I feel like someone tooling with a secure messaging app makes it less…reliable that its secure, despite yanking google play parts out of the code. Thoughts?

  • MarcellusDrum
    18·
    3 years ago

    Client is open source, but the server is not. So I would say Telegram as a service is not FOSS.

    • DessalinesA
      10·
      3 years ago

      I don’t know why people spend time building open source clients for not-self-hostable services. You could potentially spend hundreds of hours on something that can be shut down on a whim. Discord and spotify bots and clients, twitter or facebook clients, their APIs have been either severely restricted or shut down in the past.

      • ksynwa
        71·
        3 years ago

        Nitter is pretty good tho. Makes Twitter usable without logging in. But yeah a FOSS client for Telegram feels like a waste of keystrokes.

      • Evan
        6·
        3 years ago

        I love discord and the community that defends the shitshow going on at their hq day after day, averting their eyes and continuing to work relentlessly on an additional income stream for a company that does not care about them.

      • XTL@sopuli.xyz
        2·
        1 year ago

        Because of users. Having some_other_superior_service is useless if the user you care about doesn’t use it. If someone or something you care about uses telegram, you’ll need a telegram client to talk to them. Or signal, WA, whatever. Some people are willing to be users for that. Some are willing to be devs.

  • sibachian
    12·
    3 years ago

    I don’t know why Telegram is always the go-to topic for ‘secure messaging’, especially as a contender vs discord. When we have the option of matrix.org, which is not only encrypted, but federated.

    • HMH
      101·
      3 years ago

      Because Telegram offers top notch user experience, apart from excellent apps they even offer native desktop clients. I really want matrix to succeed but as of now the user experience is clearly inferior.

      • sibachian
        41·
        3 years ago

        how is it inferior? what’s wrong with the user experience of Element? it’s available on all major platforms with a native client + all modern browsers. has a nice ui. and loads of functions surpassing Telegram out of the gate.

        • HMH
          2·
          3 years ago

          it’s available on all major platforms with a native client

          Yeah, but all native desktop clients are still more or less in alpha and have no feature parity with Element. Can you recommend one, I am currently using nehko and it is okayish but still very much under development?

          what’s wrong with the user experience of Element

          To mention just a few obvious issues: Element on desktop is very slow and heavy as it is an Electron app, search in encrypted rooms does not work, if I scroll through longer chats the scrollbar becomes incredibly jerky, on mobile notifications sometimes don’t show up. And there are many more things that just need more polish, I am not an UX designer so I am not that good at pointing my finger at all UX issues but I can still feel them.

          I sincerely hope that given a little more time things improve and I can finally recommend matrix to my non technical friends.

          • sibachian
            1·
            3 years ago

            I totally and entirely agree that element suck largely due to its inherent limitations as an electron app (speed, memory use, etc) and I despise electron out of principle. But it is as you said, the only matrix client which is ahead in development. And yes, it has a handful of bugs, but nothing that should deterrent people from using it, i mean, the vast majority use Messenger as their daily driver, and it is plagued by bugs, especially in the desktop client, more so than Element I’d say.

            But yeah, being an electron app is not an argument, sadly. At least not as an argument not to use Element. As the most common chat applications (discord, messenger, signal, whatsapp) are all electron apps as well. Telegram is a notable exception, but Telegram is not secure and should never be brought up among the security/privacy based alternatives (same goes for Whatsapp). Which leaves us with Element, Signal, and the myriad of federated XMPP clients.

            But, I don’t even see the point in Signal. It’s centralized, american, and lacks all modern chat features. There is no reason for anyone to ever choose Signal over any of the XMPP clients. Especially considering XMPP is ancient, stable, has more features than signal, federated, and secure. And so, for modern chat features, that leaves matrix.org as the only option on the market. Basically.

      • zexu knub
        1·
        1 year ago

        Try cinny. I find it less cluttered compared to element

      • zexu knub
        1·
        1 year ago

        Try cinny. I find it less cluttered compared to element

    • GrittyOP
      1·
      3 years ago

      Oh I agree. I was reading a post about how many users signed up this week and wondered if it was on f-droid

      • GrittyOP
        2·
        3 years ago

        Personally I use signal, and I know it has its own issues but I got family to switch to it from WhatsApp, so that’s a win.

  • PandaCoderPL
    7·
    3 years ago

    Telegram FOSS is definitely better than official client if you really have to use this service but you should look for some alternatives like Session.

  • Sr Estegosaurio
    71·
    3 years ago

    As far as I know, telegram at the end is mostly the same garbage as Whatsapp. Let me explain: Telegram has a ton of major issues (or at least they are serious problems from mi POV)

    • NOT E2EE by default. In order to make E2EE chats you must create a “secret chat” that is only accessible via smartphone (forget about E2EE on pc or even sync it mith other devices). And I’m not sure about this but I believe that there isn’t any way of doing E2EE calls or video calls.

    • Is just “another” CENTRALIZED SILO. Lacks any form of federation an depends on a non-free servers. (More on that later).

    • You need to give a phone number in order of being able to use the service. Any comments about this, just sucks. (Yeah you can use some throw away phone number but that isn’t my point)

    • Telegram ISN’T FOSS. Okey their clients are FOSS (or at least they have a FOSS version) but their servers (as mentioned above) are just proprietary crap. I will not trust any kind of proprietary garbage. So telegram is FAR from being FOSS.

    At the end you just got a fancier version of Whatsapp (don’t get my wrong, both are cringy) because yes, compared to WhatsApp in terms of “features” it’s prettier and have some cool ideas. But at least WhatsApp IS EE2E. It stills has a freaking ton of problems, but at least your comms are encripted, not like telegram.

    For something important I (or what ever else, seriously is just the same crap but not ee2e) WON’T USE TELEGRAM. Matrix exists, ye, it has a serious problem with metadata.

    But if you want bulletproof comms you always can use Briar or Jami. :)

  • the_tech_beast
    6·
    3 years ago

    Telegram FOSS removes a lot of the proprietary code from the official telegram client and also it prefers OSM instead of Gmaps. I’ve been using Telegram FOSS for some months and I haven’t faced any issues. As for security, I am not really sure.

    If you are using telegram for any sensitive conversations, I wouldn’t recommend using it. Use Signal, Matrix or some other good and open source messaging app.

  • IngrownMink4
    41·
    3 years ago

    Yeah, it is legit. You can also use Neko X, which is inspired by Telegram X and forked from Telegram X.