your privacy, it's not encrypted and they have access to all of your messages, a huge downgrade.

Element is already better than most other Messenger Frontends. Matrix is becomming incredibly sexy. Also Element is working on element-x android and ios that is using the Matrix Rust SDK.

Also matrix spaces is more elegant than telegram folders.

True but until element X is fully ready, it's not usable for the average user. Also, it's still not great on the desktop.

A private company having apparently access to all my messages (it's not true, there is encryption) is still somewhat better than meta AND the whole US government having access to my data

> it's not true, there is encryption

Who has the keys? What exactly is encrypted? 1-2-1 chats? Group chats? Attachments? Are metadata handed over? Dear Autumn12 don't just read the marketing material.

In a real example: Apple's Cloud has a copy of most users' data as (by f...g default) when you activate an iphone it enables them all. I remember the case with that terrorist (was it the Boston Marathon guy?) that Apple wouldn't hack the device but they handed everything they had on their cloud to FBI.

Op claimed it's not encrypted. Which again is simply wrong. Other than that you'll find details about their p2p encryption here https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end if you want.

I don't know what you want to say with your example, but there are dozens of examples where telegram did not give out data even thought they likely should have. It's definitely a more private choice to apple or meta

I meant not encrypted as in not E2EE, which is true. Telegram does so many stuff to avoid saying they have the keys.

> it's not true, there is encryption

Yes, but not by default, and it’s weird/custom and not properly peer-reviewed.

> somewhat better than meta AND the whole US government having access to my data

How do you know that that is the case for WhatsApp?

If one entity controls: the server, the protocol and all possible clients; then you are still trusting the intermediary.

Its not like its a significant difference honestly. I know people beat the E2EE drum and they definitely should: but that only makes sense if the clients are disconnected from the transport. IE: ensuring that collusion between them is less possible.

Though storing things on the server is something telegram then has to secure on your behalf, it does provide a tangible UX improvement.

There is still a significant difference between "the company could theoretically mitm your communications with some effort" and "tech support can read your logs for the lols". Telegram is cleartext and by 2023 standards complete ass.

I think you're still attributing more effort than is actually necessary to sideline your protection from encryption.

Telegram supports open source and third party clients, so if you wanted the benefits of E2EE with a popular chat network then that's a better way to go. Custom clients on the telegram network.

It is best is to use something like Element/Matrix though, for sure. But if you're trading UX for convenience then materially the difference really is a lot smaller than you imply.

Let's not forget that telegram does support e2ee. And having an open source client means that you can trust it actually being e2ee much more than you can with whatsapp.

Except that they are too cool to use peer-reviewed reasonable encryption protocols.

By switching their optional E2E encryption from their weird proprietary thing to the Signal protocol, Telegram could at least display some goodwill – but only making that the default would show that they actually care about their users privacy.

e2ee comes with severe usability limitations.

I'd be happy if it was available on desktop clients as well :D

It's very usable on WhatsApp and Signal – even on the desktop clients.

Last time I used whatsapp on desktop (admittedly a few years ago), the user experience was that I needed my phone around to unlock it every once in a while, because the desktop client was disconnecting every time the phone went into a deeper power save mode.

The desktop client requiring me to constantly have the mobile with me defeats the purpose.

It doesn't do that anymore, but I'm guessing that the way it's done now comes with a privacy cost.

Still... It's an excellent product. Default e2ee, notifications on partner key changes. The main thing I'd like from it would be an option to block me from sending messages until I reauthenticate the partner, or a colour coded system like threema that serves as a reminder that without authc you really don't know who you're chatting with.

> if you wanted the benefits of E2EE with a popular chat network then that's a better way to go. Custom clients on the telegram network.

We already had that with OTP over ICQ/MSN/AIM etc. in the early 2000s. I could use it with about all of 3 other people.

And why stop there? You can always message base64-encoded PGP messages back and forth. Problem solved!

Except that defaults matter.

I expect you do not use apple/google cloud to back up your photos and other data from your phone, right?

What does that have to do with encrypted messaging?

Also, both iMessage and WhatsApp support encrypted cloud backups.

You are correct

Meanwhile WhatsApp and Signal's privacy model ensures everyone you talk to has your phone number which means they have the ability to make your device buzz at any time of the day and night. It also excludes people who do not have a phone number.

On Telegram, I can be in rando messaging groups of people and have a username rather than a hard-to-change, legacy voice traffic routing number that's widely used for tracking.

The only improvement is if they could get rid of the requirement that you use a phone number to sign up for these services, which is a regression from AIM, MSN, ICQ, IRC and Jabber/XMPP.

> The only improvement is if they could get rid of the requirement that you use a phone number to sign up for these services, which is a regression from AIM, MSN, ICQ, IRC and Jabber/XMPP.

That would only lead to one thing: absurd amounts of spam.

Signal is working on that feature right now.

And as far as I know, Telegram still requires a phone number (or some crypto nonsense) as a primary identifier and for signups. They just allow you to hide that from your contacts.

Use matrix then

Yup, I do. It's a great place to talk to myself and nobody else.

A bunch of people I know who play video games are on Telegram. I'm pointing out that I can talk to them without sharing my phone number which I can't do on WhatsApp/Signal.

Not being stalked by weirdos is a higher priority for a lot of people than anything involving spooky Edward Snowden stuff involving the NSA, FSB, GCHQ, Mossad and Five Eyes etc.

> Moving to telegram doesn't make sense at all if you are worried about your privacy

Depends on the threat model. If you're being in opposition to Western governments, you can be relatively sure that Telegram will stick the finger to them and not cooperate beyond occasionally shutting down public channels that promote violent terrorism and thus garner media attention.

> nobody of my audience went off from X to mastodon

Including Slack. Who are moving off X. In most cases, another protocol—be it a status page or even an email—may be better.

Who didn't see this coming from a million miles away? Federated protocols are a disaster for the average user. (And yes - that ABSOLUTELY includes email).

They are only closing their automated status account. Slack still has thair main account on X, according to the article.

> interestingly nobody of my audience went off X to mastodon

Did you really expect otherwise? A niche platform only cared for by a niche of a niche of a community?

When X has 500million users and Mastodon 10million. 400m monthly daily users verses 100,000. Tens of millions of app downloads vs not even 250k total...

I just don't see it. Even just raw numbers and probabilities it would be unlikely

Mastodon has around 2 million monthly active users.

And then compare interesting discussions and engagement you have on this much smaller Fediverse already with your few-follower account. Xitter is broadcast-mostly influencer garbage network.

Basically a rounding error.

> but interestingly nobody of my audience went off from X to mastodon, so I still have to post my film industry updates to X.

There's lots of products which allow you to post to both at the same time. Unless you're posting to alternative networks, the next person will run into the exact same issue, and the one after that, and...

100%, and if you try to force it you just find that people are just more inactive and won't answer. So it's either prioritize your social life or digital privacy.

This should change with DMA.

They get a notification like with any other app and can answer. It's not like they need any extra hoops to talk to you.

I just removed WhatsApp long ago and honestly it's very rare that I meet anyone who doesn't have signal or telegram as alternative

Sure, but that means they will never initiate a conversation with you

yeah i know how you feel on the whatsapp/signal, I quite involved in a sports club of 400+ people and along with that and most of my friends couldn't get anyone to leave whatsapp behind, so still with it... After all the data scandals and leaks you'd think people would be beginning to care but no one does

I care, so you're already wrong. Seems like you don't care because you're not immediately getting the attention you're used to elsewhere.

> Similarily when WhatsApp changed its Terms of Use to be incompatible with german privacy laws (using whatsapp content for facebook profiling), I had to give up whatsapp as primary communication medium in the local club I'm leading.

Did they do that in Germany? The ToS didn't change in France precisely because it was incompatible with GDPR and previous EU rulings[1], and I thought their new ToS didn't apply to the EU at all.

1 - such as https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/pl/IP_17_...

be change you want to see in the world.

you don't care (enough).

Indeed, I haven't visited an X link in awhile, more and more of the things I follow are cropping up in other places - this person seems to have been defeated quite easily.

In social contexts you caring isn't enough, it's why the network effect is so strong and why the Digital Markets Act exists.

I did care enough. But the mastodon feedback was zero, and X as before. For Signal, even with an enormous amount of pressure only 1/1000 changed.

It's just that creepiness of the data cthulus is well hidden. But people care, they vote for strange figures to get rid of it all.

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