this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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Privacy

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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.

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[–] [email protected] -3 points 8 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Afaik the protocol is documented[1] and the clients are open source[2].

No code available for the backend though.

[1] https://core.telegram.org/mtproto

[2] https://telegram.org/apps#source-code

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Ah well, my bad, things have changed since last time I checked.

So better of what I thought, but still not great. Also the fact that it's a Saudi Arabia company now (where they are not exactly famous for their human rights protections) does not bode well.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I up this one, there are many messengers, all have different clients, just choose one, or make? I like the UI of WeChat, should I use it then?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

At least Matrix lets you encrypt data. Telegram is hostile to that.

And no, taking your most personal data in a decrypted state for no good reason and promising to keep it encrypted is not the same thing. If anything, it's worse

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

My brother, XMPP existed before Web 2.0 where after the cost-cutting way to ship an app was a browser option (browser options help accessibility tho)—where Electron was the most egregious RAM stealer. OMEMO has been around for multi-client double ratchet e2ee since 2015. An ejabberd server can be tuned to handle 2 million simultaneous connects—Synapse folds over like lawnchair at a single user joining a room with a medium-length history.