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.
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
I have been living under a rock, what happened to Telegram?
It is not considered a good alternative as a messaging app for privacy folks and because the source code is not open, it is not E2E encrypted by default (you need to start a secret chat or something to make your conversation encrypted) if I remember correctly.
You remember incorrect. All Clients are open source:
Telegram apps are open source and support reproducible builds. Anyone can independently verify that Telegram apps you download from App Store or Google Play were built using the exact same code that we publish
In Fdroid there are also forks. But yes, their servers are closed source and centralized.
Still its not recommended. It requires Phone number and as you said its E2ee is not on by default and is not soooo good.
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.
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.
Afaik the protocol is documented[1] and the clients are open source[2].
No code available for the backend though.
You forget to mention they gave informations to german police, seems like they forget the point of the app
Honestly, signal is the only thing I would ideally use. But whatsapp is still a better second messenger than telegram.
But whatsapp is still a better second messenger than telegram.
You didn’t mean that.
I’m sorry. It might be meta owned, but its metadata theyre stealing. I still trust the e2e encryption. Naively perhaps
