- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
Telegram is a suprisingly good app.
- Open source clients
- Decent Linux client on the laptop (whatsapp desktop is just terrible)
- It can be downloaded without Google’s appstore.
I wish other apps were half as good as Telegram.
- More importantly, non-electron app.
It bothers me that the major complaint is not the privacy issues or the people who own it behind the scenes…
but the technology used to build the desktop application. Electron is just a tool.
Fucking hell 🤦♂️
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Owned by the Russians
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Partnered with the
CCPTencent
Hasn’t the founder been a vocal critic of Russia for years, including the Ukraine war? I don’t really see why that would be a concern, especially since Telegram is supposedly owned by a US LLC
Russia has an army of “vocal critics” who play an important role in the pantomime, you see them on RT regularly. It doesn’t prove anything.
Sure, but they were compromised by Russia in June 2020.
a yes, the ceo that isn’t on russia and is viewd as a criminal for being against the war?
If that’s the definition of trustworthy Prigozhin was a saint
Prigo was definitely not against the war.
Better than being owned by Americans.
Why does it need to be owned by anyone? There are chat protocols that are public knownleage.
“the russians” is the new “the jews” but for liberals, right?
Nah more “the Nazis” vibes to it really.
Russians didn’t invade Iraq, Americans did.
Whataboutism detected.
Whataboutism is the logical and correct response to hypocrites.
Actually, it’s a logical fallacy.
America has invaded a lot of places and I’d not recommend people use services from there either if you value privacy.
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Telegram has the best clients ever. But those clients need to connect to something and this is where we encounter a big problem.
But isn’t that the whole point of a messaging service? Connect to something else that’s not local and have your messages exchanged?
I think smileyhead is alluding to the fact that Telegram servers are not open source, just the clients are.
Not open source, centralized servers that store messages mostly without E2EE. By using Telegram we are locking ourself in situation where they can turn the knobs as they like, while we can’t do anything about it.
Why would it matter if the servers are open source? How would you ever verify they are running the exact build they claim they are?
It’s not about what build they are running. It matters because somebody just glancing at it might misinterpret the situation as “Telegram is open source”, but it actually isn’t because the server isn’t. Just some clients are, which is pretty useless if you can’t run a server to talk to them. Just for arguments sake, let’s say Telegram gets busted tomorrow in an international sting operation and all their servers get taken offline. The clients will be entirely useless at that point, somebody would have to reverse engineer the server.
I’d like to at the very least be able to run my own server. Not even necessarily federated with the original ones. Just run my own instance if I don’t trust the main one runs what they claim.
For whatsapp nothing is opensource
That’s kind of an apples an oranges comparison, WhatsApp doesn’t even try to present a facade of being open source. Telegram does, betting that the distinction between server and client code will go over most peoples heads, which it probably does to be honest.
There are two realistic alternatives with hundreds of millions of users. Whatsapp has a closed source client, Telegram has an open source one. The choice for me is easy.
That sounds like a false dichotomy and I’m not sure why you even think the number of users is relevant. Why not choose something fully open source?
yeah it is too good for just to be called a messaging app, hope it will be more privacy focused
Well, thats also easy since telegram clients dont do much more than displaying messages stored on a server. Its more a viewer than a full client.
And that compromises hard on privacy and security, which Signal and Whatsapp dont do, they have proper Clients that have to really handle and store incoming messages. And the E2EE makes it harder, developing an independent desktop client, like Signal always had and Whatsapp recently got. But both are mediocre at best, sure.
I prefer Telegram to something owned by an American corporation.
lol what are you smoking?!
The shitty forced “stories” did me question seriously this once wonderful app. If I’d want to look at crappy TikTok-like shorts from other people, I’d be on TikTok.
I had the same worry when it happened to signal
Signal has stories as well?
Inexplicably, yes. It does
Yes, but the can be disabled, which I do automatically.
Yeah but you can trivially turn them off.
Once I saw the stories I was like ok wtf. How do I turn this off?
Maybe revanced manager can do it.
I’m using Nekogram, that at least allows to automatically hide (archive) them.
Forkgram
https://www.f-droid.org/en/packages/org.forkgram.messenger/
Seems to be doing the trick for me but the icon sucks and I had to rename it in the android UI cause it uses its package name for its display name lol. How’s nekogram compare?
Yeah, the package/display name issue has been a bug for a while in Forkgram. Nekogram just works for me, nothing special apart from some custom options, such as hide stories.
Looks nice but https://github.com/nikitasius/Telegraher/issues/27
I fear that Telegram may ban user accounts…
Uninstalled and moved to signal. But no one I know is on signal 🤡
deleted by creator
Please use decentralized chat apps and not Telegram
Why there is always the guy that tell others what to do? People should use what’s best for them, be it IM apps, browser, OS, whatever.
These people also don’t live in the real world. “Hey buddy, I know all your friends are using this chat service, but just stop using it and move to this barebones, extensively complex to setup service and everyone will follow suit, trust me”
Well you can start using Matrix and still talk to your contacts on all centralized platforms via Matrix bridges so it’s really easy to move to that. You will at least remove mobile apps trackers from your life and already start gaining extra privacy for every contact that does move to Matrix afterwards
Also, it’s not at all complex to start using, like all things you download an app and create an account (I can suggest Element or Beeper)
Because you’re on Lemmy and people here care about privacy, so my comment was a reminder and an advice, not a rule. You do you
If they already care about privacy, they don’t need your reminders/advice (or they don’t care). Recommending/“reminding” what to use/avoid, without even being asked, is both arrogant and annoying.
I learnt about all of that here on Lemmy. I think it’s beneficial to talk on a social media platform, and have discussions
Guessing Signal doesn’t count?
It’s centralized. And like all US based companies they have to conply to Patriot Act and Cloud Act, meaning US government agencies have everything not encrypted (dynamic map of all messages and social links).
Plus Signal has been founded by the CIA organisms (indirectly), it’s really shady
Session is the only one that comes to mind but they did such an overkill when it comes to privacy and security application is downright unusable.
The worst part is, they’re partnering with Tencent.
Telegram is dead.
This week, TON Foundation announced that it’s forged a partnership with Tencent Cloud, which has “already successfully supported TON validators and plans to expand its services further to help meet TON’s high compute intensity and network bandwidth needs.” Validators, in web3 lingo, are participants that help authenticate transactions in a blockchain network.
It looks like the partnership with Tencent only extends to their Web3 blockchain thing, and there doesn’t seem to be any partnership in the main app so it’s not the end of the world - at least, for now.
Also, what even is this TON blockchain? I never knew Telegram had anything to do with crypto :/