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izzytcp | 3 years ago

Hi, German here.

How about not storing any information at all? Nothing to give, problem solved. Just like Signal.

I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason! The app doesn’t solve any privacy problem, default chats are unencrypted, keeps personal info. App should be dead already or turned into a dating app because it’s clearly not seriously privacy fucused.

discuss

order

AnonC|3 years ago

> I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason!

Any reason? I’ll give you some serious ones.

Signal sucks really bad on user experience and features. If you try both for a week or two and learn about the features, you’d be able to conclude the same.

Signal does not care about users and prevents backups on iOS. Lose your device or delete the app due to some issues and reinstall? All your chats are gone!

Signal still has message delivery issues (like long delays)…it’s 2022!!!

Signal keeps pestering me to allow notifications and to allow contacts access. I can only choose “Not Now”, since there is no option that says “No”. When I choose “Not Now”, it will say “we’ll remind you later” and pester me again. I don’t understand why anyone would assume that this app cares about privacy or about users’ time.

zelphirkalt|3 years ago

> Signal sucks really bad on user experience and features. If you try both for a week or two and learn about the features, you’d be able to conclude the same.

Hm, for me Signal does all I need: Chat, voice chat, video chat, group chat, sending text, pictures, videos, whatever. All of that of course encrypted and not financed by a Russian millionaire/billionaire.

> Signal still has message delivery issues (like long delays)…it’s 2022!!!

Haven't noticed those. How sure are you, that your contacts are actually looking at Signal messages (two filled cirles checkmarks) or have network to receive the messages (two unfilled circles checkmarks)?

> Signal keeps pestering me to allow notifications and to allow contacts access. I can only choose “Not Now”, since there is no option that says “No”. When I choose “Not Now”, it will say “we’ll remind you later” and pester me again. I don’t understand why anyone would assume that this app cares about privacy or about users’ time.

OK, that's really annoying then. I usually use Signal on my computer, from which it works very nicely and never asks me any of those things.

kitsunesoba|3 years ago

Signal operates on the idea that anything sent through chat is ephemeral and not worth keeping, which just doesn’t work in practice in my experience.

When you’re knee deep in conversation with someone you’re probably not going to say, “oh hey we should switch to email so we can keep a record of this”. It might not even occur to you that the conversation could ever be of value.

There’s been several occasions when my life has been made much more easy for having been able to dig up some old message in iMessage, Telegram, etc from as far back as multiple years ago sometimes because the way things played out the pertinent info didn’t exist anywhere else simply because nobody involved could’ve ever guessed it had any importance.

0xJRS|3 years ago

> Signal does not care about users and prevents backups on iOS. Lose your device or delete the app due to some issues and reinstall? All your chats are gone!

My chats being gone from new devices is one reason I use Signal over others.

> Signal still has message delivery issues (like long delays)…it’s 2022!!!

I've sent tens or hundreds of thousands of messages over the course of years and the only time i've had delays is when I had spotty service.

brnt|3 years ago

I for one am 100% satisfied with Signals UX, and a big reason for that it precisepy that it does not evolve into a communications platform, but just pushes chats around. The delivery issues are very rare, and not a btother anyways. Chat is not time sensitive nor should it be.

Signal cares about privacy (unlike Telegram) and the evidence is right there in their respective source repositories.

matkoniecz|3 years ago

UX of Signal is terrible. Part of that is a direct result of security-usability trade-offs.

> The app doesn’t solve any privacy problem, default chats are unencrypted, keeps personal info.

I am using it for public chats.

--------------------

EDIT: this is inacurate, see replies

For example I get repeated "insert PIN password here to remember it".

I have a password manager. There is no way to get rid of it, even via deeply hidden settings. For example, what about disabling it for password with length over 40? Or something?

dividuum|3 years ago

> There is no way to get rid of it, even via deeply hidden settings.

At least on iOS: Settings > Account > [ ] PIN Reminders. I would be very surprised if there isn't a similar way of disabling those reminders on Android.

durkie|3 years ago

I have a "pin reminders" setting in iOS signal that I can turn off. It's in Settings > Account

InCityDreams|3 years ago

...i havent inserted my android remind-pin for years.

em-bee|3 years ago

I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason!

telegram is the only chat app that offers Free Software clients, does not force me to share my phonenumber, is easy enough to use even for old people.

matrix is ok. but element is still buggy and the ux is complex and takes some learning.

another alternative is deltachat. it uses smtp as transport and works with an email account. the UX is also easy enough to use. easier than matrix/element.

kitsunesoba|3 years ago

The multiple third party clients feature is huge for me. It’s means I’m not stuck with living with whatever set of trade offs have been made in the official client, and it means there are true native (UWP, UIKit, etc) clients for just about every platform that don’t use UI as branding and behave the way one would expect apps of those platforms to behave.

zelphirkalt|3 years ago

Last time I tried Telegram to see what it is like, it did automatically broadcast to all my contacts, that I use Telegram, and as a consequence people thought they could message me there, even though I was only testing the app. Also it did require associating with my phone/SIM. Do you mean, that it does not publish your phone number to other people on Telegram?

I keep an eye on deltachat, hoping, that it might become a viable alternative to phone number associated chat solutions. Not sure how mature deltachat is already.

zoobab|3 years ago

Signal require a phone number, a nogo for real privacy.

hungryforcodes|3 years ago

It's actually fun to use?

upofadown|3 years ago

>How about not storing any information at all?

That wouldn't work for groups. Abusers could then destroy the groups with impunity for the purpose of censorship. Telegram is mostly about groups. Telegram is often used for activism.

Signal claims to not store data about who is talking to who. That doesn't mean that they don't. If they were, say, a secret subsidiary of the CIA they would act exactly as they are acting now. In general you can't trust the providers of these sorts of things. See Crypto AG...

DownGoat|3 years ago

To some degree you can trust them, as data request to Signal have been through the court systems which is public. You can actually look up and see what data they have turned over after receiving court orders to do so.

Canada|3 years ago

The signal code is public and has been widely reviewed. We know full well what the server knows regardless of what they say.

tiagod|3 years ago

Poeple use it because the UX is great, as well as the bot DX. E2EE isn't a critical feature for most people picking a chat app.

Signal is a great alternative to WhatsApp. Not so much for Telegram.

wellthisisgreat|3 years ago

Because you lose all your chat history without any way to export it.

I unfortunately have convinced some of my relatives to use Signal without me looking into it beforehand.

Now because of Signal’s moronic design I dread the day when something happens and I decide I want to save all our chats for posterity / memories, but wouldn’t be able to. There is simply no “export” button. There is some way to do it on Android but on iOS we are SOL.

nulbyte|3 years ago

Sounds like option 3: "If this option is supported, Telegram will change its data structure and privacy policy for users from Germany."

londons_explore|3 years ago

I would prefer them to be clearer to say "we will redesign our systems so we no longer store IP addresses".

"Change our data structure" sounds like they might just host the servers outside the country and use a "Telegram Deutschland Inc" company that doesn't have access to any user data to run the service.

xenator|3 years ago

Just to remind that Signal is bu//sh*t messenger that ask you for your phone number. And keep and share all the information with authorities. Since it is a US based company, and it is what US based companies do.

If you want to make a protected application, don't tie it to any real world data. That is very easy.

Forbo|3 years ago

> And keep and share all the information with authorities.

Hilarious that you call it bullshit whilst spouting your own. https://signal.org/bigbrother/

Unless of course you have some documentation to back up what you're saying.

rvz|3 years ago

> How about not storing any information at all? Nothing to give, problem solved. Just like Signal.

Yeah, give S̶i̶g̶n̶a̶l̶ Twilio your phone number instead. Problem solved.

> I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason! The app doesn’t solve any privacy problem, default chats are unencrypted, keeps personal info. App should be dead already or turned into a dating app because it’s clearly not seriously privacy fucused.

They don't care and Signal offers less that what Telegram has despite Telegram being less secure. Signal is bad at selling itself.

Maybe Signal needs to offer a better user experience, backup chats across all devices and offer more useful features; not less than their competitors rather than pushing a private cryptocurrency scam project useful for criminals, scammers and money launderers.

Forbo|3 years ago

If the cryptocurrency weren't useful for criminals, scammers, and money launderers, then it wouldn't be useful for political dissidents either. The reason the undesirables use those technologies is because they work. Yes, bad people are going to use effective tools. Does that mean nobody should have them? Granted, I wish they would have just implemented Monero instead, especially since MobileCoin was (is?) unusable in the US. I agree they definitely could use some work on the backups side of the house as well.

ajsnigrutin|3 years ago

> why people use Telegram instead of Signal

Telegram has a great bot feature, that you can use to do a bunch of stuff (from smart house notifications, to "uptime robot" tracking of services up/down states, build results, temperature alarms, server monitoring, etc. One curl oneliner, and you get a message on your phone with whatever data needed (even with an image/graph or a file attachment).

bloqs|3 years ago

Telegram seems to have captured some of thr discord market and seems to do "group" stuff a lot better UX wise.

afiori|3 years ago

To effectively capture discord usage telegram should add Group groups, that is to allow user to create an Organizations with some channels and groups.

Also some kind of shared access policy.

Could even be a pro feature.

isaacfrond|3 years ago

I switched from signal to Telegram because the iphone version was buggy as hell. That's why.

edsimpson|3 years ago

Signal bugs on ios really are a pain point for people that I have convinced to switch. Even basic things, the ios app does not seem to use the correct camera API which makes using the internal camera lower quality which also makes video calls blurry.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/5294

onli|3 years ago

You can install Telegram with f-droid, and it works well on a degoogled phone. Signal forbids alternate clients and is not on f-droid. It's thus just not an option.

martin_a|3 years ago

> Signal forbids alternate clients

Which might be due to their E2E encryption?!?

neverrroot|3 years ago

Channels, Groups, it’s overall way better. But true, per default not as secure. Supports secure chats, that are secure.

izzytcp|3 years ago

Are channels and groups e2ee?

loo|3 years ago

As secure as a fox who's just been appointed Professor of Security at Secure University?

autoexec|3 years ago

> How about not storing any information at all? Nothing to give, problem solved. Just like Signal.

just so you know, Signal does permanently store sensitive user data in the cloud. They collect your name, photo, phone number, and a list of every person you contact using Signal. That data is stored in your profile on their servers.

Signal really used to not store anything, but that hasn't been the case for a long time now and if this is the first you're hearing about that, it should tell you all you need to know about how trustworthy Signal is.

perakojotgenije|3 years ago

Because it works flawlessly on all three major operating systems (windows, linux, macos), unlike Signal who can not make a decent linux port.

yunohn|3 years ago

> How about not storing any information at all?

Acc to telegram:

> Telegram may disclose IP addresses and phone numbers

How do you propose this data is masked? You need a phone number to use Telegram (and Signal), and you need an internet connection, thus exposing your IP address.

I’m not sure why you think Signal does not have this information.

fsflover|3 years ago

Matrix won't have this information, if you have your own server.

ComodoHacker|3 years ago

>How about not storing any information at all? Nothing to give, problem solved.

This means no history sync, no seamless device switching, no contact discovery, no search. That's not what people want.

t0bia_s|3 years ago

Telegram and Signal has basically same problem. Thats centralised storage of data. So if you care about privacy, Signal is not alternative to Telegram.

Matrix is decentralised open-source solution. I don't understand why people don't use it more instead of Signal or Telegram. Or Session, but it is not very user friendly.

tcfhgj|3 years ago

I don't get why anyone uses Signal.

Horrible UX compared to WhatsApp, no sync of messages between devices, walled garden like WhatsApp, you can't have your own custom client

only thing: not Facebook & open source

You can have all of that with a Matrix client (except good UX, that's unique to Telegram)

tommit|3 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean. Messages sync just fine between my iPhone and Linux machine.

> Horrible UX

It got way better in the past few years. When I did the initial push with my friends, we failed. Mainly because the basic functionality was buggy at times, such as messages that would simply not be received. But now it's running real smooth imo. Sure, there are a few things I would like to see. Polls is a big one. Maybe a smooth gif creation like WhatsApp -- but those are fairly minor. My experience is that it gets pretty much the job done and that's all I want from it. What exactly is so horrible about it in your experience?

> only thing: not Facebook & open source

Those two are pretty big positives, at least for me. That's pretty much exactly what I'm looking for.

> You can have all of that with a Matrix client

Well ... unfortunately that's a bit much for your average Joe, simple as.

jen20|3 years ago

> why anyone uses Signal.

> not Facebook

Bingo!

gsich|3 years ago

>I seriously don’t understand why people use Telegram instead of Signal. Any reason!

Very easy to integrate custom notifications with bots. Signal is more like "maybe it works with this 3rd party tool". Also being able to use custom buttons with bots.

sschueller|3 years ago

Moxie rubs me the wrong way and I don't trust him. So defacto, I don't trust signal.