It was a many months transition, and it’s finally done

Fun thing, you can actually make a backup of all* your messages, groups, contacts, etc. So before leaving you can have all of your data in case you need that one contact or something

The final red flag was as that allegedly Russian authorities were messing with people’s deleted messages. Not for the first time there are news that they could read, modify, delete, see location, and etc. Screw it, this is unsafe, I’m out.

Also, these days telegram is really at the state of a pile of garbage, bloated, buggy, and shady messenger.

  • Kiryu@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    Why did Telegram get so popular in the privacy scene compared to Signal in the first place? To my knowledge Signal came out first and never had a history of breaches or leaks.

    • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      1 year ago

      Telegram, while often hyped as high privacy/security got popular because it was/is fully featured and isn’t Google or Facebook. That’s it

      It’s less invasive, less annoying, and can do all the stuff like gifs and stickers. So it was very easy to get people onto compared to pretty much anything that was actually private or secure.

      Once enough people started using it, it snowballed into its own monolith of bloat.

    • spaduf@slrpnk.net
      01·
      1 year ago

      I think the big reason that nobody’s mentioned yet is simply that they were earlier. Back when projects like Tox and Matrix were first starting to pop up, telegram was already fully formed. Signal didn’t come until at least a year later and didn’t have feature parity until several years later. Telegram by contrast was a much closer experience to WhatsApp and Messenger, making the transition much easier, particularly for low-tech knowledge users.

    • Gooey0210@sh.itjust.worksOP
      01·
      1 year ago

      Telegram came out a year earlier in that signal, and because immediately popular amongst young people and drug dealers in Russia

  • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
    0·
    1 year ago

    The final red flag was as that allegedly Russian authorities were messing with people’s deleted messages.

    I don’t know about “Russian authorities”, but the fact remains that if you can login anywhere and see your messages, then your public private key is stored in the server.

    Since Telegram requires authorization from an extant connection, I don’t know if that means your public key isn’t stored on the servers and it’s being sent from the authorizing device, or if that device is merely authorizing the Telegram servers to transmit that key to the new device.

    Since they have a full e2e chat feature (Private Chats), I’m going to assume the latter.

    So anyone who can get those keys can gain access to your chats.

    I still say Telegram is far superior to anything from Fuckbook/Meta, because it’s not integrated into everying you do (even those of us who’ve never once been on Facebook, and yet have ghost profiles), not to mention the Facebook app integrated into Android on many vendor phones.

    Even so, know Telegram for what it is - not ideal, just better than WhatsApp, and a step along the path to moving to more secure and privacy-respecting apps.l

    • Gooey0210@sh.itjust.worksOP
      0·
      1 year ago

      Comparing telegram to WhatsApp is something really 2015 😅

      Now we have many alternatives, and let’s just switch, fb and telegram both suck compared to signal, simplex, session, or even matrix (wait for the new matrix’ update where they add some new encryption stuff)

      • Synnr@sopuli.xyz
        0·
        1 year ago

        Session was at first a fork of Signal without usernames.

        Now by design it uses their own custom tor-like service (instead of just… using tor) and does not support forward secrecy or deniable authentication, so anyone who collects the messages in transit can either find a vulnerability in the encryption scheme, or spend enough GPU resources to crack it, and they have confirmation of who sent and received the message and what the contents of the message are. And is headquartered in Australia, which is 5EYES and much more against encryption than the US. Oh, and the server is closed-source.

        Regarding Australia’s 2018 bill…

        The Australian Parliament passed a contentious encryption bill on Thursday to require technology companies to provide law enforcement and security agencies with access to encrypted communications. Privacy advocates, technology companies and other businesses had strongly opposed the bill, but Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government said it was needed to thwart criminals and terrorists who use encrypted messaging programs to communicate.

        Regarding the ‘vulnerability or cracking them later’ bit…

        Messages that are sent to you are actually sent to your swarm. The messages are temporarily stored on multiple Service Nodes within the swarm to provide redundancy. Once your device picks up the messages from the swarm, they are automatically deleted from the Service Nodes that were temporarily storing them.

        From Session’s own FAQ:

        Session clients do not act as nodes on the network, and do not relay or store messages for the network. Session’s network architecture is closer to a client-server model, where the Session application acts as the client and the Service Node swarm acts as the server. Session’s client-server architecture allows for easier asynchronous messaging (messaging when one party is offline) and onion routing-based IP address obfuscation, relative to peer-to-peer network architectures.

        I wouldn’t touch it with a 12ft ladder.

    • Scirocco@lemm.ee
      0·
      1 year ago

      Easy! Just replace their usual SMS app with Signal, and then every contact they have that does use Signal is private and secure!

      Oh. Wait. That’s exactly the functionality that Signal removed in their effort to ensure that Signal is never widely adopted…

      • Synnr@sopuli.xyz
        0·
        1 year ago

        I didn’t agree with their decision at all at the time, but now that I realize they made it a little while after it gained widespread adoption and people stopped using it because “Signal isn’t actually secure!” … seems like people were expecting a secure messenger to be, well, secure. So they would chat about anything and everything thinking “I am using a secure messenger, these messages can’t be read…” and tech ignorance is a dangerous thing if you’re trying to be secure. I would’ve preferred a colored window and un-closable message for SMS chats, but oh well. I like that they’ve introduced usernames so you don’t have to give out your real number.

        • Scirocco@lemm.ee
          1·
          9 months ago

          And that irony now is that messenger on Android is RCS compliant and currently has this exact functionality, except it’s less trustworthy.

          Once again I’m using one messenger and everyone else who’s using an RCS messenger gets encrypted, but SMS (clearly marked as such) is a viable fallback.

    • youmaynotknow@lemmy.ml
      0·
      1 year ago

      Do what I did. Let everyone you care about on TG that you’re closing that crap, with your reasons for doing so. Inform them of your moving to signal, session, whatever. Be clear that, otherwise, they can try calling you and wish them good luck. Close TG on the day you set as deadline. I did that and whomever didn’t get a Signal or Session account has to call me. I’ve never looked back.

      • Delusion6903@discuss.online
        English
        1·
        1 year ago

        My family is all on iMessage. I told them if they didn’t install Signal I wouldn’t reply to their texts.

        At first, whenever they texted I would just reply with something that looked automated like “This user is no longer available via text message. Please install Signal if you wish to communicate.”

  • LordKitsuna@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    Gonna have to disagree. Telegram is the ONLY chat app with ACTUALLY NATIVE code clients on desktop and mobile. Its the only one that isn’t website in a box trash that’s slow heavy and buggy. I use discord mostly because it’s where everyone is but i fucking hate everything about it and wish people would use telegram.

    If you think other chat apps don’t read/process metadata from your dms and such your an idiot. Nothing is safe short of self hosted matrix with full E2E encryption or similar and ain’t nobody doing that.

    • Im_old@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      Nothing is safe short of self hosted matrix with full E2E encryption or similar and ain’t nobody doing that.

      Well, I’m doing that. But I’m nobody, so I guess your point still stands 😅

      But also, I don’t judge the chats mainly by their client, but the protocol. Telegram is not open and so can’t be audited properly, that’s my concern.

  • progettarsi@feddit.it
    0·
    1 year ago

    tg premium user here, WTF? i tought telegram was privacy respectfull and pretty secure, what changed/happened? that’s not the first post i saw abt It. also, any alternatives? with almost same features and as many channels/groups as telegram ofc like don’t suggest me signal or Matrix nobody Is on that platforms…

    EDIT: lmao people Just downvoted me for asking… what a world