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Comment by skerit | Hacker News Reader

> Most of my contacts made the switch, and I’m now at roughly 95% Signal for day-to-day conversations

Years ago, I set up a Matrix server. I got some people to migrate, but ultimately even my husband stopped using it because the UI and accessibility of all the applications was so poor (and he has very bad eyesight, so this was a dealbreaker)

Looking for another alternative, I ended up with Telegram. It was pretty open, easy to work with, had great UI and even a ton of funny stickers and emojis, so I got nearly all my friends to migrate. I did NOT go for Signal because I do not need end-to-end encryption all the time, and having all the same conversations available on my desktop as well as on my phone was important, and still is. Unfortunately, it's also run by a severe weirdo.

So yeah, I'm not really sure what to use now.

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Telegram is almost on the opposite end of the spectrum of Matrix & Signal so I wouldn’t really consider it an alternative.

How so? I genuinely don't know, despite casually using both.

Opposite end in terms of security. Telegram group chats have no E2EE, private messages aren't E2EE by default (you have to initiate it as a "secret" chat), and the encryption itself is home rolled.

Yup exactly, their home rolled encryption is problematic in and of itself, but the fact that it lacks E2EE means you shouldn’t even trust it in the first place.

Also opposite in terms of feature-richness.

Yep

They do publish https://telegram.org/blog/tdlib so couldn't a client author just do shared key encryption or something?

It also contains scam advertisement by now.

It,s quite clear what you never used it. UX wise it's one of the best clients and probably in the top 3 network-wise.

It's deeply insecure in most of the ways it is used.

But people don't care about security, that is obvious, they only care about UX

"only" is probably too strong here. But certainly UI/UX gets more weight in the decision making. Nevertheless, people often do things simply because other people are doing them (fad, fashion, in-group signalling) so just showing that enough people of the right stripe are doing it is often enough for a switch---I'm setting aside cases of making a switch then switching back.

I should have been clearer in my initial post, but I was referring to the security issues with telegram rather than the UI.

Their text explicitly acknowledges and waives away the security concerns for themselves.

On the Matrix accessibility side, Element X has improved loads over the years - https://element.io/blog/helping-to-get-everyone-in-their-ele... and https://element.io/blog/element-is-accessible-by-design/ etc.

Same, years ago, I set up a Matrix server, because it was advertised as the-new-XMPP (and I had done XMPP as a user, a long time before, and thought it had been quirky enough to warrant a successor protocol).

What I found with Matrix was the same terrible experience you describe, so I gave old XMPP a new look, and it's been great and continuously improving since. I sleep much better at night having my whole family using XMPP over a self-hosted ejabberd than I can using Matrix to talk with them (and synapse... Forget using synapse federated).

Recently came across FluffyChat (https://fluffy.chat/), which works on matrix and has funny stickers and emojis ;)

I've been using fluffychat for over a year. It's a nice interface and the client I used to convince less technical friends and family to give Matrix a try. Unfortunately major functionality like being able to send images becomes broken for long periods of time https://github.com/krille-chan/fluffychat/issues/2497

And for desktop apps, Cinny has custom emoji/sticker support. Would be nice if they played better with Element though.

Matrix has gotten to a complexity threshold that makes it near-impossible to have independent client/server implementations. Element is terrible, and many contenders are better in a way or another, but all lack some essential feature to turn them into practical alternatives.

There are several independent clients and servers. None of them support all features, not even synapse/element. But most keep improving steadily.

Signal supports desktop clients now, no?

Has done for years now, but its desktop support is far inferior to even Matrix chat clients. It works in a pinch but you have to lower your standards quite a lot to use it as a true alternative.

How are you framing this? It’s an Electron app so it exists but doesn’t integrate or perform great. Last I recall you still were required to provide a SIM to sign up & you needed an iOS or Android primary device to even use the desktop client. Can you use a standalone, fast desktop application like you can these other protocols? I would say no, so “support” has shades of gray to it.

This is how I got kicked off LINE… they had a Chromium app that I could use tethered to an app, they disabled support for LINE Lite (which had light/dark theme, E2EE, texting, voice/video calls, debatable trackers (Firebase), even stickers & sending a location @ 8MiB instead of 200MiB+ of the “heavy app”), I refused to “upgrade” as it was a downgrade to me, & since I was no longer registered with a “primary” device, I was booted from the network. I don’t think I want these mobile-duopoly-required apps to be my primary means of communication with folks—especially now that my primary phone isn’t Apple or Google (luckily Open Whisper lets WhisperFish exist).

> but doesn’t integrate or perform great.

Curious what you mean by this. I use the Signal Desktop app. It does what it's supposed to - send and receive messages in a timely way with no lag.

What poor performance are you seeing? What doesn't integrate?

Not GP but I've also had issues with the Signal Desktop app (installed from the Arch repos).

Its overall a little sluggish in general (like most Electron apps though, in fairness) and occasionally clicking and dragging images onto the application will cause it to freeze and eventually crash.

Plus, the general usability issues present in all variants of the signal client (like no easy way of restoring previous messages on a new device).

It's not terrible or anything, but it's just a solid 6/10 application. I personally wish they were more open to 3rd party clients, so I could have something that integrates with my desktop environment a little better and is snappier, like my Matrix clients.

I'll have to try clicking and dragging images onto the Signal application and see if I notice any difference. I usually actually click the button to add an attachment and then browse to it. I'm also on Win11 but I would hope the experience between OSs wouldn't be too drastically different.

I haven't used Signal desktop, but I find Electron apps in general to be very wasteful of system resources. Out of curiosity, I once compared an Electron-based chat app to a C++ alternative, and found that the former used about 25 times the RAM and generated more CPU load.

If GP's system resources are usually dedicated to other tasks, perhaps trying to run an Electron app on top of those led to resource contention, and poor performance. You wouldn't notice this if your hardware is overprovisioned for the things you do with it.

Can I use it without iOS and Android though?

No[1], but that wasn't what I was trying to get clarification on, or disputing for that matter.

1 - https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360008216551-In...

The Signal desktop app works fine, but you are right, it is still tied to a mobile account and a phone number. This is the main downside to Signal. I read that the Molly fork will support multiple accounts and a self hostable server. It probably won't be federated, but that is not really a problem when you can use multiple accounts and avoids a lot of headaches that come with federation.

Starts to sound like Signal isn’t the panacea some folks make it out to be :)

The other downside of the Desktop is that it requires periodic re-verification with the device you used to set it up. Desktop users are definitely second class citizens in the Signal ecosystem.

Telegram is very much more about IRC / Discord public chat rooms, rather than private group chats.

> Unfortunately, it's also run by a severe weirdo.

Marlinspike, Acton, or someone else? Why does this matter?

I think they're talking about Telegram for that part.

Yeah, Durov has some interesting takes on things and often not in a good way.

Over the years there's been a couple of apps that have tried to use email protocols as the backend for chat. I really wish those had gained popularity - there's a lot of overlap with messaging and email.

DeltaChat supposedly does that but I've never tried to interoperate it with email

Deltachat moved away from email, to their own protocol called chatmail

Isn’t that still email/SMTP under the hood - just optimised for fast delivery?

I don't think so, because they're not recommending it to be used with normal email accounts.

https://github.com/chatmail/core/blob/main/standards.md

Isn't that just email then? I mean I guess you could wrap a bubbly UI around it, but you're not getting around the latency and spam. Those seem like dealbreakers to me.

Latency isn’t that much of an issue. There might be greylisting for the initial message, but once the receiving server knows you, it’s pretty usable. And since everything is an email, you can “chat” with people that don’t use DeltaChat and they can reply using their normal email program. If you’re not using encryption, that is.

I do like that last part. Still, it would be difficult to have a contemporaneous conversation that way.

Telegram is the only service I join that as soon I did it so, I received SPAM, added to random groups and you name it.

It has to be the worst service out there, better stick with WhatsApp over Telegram period.

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