Say what you want about their security; they have the absolute best UX of any (primarily 1-on-1) messaging app, bar none.
Discord is a close second. But the quality and polish of telegram blows me away to this day.
And it’s lots of small features and details such as built in translation for messages in a foreign language, all the smooth animations, quick look and summaries of channels with aggregated links media etc, a super fast and responsive UI etc. And their stickers are actually ridiculously fun to play with (I used to not be into that, telegram converted me).
Just yesterday I accidentally found out that it’s possible to replace a picture you have sent, with a new or different one - I sent a photo, realised it would have been better cropped, and just edited the message as I normally would have.
And with all that it’s the only popular messenger that is actually easy to programmatically interact with. (And cheap! WhatsApp has a business offering and it’s ridiculously expensive)
That is precisely because they don't give a shit about security. While others like Whatsapp bother with e2ee and resulting device sync problems and inability to do server-side search, Telegram just stores everything on a server without (meaningful) encryption and boldly claims that 'it is the most secure messenger'. And, imagine that, users just believe that it is the most secure! (I did talk to MANY people who repeated this word for word, 'Telegram is the most secure and encrypted messenger app!', and yes, nobody of them used Secret chats, - it doesn't nicely sync, and nobody needs disappearing messages anyway.
Pretty much no one does any sort of identity verification anyway on any E2EE messaging system. So that means that the people running the servers can MITM if they feel like it to get the content. So in practice Telegram might be the best of something or another for all it matters. It's sort of a con. Yes our E2EE encryption app is perfectly secure assuming you do this thing that we know you won't bother with and will not be able to figure out anyway.
Study based on Signal, but applicable to pretty much all of them:
* https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/09...
People care about these features. Tell you what: I care about these features! And I also care about e2ee but I care more about all the things I can’t do with e2ee enabled.
When it matters, I enable secret chats. In the early weeks of the war I used secret chats a ton to organise things (and I echo your observation that most people don’t know about them).
But it doesn’t matter all the time.
Messenger also has e2ee secret chats; they’re awful and don’t have 1/10th the features telegram’s chats have. Hell even telegram’s secret chats are more featureful than WhatsApp chats (which are all e2ee)
But it does aggressively surface the P2P AES256 text chat feature, it does P2P AES256 encrypt voice and video by default (unless I'm badly mistaken), it's got the cute emoji key-verification affordance in voice and video, it does aggressively surface features for allowing people to contact you or not, which is the exact opposite of what a "growth-hacker" PM would do.
How it stands up to a serious security audit is beyond my pay-grade, Moxie seems to think it's weak-ish, and again, that makes it a bad choice if you have credible adversaries.
But I've worked in privacy-hostile settings. Telegram is not privacy-hostile.
If I were a dissident then given the choice between whatsapp and telegram, telegram wins
"Secret chats use end-to-end encryption, thanks to which we don't have any data to disclose.
To protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption, Telegram uses a distributed infrastructure. Cloud chat data is stored in multiple data centers around the globe that are controlled by different legal entities spread across different jurisdictions. The relevant decryption keys are split into parts and are never kept in the same place as the data they protect. As a result, several court orders from different jurisdictions are required to force us to give up any data." https://telegram.org/faq#q-do-you-process-data-requests
Telegram is more convenient by default and it can provide security for those who need it.
Well, it's not like other messengers excelled at UX before they introduced e2ee (which is not implemented very well either)
https://theoutline.com/post/2348/what-isn-t-telegram-saying-...
signal does marginally better.
real e2ee is possible with XMPP and Omemo iirc. but as others have pointed out that's not UXy enough to compete with Telegram for the mainsteam.
That's awesome. You have your pick of a massive variety of clients… one of them bound to fit your device setup like a glove. No lowest-common-denominator one-size-fits-all compromises like is so common with cross platform software these days.
As a result, you have a large set of very good clients for pretty much all platforms.
Imagine if the FLOSS darlings like Signal would make something as amazing as this - a library any plaform (from RPi, watches, etc.) to implement the best possible secure client that fits the user.
I didn't enjoy using it without a third party library [1].
Sending a single message is easy, but using the rest of telegram's features is "meh" when using pure API calls.
If you want to see a well designed API, you should take a look at FTX or Stripe. I love those two :)
hmmm ... could I participate fully on Telegram without ever installing the app anywhere ?
That would be compelling ...
Signal on the other hand seems to have failed to stick with the rest of the users and instead of trying to attract users from WhatsApp, not only they can't get backing up messages working properly, they instead were focused on introducing a scam cryptocurrency and wallet only usable on their app that no-one wants, and probably scared everyone off.
Perhaps Signal is only good for getting users to keep using WhatsApp or Telegram, since there are too many missing basic features that the end users keep complaining about when trying it out.
Let me introduce you to Matrix SDKs https://matrix.org/sdks/
I’m a proponent of matrix, but it’s absolutely not popular.
List of third-party tech in their desktop stack listed here:
> Discord is a close second. But the quality and polish of telegram blows me away to this day.
User experience is, well, subjective to the user. For tech savvy, primarily desktop users, Telegram and Discord can be great choices.
This is however probably not true for the majority of the population.
Apparently it is true for 700M people
Is "automatically sends your message text to google" supposed to be a plus?
Seriously, sometimes people are so cynical here it makes my blood boil. Give people some credit, ffs.
I can provide some answers. Telegram is my primary chat app.
- It offers you to simply share an alphanumeric handle and you can connect with anyone in the world. I can do a voice chat or normal chat really quickly and easily. It is the only famous truly Instant Messenger there is. And I can do it without sharing my name (unlike FB), email address, or phone number (unlike WApp).
- It is the only app where I add any woman to any group outside of family or other close-knit groups. When creepy dudes get women's cell numbers, it sometimes becomes very difficult for the women to handle. In Telegram, you can be part of large or large-ish groups without the women having to share phone numbers or real names. Blocking is really easy and tension-free.
- The video quality in chats is really high. In Android, only Google Duo came close.
- ONLY chat app in market with an excellent desktop app for Linux. Also Windows.
- I love their non-SJW-everything approach to allowed stickers. Emojis can only be PG-13 and "wholesome" (like banning gun emoji and replacing it with water gun- where I live no one owns guns - and guns are irrelevant to my politics and everyone else's). Telegram's stickers are really fun and creative.
- UI/UX is excellent. Really love chat themes and how I can edit them. Many components are customizable. Chat bubble colors, radii of rounded corners, etc.
- I like the fine-grained control over notifications from different chats (groups and persons).
- I like the lack of E2EE. I just like logging in and having access to all my chats. I don't have to be with the same device to be on the same chat.
- The simple yet effective image editor is nice. So is the text formatting with no fuss.
- I often use the auto image resize feature to downscale images.
- It is so seamless. It has replaced email when I want to transfer small files to my own devices.
- I am a selectively social person. It's good that even with 700 mn people, not many people are in it. The people with whom I don't want to interact more aren’t yet in Telegram. That's an appeal to me.
- Developing bots is a bliss. So easy and effective.
- SO helped a bunch of HS kids with their Bio study before a big test, the quiz feature was great. SO is not a technical person, and it was easy for her to set up a group, no phone numbers, create quizzes and so on. She loved it.
Telegram is not like that, channels with tons of videos and pictures continue to work smoothly.
Same. I've seen enough people get burned by losing messages because of the E2EE of WhatsApp to prefer to use Messenger and/or Telegram.
> - Developing bots is a bliss. So easy and effective.
Reason I am using Telegram more these days. I'm house hunting and needed a way for my scraping script to notify me and my partner about houses that the script finds: Telegram works perfectly for this. Just create a private chat group and send a HTTP request to Telegram.
I appreciate stuff like this too. I hate being treated like a child.
Sometimes I want to express "just shot me" with an emoticon, which a watergun ruins.
Has this changed? Last time I looked, you needed a phone number to sign up.
Telegram have your phone number. But you need not share it with anyone else to connect.
You can do that with E2EE as well. Proof: Element/Matrix which btw has excellent bot tooling and alphanumeric usernames as well...
It's got best-in-class applications with lovely animations. The server now governs reactions to specific messages. Stickers are fun, with premium stickers having additional animations.
From a technical perspective, they occupy least space; is "fast" and have a great ecosystem of third party clients. (I use "Owlgram") that offers additional UI elements without cluttering the experience. Tabbed chats are possible now; on Windows desktop, Unigram offers a stellar experience. Threat perceptions or "privacy concerns" are not in the lexicon of ordinary users like me and I am better off without Signal or WhatsApp. WhatsApp reminds me of what Telegram was 5 years back.
I think it is time to reconsider the association of Russia with the application. Criticism is fine, but much of it directed against Telegram appears biased and coloured. I don't work for Telegram, but am a happy user. I couldn't get my folks to understand XMPP or Matrix, or even get my colleagues to switch from any other competing application. This is fine by me.
Other finely grained privacy options (ability to control who can call you or add you to groups) are critical for my needs. Yes, it could be better, but no other application offers those controls. Besides, it's easy to chat with others using "usernames" without the hassle of handing out phone numbers.
Bravo!
I don't think a potential association with Russia is the main problem; what about E2EE by default, including for group chats? It's mind-boggling that it's 2022 and we still have to trust that whoever controls Telegram's servers doesn't abuse their powers and is diligent enough to protect them.
It's fine to celebrate Telegram for its features, but let's not pretend that this criticism is unwarranted.
Telegram feels like that group of people they warned you about. Sexual and political freedom. Be whatever you want others to see you like. Easy bot API, deep event based td-lib SDK, censorship bypass through MTProto proxies. Delete messages you sent before your crush sees them because you changed your mind. Send messages anonymously in a group if you have multiple admins. Forbid people from clicking your profile when your messages are forwarded. See the people who saw your messages in a group.
Telegram feels like the last place where as a European I’m not dealing with US-identity ideology, where I’m not dealing with copyright censorship, where everyone can speak up no matter how normal or insane.
In this moment I have 17 bots keeping me up to date with all the things happening, and telegram has essentially become the single stream of news and online social interactions for me.
Another one I wrote recently is a bot that I ported to Telegram from its original IRC incarnation: https://github.com/19h/minuteman-bot.
A bot I wrote that, when seeing a voice message, transcribes it using AssemblyAI and finally uses OpenAI GPT3 to summarise it: https://github.com/19h/transcriptbot. (Needs an api key for both)
Finally, a bot that monitors a tcp / http endpoint configured via a yaml file, can be configured to send alerts via SMS (via AWS SNS), Slack or Telegram: https://github.com/19h/zuse.
There's a bunch more but most of them are very specific to my needs.
I have the same issue with hey.com email provider, but they are too expensive too. I would love to have an email service provider for 2-3€/month, I'm not an hardcore email user so 8€ as they ask is too much for me. For 3€ and less "pro" features I would pay for the email service.
Same for Spotify, I don't listen much, I would prefer to pay only 4€ a month and have only 2 hours a month of listening without ads. But 10€ for listening for less than 2 hours is a lot. And I don't think I'm the only one like this.
The only company I know who is doing an affordable paid service is nextdns. For 2€ a month, I'm happy to pay for the service for having a DNS that filters trackers on all my devices.
Bitwarden paid is $10 per YEAR. I'm very happy to pay that. (Off-topic for discussion of Telegram though)
Their smallest webhosting package is 1,90 €/month and comes with your own domain. Configuration is done through their web-based interface, so no CLI fiddling and nothing.
I think that's a good deal, you could even run your own NextCloud on that package, if you want to. That way you get a CalDav server, so you can ditch Google Calendar and Contacts, if you want to.
I use it for all email forwards for my family: https://github.com/politician/barissat-infra
I want to buy it, I've been wanting to pay for this service for so long (it just feels so shady this whole time, it's gigabytes of (unencrypted) storage for free? WCPGW), I just can't figure out how to buy this.
Also their client apps are open source and have very good Linux support.
Signal sounds nice but it's a bit overbearing - backups are somewhere between difficult to impossible depending on the device, there is no web client, and it's only open source in that you can audit source or run your own independent chat network (3rd party clients on the official server are treated as hostile) not as in it's an open community. Despite all of this kind of stuff being defended for contrived hyper-secure hyper-private reasoning you can't send a chat without giving out your phone number and it's ridiculously easy to cause your verification number to change making people numb to all of the protection in the first place.
I did grab a Telegram account recently but only since Beeper supported it and I figured "why not" so I'm missing out on these features but I almost wonder if I would have even been so excited about new things like Beeper had I went Telegram originally.
Interestingly of all the chat apps WhatsApp and Telegram usage seemed to align heavily. Not sure if that was just a quirk of my friend group or a more general thing.
Do you happen to know why there is no Telegram client fork using Matrix protocol? it seems a pretty obvious thing to try given their advantage with UI and Matrix ecosystem's slow progress with friendly clients.
They’re both great, I plan to support both, they’re just for different things.
It has a lot of good security features too, including support of account passwords, requiring verification of new logins on another device, letting you see all of your login sessions on any device and log out any of them, private groups with detailed controls for join links, etc. A lot of crypto people get mad that it doesn't have E2E encryption outside of opt-in "secret chats", but I don't think that's all that important.
It's also completely free of most of the dark patterns that plague most social media sites. No reshuffling of message order, optimizing for outrage and engagement, or pushing new content to keep you scrolling. No randomly banning or locking accounts for no apparent reason.
I view this paid account thing as an excellent sign that their future plans for the app are for optimizing user satisfaction instead of trying to appeal more to advertisers. I plan to sign up as soon as I can, and hope it goes well and helps us move towards a future where our social platforms see the users as customers to be served, not products to optimize the sale of to advertisers who become their actual customers.
At my kid's previous school and at my kid's current school there are parents using Telegram. Sure WhatsApp is still the most common one but Telegram is not unheard off.
700 millions users is quite something.
Hardly a week goes by without Telegram telling me: "xxx joined Telegram". Last week I re-connected with a friend I hadn't talked to in a long time because I saw he just joined Telegram. Said hi to him, sent him a few pictures. I don't know who brought him to Telegram but he ended up using it and he's definitely not a techie.
At this rate in two years they'll have 1 billion users. Maybe it'll even snowball at some point.
This is competition to WhatsApp. 700 million users and growing is not nothing.
- Telegram vs. Whatsapp is clear, Whatsapp is off-limits due to it being owned by Zuckerberg & Co.
- Telegram vs. Signal is a bit less clear but the user experience offered by Telegram is superior to that of Signal which made it easy to get some of my more computer-averse family members to accept it. The fact that Telegram is easy to use across devices - native apps on mobile and PC, web, CLI, you name it - is a big plus here.
- Telegram vs. XMPP is a battle which has yet to be fought, I have an XMPP server standing by for the moment when Telegram crosses some line which makes me want to switch. With Conversations on Android the user experience is quite good so I consider this to be a serious contender.
- Telegram vs. XXX - see Telegram vs. Signal.
It's also great for piracy. There's a channel I'm in with links to updated Nintendo Switch modpacks as well as one for premium STL files.
Many Ukrainian and Russian primary sources are on Telegram only. Including government officials etc.
Not much in terms of restrictions to message size, or file size, or storage, or bandwidth.
You're not spoon-fed by some algorithm, no recommendations, you only see the channels that you manually joined/followed/subscribed to. Feels very old-school in that regard, but in the best possible way.
It has great desktop app support (I'm not much of a mobile user).
No ads, ever, anywhere.
If you just want to follow some content creators without much interaction, it's perfect (that being said, of course there's regular group chats too, I just don't use any of those).
I am very happy with it btw; much better than whatsapp.
On the other side, people who I know use it for finding all kinds of uncensored stuff in the groups there. It is not totally dark net style there, but the moderation is lax compared to the more visible social media.
LibreOffice user groups (e.g. Right-to-Left)
Some activism.
My ex-girlfriend.
Needless to say I will be paying for their premium services.
Is Dubai a place with good protection against government pressure?
Depends on the government :)
The German government has been throwing a temper tantrum and threatening to bad Telegram because Telegram doesn't respond to data requests from German police and spies.
that 'temper tantrum' is colloquially known as the rule of law, and Telegram has cooperated with the government concerning terrorism and child abuse as they should, or alternatively leave if they consider those rules unacceptable.
https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2022/06/telegram-has...
- people claiming MTProto (Telegram's custom protocol which is basically a worse TLS) makes it in any way more secure than pretty much any other system
- people saying moxie is just pushing MobileCoin. Maybe, I don't know, but what does that have to do with Signal? And even if Signal is a total scam, how does that make Telegram not terrible?
- people saying Signal is backdoored by <3letteragency>. We don't know if that's even possible. If it is, then probably so are almost all other e2e encrypted chat apps. And it's about 100x more plausible that Telegram is backdoored - it certainly could be.
The only slightly valid criticism I saw there is that you have to use your actual phone number with Signal. But that doesn't make Telegram any good.
I'd take Telegram over SMS, but I'd almost take SMS+rot13 over Telegram.
> Telegram messages are heavily encrypted and can self-destruct.
How is Joe Average supposed to understand that?
Adding to that, the secret chat encryption has always been Weird (capital W) and in one of the previous generations the server could actually MITM it. Trivially.
Signal showed us that is possible to have E2E encrypted messaging, why don't they provide it, but with better UI/UX?
If Telegram doesn't read messages and doesn't provide access for 3rd parties(governments, etc.), It should provide E2E everywhere by default.
I had telegram installed for almost 3 years. I never had a secret chat that I did not start myself.
But people use Telegram for its plethora of features, the UX, and its attention to even the smallest of details.
It could very well be that one of your friends looked up the product being discussed and FB (correctly) guessed based on other data they had that you're the one most likely to be interested in it (or alternatively just shown this ad to everyone in your friends group, but only you picked up on it).
• 4 GB uploads, faster downloads: I'm struggling to imagine what these would be useful for, other than movie piracy. The default upload limit is already 2 GB, and the download speed is fine.
• Doubled limits: Most of these are client-side limits. Locking these features down behind a paywall is just obnoxious.
• Voice-to-text: I have never intentionally used Telegram's voice messaging features. Most mobile phones can already do speech-to-text; making other people use a premium feature to get the same results is silly.
• Unique stickers, unique reactions: Oh please god no. Animated stickers were bad enough. I'm going to be tempted to ban anyone using these in the groups I moderate.
• Chat management: More paywalled client-side features. (Including one feature that was previously available to all users -- auto-archive for new chats used to be offered to any user that was getting a lot of chat requests.)
• Animated profile pictures: See "unique stickers".
• Premium badges, premium app icons: Yawn.
• No ads: Where do ads even show up? I've never seen one, even in large channels.
