Telegram is no longer safe for piracy.
I bet they will start kicking out piracy channels in few weeks.
I am going to delete my account now as it will become useless soon anyway.
what are other options?
Matrix. It can be self hosted, federated, and has encrypted chat rooms.
But terrible handling of metadata. Which is the case for all chat apps AFAIK. Like, even with OMEMO, who talks with whom, and when, can be exposed. Which sometimes is enough to get legal issues (e.g. Ola Bini’s case)
Matrix is great and works great.
Element is a semi abandoned client that happened to come from some of the makers of matrix.
Use literally anything else. Fluffychat works for me. Element is okay for debugging sometimes so I keep it handy.
But the commenters point stands. In matrix, you can send whatever you like, as illegal or morally corrupt as you wish because its nobody‘s fucking business AND e2ee.
If someone on my server sends csam, I would never know unless someone reported it to me. Because thats how privacy works.
Why? You can connect over a VPN or TOR, can sign up with an email, and it can most likely be hosted on a as a hidden service on I2P or TOR.
How is telegram better?
I tried a Piracy group in Matrix and there was less than 100 users…and the only active poster was a bot (or honeypot) advertising explicit CSAM related telegram groups for purchase… just looking at the words made a pit in my stomach
That’s the double edged sword with no moderation abilities
there are moderation abilities, but instead of all-seeing global moderators it must be done by the little poor room owner, and the mods they have granted permission.
if the existing owner/mods don’t do that, and disgusting content starts appearing in the room, that means they probably aren’t active anymore, and that it’s time to make a new room with the still active members before something even more damaging happens, like an uncontrollable high volume spammer, at which point you won’t be able to tell the others that you have made a new room.
Hmm, sounds like the P2P version has been paused for the forseeable future:
https://arewep2pyet.com
https://matrix.org/blog/2020/06/02/introducing-p2p-matrix
https://matrix.org/blog/2023/09/matrix-2-0
I don’t know of any encrypted P2P chat 🤔
There is anonymous IRC over I2P which isn’t the same but might be good enough?
Maybe there’s even matrix over I2P.
Signal is probably the best option because it’s as easy to setup as Telegram and others.
Signal is unfortunately as vulnerable to this as Telegram is, as it is a fully centralized service so once the CEO is grabbed is Game Over. Something like jabber / XMPP would be better.
Signal is E2EE encrypted (similar to Telegram’s secret chats but probably better) so it’s less vulnerable. If people know about it they can ask Signal to ban you, but they can’t just passively spy on everything.
That said, XMPP is better still IMO.
(Edit: centralization isn’t as big a problem as you might think with Signal. The wealthy own the whole world now. You can’t set up somewhere outside their jurisdiction, you can only stay ahead of them as they force people to stop hosting you. Sending a takedown to Signal is the same as sending it to your hosting provider, do not fool yourself. )
@nintendiator @someonesmall Matrix
