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Comment by tamimio | Hacker News Reader

It’s not encrypted by default, and even if it were encrypted, you should never trust any connected device with anything important. That being said, Telegram is hands down the best communication platform right now. It is feature-rich, with features implemented years ago that are only now being added to other platforms. It has normal chatting/video calls, groups, channels, and unlimited storage in theory, all for free. I just hope it doesn’t go downhill after what happened these last days because there’s no proper replacement that fulfills all Telegram features at once.

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What's in Telegram that you don't see in Signal? Honest question, I only use Signal rather than Telegram.

People.

Signal has probably the worst UX of any messaging app. It also used to require sharing phone numbers to add contacts, which imo is already a privacy violation.

Telegram is fast, responsive, gets frequent updates, has great group chat, tons of animated emojis, works flawlessly on all desktop and mobile platforms, has great support for media, bots, and a great API, allows edits and deleting messages for all users, and I really like the sync despite it not being e2e.

> allows edits and deleting messages for all users

And it has those little features like masked text and what not, features wise, telegram is just the best. I didn’t use Signal for a long time, you can’t edit the messages there!?

Yes, you can.

Yeah you can?

Signal also allows edits and deletions.

I haven't used Signal in a while, so I probably misremember some of what it supported. I just looked it up though and Signal's delete feature seems to leave a "This message was deleted" placeholder like what Facebook Messenger does, which looks a bit annoying to me (https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360050426432-De...). Telegram just directly removes the message for everyone.

But with the benefit that it prevents situations where responses to the deleted message appear to have a completely different context and meaning.

the "message was deleted" can also be deleted, leaving nothing. :)

You’re also not stuck with the official client and all of its decisions like with Signal. In addition to the official Qt and Swift/Cocoa Telegram clients, you can find third party clients written in WinUI and GTK as well as a CLI client, which gives users the choice to use the one that fits their wants/needs best.

I use both on desktop for different people and the desktop Signal client doesn’t hold up well in comparison. In some ways it feels more clunky than the iMessage ancestor iChat did 20 years ago.

> Signal has probably the worst UX of any messaging app

Really? I don't see any real difference between the UX of WhatsApp and Signal for example. And they're really on-par feature wise.

The only things in your list that are not available on Signal are "tons of animated emojis" and "bots". Recently they also introduced usernames to keep your phone number private. And Signal have had all the other things for a few years now, and with actual security.

>It also used to require sharing phone numbers to add contacts

It no longer doesn't. It took them a while because you can't just slap features like that. It's not a string in a database like with Telegram.

Telegram has great UX because you can build things fast and easy when you don't have to give two shits about the security side of things. You can cover that part with grass-roots marketing department and volunteering shills.

Telegram consumes up to 50% of battery charge on iOS, with practically zero daily usage, all energy saving settings enabled, and a single followed channel, whether or not I force close the app or reinstall it. I gave up on trying to make it work, merely installing the fucking app ensures my phone is dead in the morning.

That sounds like a bug in your OS. Like, even if the app were doing something crazy, it shouldn’t eat that much memory.

That absolutely does not happen to me. I have it installed and don't use it (at all) and my battery life is fine.

I have group of 15 friends using it and it barely uses 2% of battery while using it. Either you are just spreading misinformation or you should check your phone for custom wires added by the bad guys.

13 people on iOSes, iPhones from 11s to 15 Pro; 2 Androids.

You can use Telegram Web.

> It also used to require sharing phone numbers to add contacts, which imo is already a privacy violation.

https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/

Signal doesn't require sharing of phone numbers

> Signal doesn't require sharing of phone numbers

It does require a phone number to create an account. That’s the reason I do not consider it being private because at least in Germany a phone number can only be activated by using a personal ID card which it is connected to.

Private and anonymous are two very different things

> Private and anonymous are two very different things

They’re going hand in hand as soon as there’s a data breach or a back door

With just 30 staff

Good desktop client.

User base, large groups (I think the max is 200k members), channels, bots to automate work, animated stickers, video messages (not the calls one), and video/voice calls within the group (not sure if Signal has that), file storage and file sharing, multiple devices without worrying about losing messages -and you might mention the security part and that’s ok, I want the accessibility, if I want security I will look somewhere else- among other features. Those are on top of my head.

This is one of those questions where it's hard to answer but it's obvious once you use it.

What's the difference between a fiat and a ferrari? What's the difference between CentOS and Linux Mint? What's the difference between a macdonalds and a michelin burger?

I have friends and groups on both platforms. On Signal, I'm basically just sending messages (and only unimportant one, like, when are we meeting. Sending media mostly sucks so I generally only have very dry chats on Signal).

Whereas on Telegram, I'm having fun. In fact it's so versatile, that my wife and I use it as a collaborative note-taking system, archiver, cvs, live shopping list, news app (currently browsing hackernews from telegram), etc. We basically have our whole life organised via Telegram. I lose count of all the features I use effortlessly on a daily basis, and only realise it when I find myself on another app. This is despite the fact that both Signal and whatsapp have since tried to copy some of these features, because they do so badly. A simple example that comes to mind: editing messages. It took years for whatsapp to be able to edit a message (I still remember the old asterisk etiquette to indicate you were issuing a correction to a previous message). Now you can, but it's horrible ux; I think you long press and then there's a button next to copy which opens a menu where you find a pencil which means edit, or sth like that. In telegram I don't even remember how you do it, because it's so intuitive that I don't have to.

Perhaps that's why I find the whole "Telegram encryption" discussion baffling to be honest. For me, it's just one of Telegram's many extra features you can use. You don't have to use it, but it's there if you want to. I don't feel like Telegram has ever tried to mislead its users that it's raison d'etre is for it to be a secret platform only useful if you're a terrorist (like the UK government seems to want to portray it recently).

I get the point about "encryption by default", but this doesn't come for free, there are usability sacrifices that come with it, and not everyone cares for it. Insisting that not having encryption by default marrs the whole app sounds similar to me saying not having a particular set of emojis set as the default marrs the whole app. It feels disingenuous somehow.

I second the point about the difference. Can’t tell why, but signal and whatsapp feel just awful ui/ux-wise. And that’s not a habit thing, I’ve used whatsapp before telegram (and still it was unideal). Telegram knows UX-fu and how to grow without being the only player on the board.

I think it's mainly Telegram's native feel (and it is native on every platform it supports afaik). It's even in little trivial things like the rubber band effect on Apple's platforms, then in how smooth the loading of missing stuff from the network is, and finally it's in the design: Telegram is slick.

All those little things combined and when you switch from Telegram to Signal or WhatsApp it feels like going a couple of decades back, or something like that.

Honestly I don't know how much I can trust Telegram and its founder Pavel Durov (I probably shouldn't), but in terms of the quality of software it's unmatched.

> Perhaps that's why I find the whole "Telegram encryption" discussion baffling to be honest. For me, it's just one of Telegram's many extra features you can use. You don't have to use it, but it's there if you want to. Well, as soon as you crate all e2ee chat most features are gone for this chat. It doesn’t even sync on multiple devices. And e2ee is not available for group chats.

It’s more like they implemented it to check a box …

Nothing wrong with "encryption? check" if the encryption part works as intended.

None of the typical criticism against Telegram is directed at whether this is the case or not; usually people start by assuming Telegram is something it doesn't claim to be (a super-secure encrypted-exclusive communications app), and then proceed to attack the scarecrow by pointing out that it's not encrypted-exclusive. Whereas Telegram just says it provides the ability to encrypt your chats if you want to, but otherwise it's more of a multiplatform social platform. It specifically does not state that its sole purpose and raison d'etre is that you, either as a private person or as a terrorist or whatnot, should feel safe and secure using this tool at all times and expect to be untraceable.

The point I'm making here is, if a box needed to be checked and they checked it (properly), then people ranting "ermagerd what about all the other checkboxes that you don't need but other system with different priorities and mission statements have" isn't really useful criticism against the project. Let alone suggesting Signal etc as an alternative, which is like suggesting a raspberry pi to someone wanting a macbook experience.

Honest question - is Linux Mint the Ferrari of linix?

It is to me :) (though obviously it depends what kind of user you are and what you're looking for in your OS).

As a 'personal' user (rather than sysadmin), I tried more distributions than I can count before settling on linux mint, both 'beginner friendly' and 'advanced (e.g. Slackware/Gentoo)'. Ever since I've discovered Linux Mint I've not looked at another distribution (except occasionally for 'shits and giggles' in at least a decade. I feel it is very respectful of its userbase and has exactly the right mix of user-friendliness and non-patronisingness that I would expect from an OS project.

Small example from the latest release: ubuntu suddenly decided to only provide its thunderbird package exclusively as a snap, so the mint team assigned a maintainer to preserve a mint-hosted .deb file on their own repo. While ubuntu has been moving to snaps and flatpaks, mint has listened to its user-based and allocated resources to 'undo' stupidities by ubuntu where they occur. And they've been wise enough to maintain a debian-based rolling-release alternative as a contingency.

Having said that, I have been using the XFCE variant exclusively over cinnamon, which I got used to when I had a line-up of severly underpowered laptops for years. So a lot of it is probably also habit by this point.

> Whereas on Telegram, I'm having fun

I guess I fail to see the need for having fun in a messaging app. Signal covers all my major requirements, Telegram, while fun, does not.

> What's in Telegram that you don't see in Signal?

The first feature that comes to mind for me is being able to use multiple devices. Signal only allows using it with one phone. If you add a second device, the first one stops working. You can use a computer and a phone, but not multiple phones. Telegram supports this without any issues. I still struggle to understand this limitation.

It’s easy for telegram to support this since it’s not e2ee. When you create a so called private chat on telegram, this chat is also only available on the device you created it on.

>It’s easy for telegram to support this since it’s not e2ee.

E2EE is not important to me. Continuity of chats and lack of friction in accessing them is important to me.

>When you create a so called private chat on telegram, this chat is also only available on the device you created it on.

Signal is able to do this with my phone and my computer. The one-phone limit seems arbitrary.

Polls

For me, that I can just do apt install telegram-desktop

Cross-device message history for me. I can go back to my very first message sent. Signal to this day sucks for message history.

The worst UX you can provide. Clumsy, slowly switching views, search worse than on WhatsApp, stickers like from 2005, no formatting, no bot API (of course there are few "hacked" ones implementations, but is it really the way?), margin and padding bloated UI.

# No smooth animations - that's makes Telegram stand out from everything else here, but maybe not everyone is happy when 6-core phones can deliver something more than 60fps in 2024...

That's what I remember and yes - mostly those are probably easy to fix UI/UX features/bugs, but even being open-source - they aren't.

Signal doesn't provide a web app, unlike Telegram.

Telegram is great for large groups. It's better to compare Telegram to Reddit than Signal.

Signal is excellent for tiny groups of known participants. I prefer it over anything else for this use case. The group permissions Signal introduced a few years ago are well suited for that purpose. I've recently started running small groups on Signal with about 100 participants who mostly know each other, but not tightly. The recent addition of phone number privacy makes this feasible.

Once you start moving up in scale you really need moderation tools, and Signal doesn't do so well there. When you have thousands of people and it's open to the public you need to moderate or else bad actors will cause your valuable contributors to leave. Basic permissions like having admins who can kick people out and restricting how new members can join only gets you so far.

The issue is that in Signal there is no group as far as the server is concerned: The state of the group exists only on client devices and is updated in a totally asynchronous manner. As a consequence it is more difficult for Signal to provide such features. For example, Signal currently has no means to temporarily mute users, to remove posts from all group members, easy bots to deal with spam, granting specific users special privileges like ability to pin messages, transferable group ownership as opposed to a flat "admin" privilege, etc.

Think about the consequences of Signal's async nature with no server state: What does it mean to kick someone out? An admin sends a group update message that tells other clients to stop including that user in future messages. Try this: Have a group member just delete Signal and then re-register. Send a message to the group. They're still in the group. You get an identity has changed message. These are really only actionable with people who you know... that is, in tiny groups.

And then, the biggest strengths of Signal, which are its end to end encryption and heroic attempts to avoid giving the server metadata, are less valuable in the context of a large public group: Anyone interested in surveilling the group can simply join it, so you have to assume you're being logged anyway. Signal lacks strong identities as a design choice, so in big groups it's harder to know who you're really talking to like you know that "Joe Example, founder of Foo Project" is @Foo1988 on Telegram and @FooOfficial on X and u/0xFooMan on Reddit.

As far as I see there was no criticism targeted at anything else than the encryption part.

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