Ukrainians are some of the bravest people I know.
To the extent that you can, do not use Telegram. Telegram is owned by a single person. This man is a fucking liar.
Telegram infrastructure is linked to the FSB.
https://www.occrp.org/en/investigation/telegram-the-fsb-and-the-man-in-the-middle
Signal is more secure and owned by a nonprofit. The founder of Signal is a professional cryptographer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie_Marlinspike
Signal delivers end-to-end encryption by default and collects almost no data.
Telegram was always super shady. Why do people use it instead of f.e. Signal?
Because there is nobody who has signal, and everyone is using telegram. I could switch to signal, but there is nobody to chat with. Telegram users and group chat owners wouldnt switch to signal, because they dont care, and nobody else in chat does so. So unless telegram will be legally banned by government, nobody is going to do anything about using it.
I’ve had it installed for a while. Didn’t use it much, but it was fun to see the pop ups from people out of address book joining telegram.
There were some usual suspects of kind of ‘sceptical’ folk, but also some surprises like my aunt.
The novelty wore off quickly though
Not based in the US is one.
Not an excuse but Telegram is pretty, and full of colors and animations. Signal is ugly (which is a feature for a small number of users).
But yes it’s shady since their custom encryption is weak and they hold the keys.
nah both are ugly, but out of the messengers I have tried only telegram and whatsapp have the problem of randos adding me to crypto scam chat groups without any option to decline before it starts pinging me with notifications.
you want to go into settings > privacy > invites > change to my contacts
that will stop the random channel invites
It started pretty fine actually.
But nowadays I just love the API and my bot that’s wired into my smart-home.
worst case that means FSB can control your home 😆
it got big in people’s minds earlier. my experience over the last 5 years has been that the only people still using telegram are fascists and cishet eastern europeans. queer folks in eastern europe mostly moved to signal (again. this is my experience. it’s purely anecdotal)
And furries. For some reason furries are all over telegram.
noted! wonder why they’re not on signal? seems like with how common queer identities are in the furry community there’d be more desire to avoid a platform with russian ties
All my weed dealers use it where I am, so I think of it only as a drug app.
Unfortunately the vr pirates that crack the games I want to try only use telegram… So I have to use it to get their releases, but they prob fit the categories you listed…
nah for sure. there’s a lot that goes on on telegram. just don’t put anything that incriminates you on it
It’s a lot easier to get a telegram account. I use telegram for its API and automated notifications, not impossible to do that with signal, but difficult to the point of serious impracticality. Telegram groups also don’t really have anything that compares with Signal.
For person to person communication, its signal every time though.
Wake me up when Signal can actually share the location, esp. live location, and not just a static maps screenshot with a Google Maps URL.
That… seems like a bad thing. Why do you want that as a feature?
In addition to finding friends, it’s nice to see your partner making progress home if they’re driving/walking in poor weather.
There’s a million apps out there which you can install to let you see your partner’s location if you really need realtime telemetry to help salve your anxiety - why can’t you use one of those, instead of introducing a huge privacy flaw into a totally unrelated messaging service?
Seriously this is about a messaging app being aligned to the FSB, and you’re arguing that letting it know your partner’s location while they’re particularly vulnerable is somehow a desirable feature??
No, I’m not talking about Telegram, just location sharing as a general feature. And if you already have a chat app you share your secrets on, why wouldn’t you also trust it with your location. Sounds better than introducing yet another company’s app to sniff on you.
When you have actual friends and you want tomeet up, just share the live location for 15 minutes, walk towards each other and you can get live updates to see where both are.
I’ll rely on the good old classic “hey lets go to X at Y time.” If X is large enough of an area then “we’ll meet up at Z (probably the snack bar knowing me.)”
that is certainly the way, people above are too spoiled by the technology it seems
No, all my friends are capable of finding each other without having to rely on an app to do it for them.
Have you seriously never though about how cool it would be to see where your friends are, live on a map?
Its a realy useful feature when you want to meet up with someone and (at least) on person doesn’t know the area, or just organizing multiple people.
Having that posibility available is a good thing. But signal decided that having that capability in an app means it could be misused so they actively decided against implementing it.
People without real life friends cannot relate real world needs.
… Yeesh, can your fancy app find some grass for you to touch?
Umm, about zero cool.
Emphatically no, and it’s terrifying that concept has apparently been normalized to the point it’s a desirable feature.
“Signal does thing to safeguard user privacy - that was bad, actually”
That requires paying Google maps for their services. I don’t know how their running costs and budget work.
Signal have tons of money from selling proprietary licenses of the Signal code base to Meta (used by WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger), Google, and Microsoft.
All these partnerships were announced on Signal’s own blog, in case you don’t believe it.