“Telegram is not a private messenger. There’s nothing private about it. It’s the opposite. It’s a cloud messenger where every message you’ve ever sent or received is in plain text in a database that Telegram the organization controls and has access to it”
“It’s like a Russian oligarch starting an unencrypted version of WhatsApp, a pixel for pixel clone of WhatsApp. That should be kind of a difficult brand to operate. Somehow, they’ve done a really amazing job of convincing the whole world that this is an encrypted messaging app and that the founder is some kind of Russian dissident, even though he goes there once a month, the whole team lives in Russia, and their families are there.”
" What happened in France is they just chose not to respond to the subpoena. So that’s in violation of the law. And, he gets arrested in France, right? And everyone’s like, oh, France. But I think the key point is they have the data, like they can respond to the subpoenas where as Signal, for instance, doesn’t have access to the data and couldn’t respond to that same request. To me it’s very obvious that Russia would’ve had a much less polite version of that conversation with Pavel Durov and the telegram team before this moment"
f-droid represents a distro model with a trust model and certain requirements including build ones. Think of it as the Debian of Android.
When f-droid support is mentioned, it’s not a question of mere APK availability. All APKs after all are available if you know where to look. And it just happens that f-droid compatible 3rd party repositories already exist without the strict requirements (e.g. IzzyOnDroid).
Beyond warring against any kind of third party build (don’t let me get started on forks), Signal uses google services dependencies, so it’s not just about the source of the binary APK. Note that whether these dependencies are hard, or “just!” a default, is not that relevant in my books (this is an active point of contention across many many apps).
This insistent attempt at defending this blessed supposedly secure messenger seems infinitely weirder than what any fanperson of any other app can muster! I put imaginary hypotheticals that don’t even understand the point of f-droid, like “it is perfectly capable of enshittification” into that bracket. The continuous attempt at painting a false binary of Signal and Telegram is even more pathetic.