>lol Telegram
Did I miss something? what's wrong with telegram?
Did I miss something? what's wrong with telegram?
I maintain that someone should fork their codebase and bolt on a different backend (Signal, Matrix, whatever). It's right there and it's very, very good.
(Yes, I know it's not as simple as "bolt on a different backend". You know what I mean.)
Precisely because they don't spend so much effort for privacy. If your server can read all your messages, it's suddenly easier to provide great features. For instance, GMail can add your next hotel stay to your calendar automatically because it has access to your emails. That's great UX, but poor privacy.
I don't think Telegram's UX is tied to their permissive privacy, but they do seem to start with UX then do what's needed to support it. That does give them an edge. (Instagram has terrible privacy and actively mines information from chat and their UX is only passably good.)
My point is that it's generally harder to add those features in a privacy-preserving way. GMail couldn't do it if it couldn't read the content of the emails, period. It doesn't mean that there is no way to have nice features in a privacy-preserving way. I just said it's harder (sometimes impossible).
> I don't think Telegram's UX is tied to their permissive privacy
Not exclusively, but it is obviously a lot easier! Take a web client: if the server has access to the data, your client can just fetch it. If the server doesn't even know about the existence of the group, that's harder. Why do you think only the "secret chats" are E2EE in Telegram (and those don't support groups)?
> then do what's needed to support it
What do they do to support privacy? They don't have E2EE except in the secret chats! That hasn't changed in a decade!
> Instagram has terrible privacy and actively mines information from chat and their UX is only passably good
This keeps getting further from what I said :). Of course, it's possible to do worse than Telegram!
What on earth makes you think that the same engineers responsible for fluid and smooth UI/UX are the ones who’d ever influence the cryptography/privacy/security? Whether or not the chats are encrypted has zero to do with this.
Telegram has almost universally smooth scrolling, things work well across platforms, it’s native pretty much everywhere with low memory usage and mostly platform specific behaviors. Signal half asses this, and Element is… shoddy, at best, in comparison.
Making a smooth app isn't that hard. Inventing the cryptographic protocols to enable group management without server-side control, and proving their security is the hard part. Something Telegram's developers haven't the faintest idea of how to do.
My calls and texts used to be about me agreeing with my buddies when to hang out. They weren't nearly as private as me keeping in touch with buddies I rarely see IRL, online.
Also, there was a period of transition. Had I known the MSN messenger was completely unencrypted, in that everyone, not just Microsoft, could listen in, I might have felt my privacy violated. I sure as hell feel that in hindsight.
Also feels like missed opportunities :D.
No, dude. Come on - you really think that plays a role in how smooth a listview renders? Or whether it follows the correct tab focus order? I don't think I could be more clear about what I'm saying in my last comment. Their client side app is incredibly smooth and well built. Signal, Element, etc do not stack up.
> Making a smooth app isn't that hard.
Yes, it surprisingly is. Multiple chat apps in 2025 still fail at this.
> Inventing the cryptographic protocols to enable group management without server-side control, and proving their security is the hard part. Something Telegram's developers haven't the faintest idea of how to do.
This isn't even in the realm of what my point was.
That's not a feature. Stickers is a feature. Calls are a feature. Messages are a feature. Group chats are a feature. Group video calls are a feature. Link thumbnails are a feature. Forwarding messages is a feature.
>Their client side app is incredibly smooth and well built.
Yes, and the Trojan horse was so beautiful John Oliver would totally have hit on it.
Telegram UI is fine, I'll give you that. But it was created at the expense of designing the app private. Move fast yolo security isn't the justification.
They'd have to re-design the protocol from scratch to make it E2EE by default. Hell, you can't even get feature parity with secret chats. E.g., stickers do not work.
Signal might not have every bell and whistle like pinned messages, but when it eventually does, I will know it's done with proper privacy design.
I get that your point is to bore exclusively in the UI/UX with, admiring the forest from the trees. I'm saying the true beauty is with the ridiculously seamless and easy to use end-to-end encryption for everything Signal provides. Both phone app, and all desktop apps stay in sync, all 1:1 chats are E2EE and they are available on all platforms, unlike Telegram where they're limited to phone only. All group chats are E2EE and they're available on all platform, unlike Telegram that doesn't have E2EE for group chats. All chats are E2EE by default, unlike Telegram where no chat is E2EE.
Privacy and security are integral part of every feature. Everything else is a footgun. Arguing about how well the footgun is polished, doesn't make it any less of a footgun.
Signal has over time polished its secure features.
Telegram isn't in the process of securing it's polished turd of a protocol.
K, and? Every comment I've typed in this thread was surrounding how these things are implemented on the rendering layer. Whether or how those are encrypted is of no relation to my point. Badgering on about it more won't help you make a point.
> Signal might not have every bell and whistle like pinned messages, but when it eventually does, [...] > I'm saying the true beauty is with the ridiculously seamless and easy to use end-to-end encryption for everything Signal provides.
You seem to be under the impression that I am knocking Signal as a client, and I'm not. It is my primary messenger.
I just expect better of them and I do not believe for one moment that they couldn't have the UI/UX of Telegram. You are more than welcome to get all tied up in the crypto/privacy/security arguments - I have never argued those because they are (a) boringly obvious points and (b) not the fucking point of my comment chain.
Privacy and security have jack shit to do with how well an engineer implements rendering code, full stop. Telegram does it better and Signal/Element/etc need to do better.
It really depends. People discuss and communicate in public channels like IRC or Discord.
A large chunk of chatting is shitposting with anonymous identity.
Secure chat is only needed in some scenarios.
Did you even read my comment? I gave an example of how privacy directly impacts UX: GMail couldn't automatically add your events to your calendar if it could not read the content of your emails. I never talked about engineers, just the technical reality. If you don't have it, you can't read it. That seemed absolutely obvious to me: the best UX for a car would be one that doesn't need a source of energy, fits in my pockets and instantly teleports me anywhere I want. Go ask your engineers to make a car that allows that perfect UX, and see how they react.
Telegram has no E2EE except for the secret chats. Last time I checked, the secret chats were not synchronized between devices (i.e. the privacy has an obvious impact on the UX).
So no, I don't think it was an odd comment. It just feels like you don't know how it works technically.
I'm not even sure you read mine.
> It just feels like you don't know how it works technically.
You're disregarding what I've said and trying to have a different discussion. Please pay attention.
I am not discussing - nor do I consider it relevant to my point - privacy/security/etc contexts for Telegram's client side applications. Whether or not it's encrypted has zero to do with how smooth and well built a chat UI is. I am commenting on the frontend client side engineering and how Telegram has, hands down, the best implementation. Other apps need to catch up.
Ok, let's talk with concrete examples.
1. Say you open the Signal Desktop app: either you don't get the history of the messages, or you need to wait a fairly long time for them to arrive. With Telegram, you get the whole history immediately. Does that count as "smooth and unrelated to encryption" to you?
2. Say you send a message to a group on Telegram and on Signal/Element. On Telegram you see that the message was received noticeably faster than on the others. Does that count as "smooth and unrelated to encryption" to you?
3. Let's talk about GIFs and stickers: I'm sure Telegram has many more than e.g. Signal. Is that something you consider when you say Telegram has a better implementation and it is unrelated to the privacy concerns?
4. Telegram has bots that enable a lot of feature. Does that count?
You're telling me that for the stuff that isn't impacted by privacy concerns, Telegram is better. You seem very sure of that, and maybe that's right. But can you give concrete examples? Because until now, what I've been reading from you is that the UI/UX is not impacted by the privacy, and this is obviously wrong.
So let me ask this: would you agree that at least some UI/UX is impacted by the privacy concerns?
I also frankly don't even get what you're trying to say with point 1, because Signal loads messages instantly for me on Desktop. There's zero delay. The UI/UX of the scrolling and chat display is the problem.
> what I've been reading from you is that the UI/UX is not impacted by the privacy, and this is obviously wrong
It is not obviously wrong, and you've done nothing but attempt to loop the conversation back to some level of privacy/encryption/etc. These things do not matter in this conversation, full stop.
This (my thread, not the greater thread we're in) is a design and frontend implementation discussion, not a privacy/security discussion. If that is not clear to you, I don't know what to say anymore.
Well, you're answering to my thread, if we go like this. Where I said that one reason the UX is better in Telegram is that they don't care about privacy.
> Every single point that you want to try here has nothing to do with implementing a smooth scrolling, buttery UI/UX of a chat application.
Then we fundamentally disagree on what UX means. If it takes 2 days to receive a message because a human has to check that it is not spam, wouldn't you say that it's bad UX? Or is "scrolling" the only thing that you put into "UI/UX"? Do you actually know what UI/UX is?
> It is not obviously wrong, and you've done nothing but attempt to loop the conversation back to some level of privacy/encryption/etc.
Because that's my goddamn point from the beginning on. Privacy has an impact on UX (which means "user experience", by the way), period.
> If that is not clear to you, I don't know what to say anymore.
Same here. You don't seem to understand how privacy works technically, and you don't seem to understand what UI/UX means.
Except we were not going like that, because my thread is tangential to yours, and is all I was discussing.
> Because that's my goddamn point from the beginning on. Privacy has an impact on UX (which means "user experience", by the way), period.
No, it has no impact on whether or not the frontend interface is implemented well. "Virtualized Listviews 101, or how to implement them well" is a course you might consider taking.
> Same here. You don't seem to understand how privacy works technically, and you don't seem to understand what UI/UX means.
I've been pretty transparent with the point of my comment chain, and I've more than enough time on the implementation end of both of these topics. I've asked you repeatedly to stop going off on tangents unrelated to my point (i.e, rendering/frontend UI/etc). If you don't want to do so, that's fine - I certainly can't make you. I just don't need to waste the time arguing with you either.
Have a good day man.
The largest UX hit is when launching a client after it's been powered off for a while.
Telegram uses a symmetric session key. The client can with SINGLE AES-IGE decryption operation decrypt a massive packet containing every message received to every non-secret chat.
Signal uses Diffie-Hellman ratchet or SCIMP ratchet for every received message. That means there's X25519 and AES-CBC involved for every message. It is not, and will never be as fast as Telegram's insecure approach.
Thus the security design will absolutely affect the smoothness of the experience.
But Signal has blazing fast search function since it's local only. Telegram's search functionality freezes when you go over the server's chat history cache limit, to try to find years old posts.
>The UI/UX of the scrolling and chat display is the problem.
My desktop computer loads messages from my Signal history as fast as I can scroll my mouse.
My cheap smart phone loads messages from my Signal history as fast as I can swipe my fingers.
You can solve this with faster hardware.
I'm aware.
That said, if Signal is able to render mostly fine in their current desktop app, then I've no reason to believe that the speed of decrypting messages is a blocker to optimizing the UI layer. Glossy-ness is a factor in why people still use shit like Telegram. Signal has no blocker to implementing it.
This has been my entire point for pretty much every comment in this chain.
> My desktop computer loads messages from my Signal history as fast as I can scroll my mouse. > My cheap smart phone loads messages from my Signal history as fast as I can swipe my fingers. > You can solve this with faster hardware.
Or they could write better UI/UX/frontend-specific code. That layer isn't rocket science.
I sincerely hope you get there, but it's really hard to believe it at the moment. You're not even at feature parity with the app (Element vs Element X) you're replacing, and it's been out for a bit now.
i.e, you have significant user experience related features that keep people using Element (open graph previews, just to name one).
Meanwhile, Element One will support it shortly - the missing piece was MAS in production, which is now happening on matrix.org as per the OP.
Good service btw, but not the best from a privacy point of view.
The difference is Moxie isn't an amateur when it comes to cryptographic design. Wikipedia actually lists him as a cryptographer. The company has also employed an actual mathematician/cryptographer, Trevor Perrin.
Meanwhile, Telegram employed the CEO's brother who's a geometrician, which is not the same. You wouldn't hire a dentist to perform brain surgery even though both studied medicine.
Signal protocol's double ratchet is considered best practice by pretty much every competent cryptographer.
MTProto's main issues are not the teething issues of the yester-years. It's the fact every chat is sent to the server that can then read the messages. Telegram only has E2EE in internet debates about it's non-existent E2EE in practice.
> MTProto's main issues are not the teething issues of the yester-years. It's the fact every chat is sent to the server that can then read the messages. Telegram only has E2EE in internet debates about it's non-existent E2EE in practice.
Telegram does in fact have E2EE available in the form of Secret Chats, so that's just an incorrect statement from you.
Regardless, that wasn't what I was rebutting. If anyone is going to have a reasonable debate about Telegram's problems, at least do so reasonably, without resorting to well-worn and facile language invented by the person who has the most to gain from its use. Moxie is not at all innocent in any of this and I'm glad he's no longer involved with Signal, which I use every day.
But if you turn that on, other features turn off.
Its clear which is an actually private chat app. Defaults matter
Yes, but surely you realize a competent cryptographer wouldn't have implemented a backdoor looking design in the first place?
>Telegram does in fact have E2EE available in the form of Secret Chats, so that's just an incorrect statement from you.
No it's 100% correct and you just made my point for me.
1. Secret chats are not used by default, meaning most of users don't even know about it.
2. Secret chats are not available for group chats, not even small ones that have reasonable expectation for privacy.
3. Secret chats are not available for desktop chats, so you can not really use them seamlessly. I've spent six hours in front of my computer today. My phone is 30cm from my left hand. And I absolutely can't be arsed to pick it up every time my friend would send me a secret chat. Telegram's backdoor works exactly this way. They know I'm lazy. They make it my fault. Whereas with Signal, I can just alt-tab into the chats and reply there.
When I said Telegram only has E2EE in internet debates, that means people like you who love to point out it's technically there, but who also fail to understand what it takes for such feature to be even used on a daily basis.
>facile language invented by the person who has the most to gain from its use.
I've been criticizing Telegram for over a decade now. You trying to make it sound like it's Moxie who's the devil pulling all the strings and making my arguments for me, makes you look like an astroturfer employed by Telegram: https://tsf.telegram.org/
But you are being dishonest when you make an incorrect statement like this. Don't do that.
EDIT:
> makes you look like an astroturfer employed by Telegram: https://tsf.telegram.org/
I just read the linked page through: this is a request for volunteers to answer support questions for Telegram. How did you make the mental leap from a request for support volunteers to recruitment ad for astroturfers?
https://tsf.telegram.org/manuals/e2ee-simple#are-cloud-chats...
Talks about "unique distributed architecture" which I have debunked here
https://security.stackexchange.com/a/243172
When people parrot those lies, they're being useful idiots, which Russia has used for ages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot Durov is trained in information warfare and propaganda https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/03/technology/once-celebrate... He knows what he's doing.
What I asked you to do was to stop misrepresenting your own bizarre theories as fact and stop linking microblog posts and blog posts describing vulnerabilities of a completely rewritten protocol that have nothing to do with its current. That is dishonest and not a reasonable basis for any argument.
There are many ways of honestly portraying the problems of Telegram without resorting to false inventions, such as its immense problem of spam and ads and the fact that E2EE is not available across all devices and for group chats.
Linking to vulnerabilities in a protocol that hasn't been used for 8 years and misrepresenting that fact by omission is simply unethical.
Attack my arguments with reasonable, evidence-based arguments. Do not make personal attacks. That is in the HN rules.
You've presented falsehoods and unfounded conspiracy theories. I've called you out on them. I expect better from any human being on Hacker News and I will continue to, whatever the topic.
It's a good service and in some cases it can compete with Matrix, Signal, etc, but most direct chats and all groups have no privacy from Telegram (and anyone with access to their servers).
What's wrong with Telegram is the privacy story. It's not end-to-end encrypted, meaning that the server can read the content of your messages.
I hear that Telegram has a great UX, which makes it popular. But in terms of security... it's wanting.
It's a bit like if we analysed the E2EE guarantees of email over and over again. Every year, multitudes of people would publish a post explaining how email is "badly encrypted". Well, email is not E2EE, period. If you want E2EE, use a system that has E2EE.
1) Didn't say it was "Heavily encrypted" on its front page.
2) Didn't claim it was more private than WhatsApp which is always end-to-end encrypted with Signal protocol.
3) Didn't claim secret chats were somehow adequate.
They have f'd up in the past, and since they still employ the same incompetent nepo-hirings, they will continue to f up in the future.
Until they own their mistakes and E2EE everything, like they should have done in the first place, I will keep pointing out their incompetence, past and present.
You do not get to rewrite their history by telling people to shut up.
2. No group chat, even a small one between close friends is end-to-end encrypted.
3. Almost all desktop clients support no end-to-end encryption for 1:1 chats, meaning if you use the desktop client as part of your workflow, you're forced to drop using the end-to-end encrypted secret chats.
4. No cryptographers have ever worked in the company.
5. Horrible teething issues for the protocol:
Telegram hosted a cracking contest back in 2013. Everyone in the industry know they are bullshit, and this was discussed back in 2013 The Fallacy of Cracking Contests (1998) | Hacker News The tldr is, Moxie issued a counter challenge to Telegram where he presented the same goals with already broken primitives like MD5, to break the encryption. Telegram never proved the challenge could be won even under those conditions. (Also again, given that Telegram’s built in backdoor of “people are lazy” exists, the cracking contest was pointless. It doesn’t matter how good the encryption is if the adversary wears you down to hand over the keys).
http://unhandledexpression.com:8081/crypto/general/security/...
https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20160425091011/http://www.alexra...
https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/telegram-ecdh/
Also this:
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2024/08/25/telegram...