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.
I’m glad I never used it
I only use it for porn groups🗿
Now, where might one find those? For science, of course…
You can actually just search telegram porn groups on your search engine of choice. Although google usually leads to better results in the porn department
Eww, disgusting!
Where?
I thought furry groups use discord?💀
Nu uh, I aint no furry❌🗣️
Porn groups are good indeed!
critical damage to the “privacy-conscious people are not freaks” message
Porn groups? What do you do in those groups? Exchange porn? Is there not enough on the internet?
where did you moved to? i tried matrix but their android client (element) is terrible compare to telegram’s.
Try checking out Element X. It’s made to replace Element stable once it’s complete.
Does it handle the battery usage better? I had to remove Element because it was killing my battery.
Try schildichat it seems more polished
Schildi is planning to be based on Element X later.
It aldready is . But it don’t matter
I deleted telegram long ago, but not my account, just the apps.
As of recent, I wanted to log back in and actually delete my phone number from there, so there’s no more association.
I can’t login. I download the app, and it sends a verification code through Telegram and won’t do SMS, but I’m not logged in at all so I can’t get the code.
I’m stuck there. I contacted support and they’re yet to respond. :p
Also, these days telegram is really at the state of a pile of garbage, bloated, buggy, and shady messenger.
Every messenger is.
The final red flag was as that allegedly Russian authorities were messing with people’s deleted messages
I’m gonna need a source on that, since the creator himself was persecuted and telegram had layers of fake companies to stop Putin from getting to it.
Here’s what I found:
Over the past year, numerous dissidents across Russia have found their Telegram accounts seemingly monitored or compromised. Hundreds have had their Telegram activity wielded against them in criminal cases. Perhaps most disturbingly, some activists have found their “secret chats”—Telegram’s purportedly ironclad, end-to-end encrypted feature—behaving strangely, in ways that suggest an unwelcome third party might be eavesdropping. These cases have set off a swirl of conspiracy theories, paranoia, and speculation among dissidents, whose trust in Telegram has plummeted. In many cases, it’s impossible to tell what’s really happening to people’s accounts—whether spyware or Kremlin informants have been used to break in, through no particular fault of the company; whether Telegram really is cooperating with Moscow; or whether it’s such an inherently unsafe platform that the latter is merely what appears to be going on. … Elies Campo, who says he directed Telegram’s growth, business, and partnerships for several years, confirmed this general characterization to WIRED, as did a former Telegram developer. In other words, Telegram has the capacity to share nearly any confidential information a government requests. Users just have to trust that it won’t.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat/
Good for you. I still don’t know how to move my friends and relatives to Signal. Any tips with that?
Keep bugging them. I almost exclusively use signal for messaging these days and it’s fantastic. It took longer to convince some people than others
Install a family XMPP server like Snikket or otherwise. Show them the benchmarks of how little battery & data plan drain is used from Conversations forks. Explain how bloated Electron apps are & how you don’t wish that on your loved ones vs. Dino, Gajim, or a TUI client. Sidecar a Movim server so y’all can share long-lived, non-ephemeral posts instead of losing memories like photos in some long group thread. Let them know their data is safe with you as the operator instead of some massive for-profit corporation—and if they don’t trust you, they are empowered to start their own server to interop.
(This tactic has yet to work for me, but I will keep running into that wall til it breaks 😃)
Do what I did. Let everyone you care about on TG that you’re closing that crap, with your reasons for doing so. Inform them of your moving to signal, session, whatever. Be clear that, otherwise, they can try calling you and wish them good luck. Close TG on the day you set as deadline. I did that and whomever didn’t get a Signal or Session account has to call me. I’ve never looked back.
My family is all on iMessage. I told them if they didn’t install Signal I wouldn’t reply to their texts.
At first, whenever they texted I would just reply with something that looked automated like “This user is no longer available via text message. Please install Signal if you wish to communicate.”
That’s freaking epic. Love it.
I did something similar and just sent a link to Signal when IPhone friends and family SMS’d me, worked…eventually :) (am on Android)
Like that, also, a few months prior to the deletion turn off the notifications, and come there every few days, so people need to wait for your reply for days, and when you come you say “oh, I’m not using tg, I switched to signal/session/simplex/bird mail”
These are allngreat suggestions. Another huge advantage is that this help detoxify from the constant pinging with others.
start a meme group. People may not want to install a chat app to talk to you, but they don’t want to miss out on juicy memes.
this strategy worked for a few of my friends at least.
Easy! Just replace their usual SMS app with Signal, and then every contact they have that does use Signal is private and secure!
Oh. Wait. That’s exactly the functionality that Signal removed in their effort to ensure that Signal is never widely adopted…
I didn’t agree with their decision at all at the time, but now that I realize they made it a little while after it gained widespread adoption and people stopped using it because “Signal isn’t actually secure!” … seems like people were expecting a secure messenger to be, well, secure. So they would chat about anything and everything thinking “I am using a secure messenger, these messages can’t be read…” and tech ignorance is a dangerous thing if you’re trying to be secure. I would’ve preferred a colored window and un-closable message for SMS chats, but oh well. I like that they’ve introduced usernames so you don’t have to give out your real number.
And that irony now is that messenger on Android is RCS compliant and currently has this exact functionality, except it’s less trustworthy.
Once again I’m using one messenger and everyone else who’s using an RCS messenger gets encrypted, but SMS (clearly marked as such) is a viable fallback.
One day I said that in the future I will only be available via Signal. If not there then there is still SMS. And so far everyone I have contact with regularly installed it eventually.
That’s exactly right.
Why did Telegram get so popular in the privacy scene compared to Signal in the first place? To my knowledge Signal came out first and never had a history of breaches or leaks.
I can’t speak for the privacy scene but in my country it’s pretty popular merely because of anonimity (which boils down to not having to use a phone number) and Discord-like server/groups. For porn and other NSFW content, it is pretty popular.
Ah I did not know Signal required a phone number compared to Telegram not requiring one. Thanks.
At least they have usernames now…
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Telegram still requires a phone number to sign up, but they have had usernames that can be used to contact people without needing their phone number. Signal is only now finally rolling out usernames.
And they still want your phone number.
Telegram got its popularity because of piracy and having your chats on cloud. It was never intended to give privacy to user but due to WhatsApp breaches they started promoting telegram as a secured chat app which is a toatal joke till this day.
Honestly it was mostly a Discord competitor if anything. One with FOSS clients for desktop and Android.
The private chat is baseline implementation just to tick a box rather than anything practically useful.
Honestly, UI and PC client experience.
I find the UI in signal a bit off putting. Telegram grabs you with their funky stickers, clean UI and dumb features. I alps hate that Signal won’t bother copying the messages to a new client… Like, I have a 1Gbps connection, surely we can copy my chat histories from my phone to my PC? Nope, gotta start fresh on every new client…
If they did less dumb shit like adding statuses, and put some more effort into making the UI nice, more people would use it.
And I get these are dumb reasons, but they’re real none the less
I think Signal shot themselves squarely in the dick by removing SMS functionality.
Previously, you could use Signal as the primary SMS/messenger app. Any conversations with other Signal clients secure. Conversations in SMS/MMS? Marked as not-secure.
But, out of some purity concerns, SMS functionality was removed and the dev team focused on adding useless shit like “stickers” and then the pin-code harassment.
Signal adoption plummeted as intended (?)
Telegram, while often hyped as high privacy/security got popular because it was/is fully featured and isn’t Google or Facebook. That’s it
It’s less invasive, less annoying, and can do all the stuff like gifs and stickers. So it was very easy to get people onto compared to pretty much anything that was actually private or secure.
Once enough people started using it, it snowballed into its own monolith of bloat.
The UI was also very fast and transparent – not a lot of stuff separating somebody from the other people in their conversations, which was pretty solid even compared to other messaging apps of its day. Most people didn’t feel the need to fact-check its privacy and security claims because it worked good enough for them!
I assumed the popularity was not in the privacy scene, but rather in general population, just because of usability. It is just a more usable alternative to Whatsapp or VKontakte. It is pretty much the default messaging platform for young people like Whatsapp is for older ones.
in some circles yeah.
In Germany it actually became famous because it allowed for huge groups and it’s where covid misinformation breeding grounds took off. People thought you were a nutjob if you had telegram lol.
Which, while that is the dumbest reason to reject a chat app, at least meant that Signal was able to get more popular with uhhh smarter folks.
It’s popular with furries because of sticker support. Furries are an anchor population for the larger world of IT/etc. It was never really about privacy, or signal would have taken off.
Maybe because it offers public chats and channels? Something other apps lack.
Also the best desktop experience out of all apps I’ve tried.
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By lying aggressively.
Lying about being the first phone app with E2EE (they’re not even close, by over a decade if we count J2ME apps) because Signal was called TextSecure back when telegram didn’t even exist yet. Lying about their protocol, lying about their backup system (if you’re using group chats or regular chats which are backed up they are visible to the admins and any other claim is a lie), bullshit propaganda against Signal, etc…
Oh and by the way, Signal has now finally launched usernames, so you don’t have to share your phone number to use it anymore.
Telegram came out a year earlier in that signal, and because immediately popular amongst young people and drug dealers in Russia
I think the big reason that nobody’s mentioned yet is simply that they were earlier. Back when projects like Tox and Matrix were first starting to pop up, telegram was already fully formed. Signal didn’t come until at least a year later and didn’t have feature parity until several years later. Telegram by contrast was a much closer experience to WhatsApp and Messenger, making the transition much easier, particularly for low-tech knowledge users.
So what do you use to send, receive and store 2GB ish files to other people?
Edit: Would be great if some non-selfhosting solution was suggested here.
Magic wormhole, Bitorrent
How do you share using BitTorrent. I had a lot of problem sharing with BT, especially on tracker choosing reasons and port problems.
Depends what people
For family and friends I have nextcloud, many of them are using it (yes, i’m that one out of a million people who made their friends and family use selfhosted stuff and be happy)
I use Pingvin Share to share one or more files. Have set the max limit for each share to 4 GB. All files will be stored temporary which is awesome privacy-wise.
I will probably up this one, it’s really a lot of materials, and articles, and news if you read behind all this war and politics stuff
You should really search, I tried to compile all I could find, but I’m here to stop using tg, not going back to tg and scroll Russian opposition channels for all the mentions of stuff like that
There are some articles in English that describe the events, but most of them are in Russian
Also, from the search it’s really hard to find anything because a lot of stuff about the war
Here are a few topics:
- Telegram leaking location
- Telegram leaking IP address
- Deleted many years ago chats/messages were recovered remotely (just recently)
- Telegram is delaying source code publishing
- The source code’s build has a different hash and a few mb smaller than the release
- Their data sharing reports are empty although they were openly giving data to authorities in e.g. Germany
Compilation of different technical vulnerabilities and issues of telegram(in Russian):
- https://habr.com/ru/articles/206900/
- https://habr.com/ru/articles/252911/
- https://xakep.ru/2018/10/31/telegram-plain-text-chats/
- https://habr.com/ru/articles/460655/
- https://habr.com/ru/articles/744316/
And in general, Russian government unbanned tg after it realized it can read it. I wouldn’t trust anything that was unbanned in Russia or China
And one more article that lists issues of telegram: https://emisare.medium.com/так-ли-безопасен-telegram-f5a3128a1311
I’m already tired of doing this, I didn’t even start on activists and how they get hacked and stuff
I posted this down below in a comment thread but I’m afraid it won’t be seen and not enough people know about this.
Session was at first a fork of Signal without usernames.
Now by design it uses their own custom tor-like service (instead of just… using tor) and does not support forward secrecy or deniable authentication, so anyone who collects the messages in transit can either find a vulnerability in the encryption scheme, or spend enough GPU resources to crack it, and they have confirmation of who sent and received the message and what the contents of the message are. And is headquartered in Australia, which is 5EYES and much more against encryption than the US. Oh, and the server is closed-source.
Regarding Australia’s 2018 bill…
The Australian Parliament passed a contentious encryption bill on Thursday to require technology companies to provide law enforcement and security agencies with access to encrypted communications. Privacy advocates, technology companies and other businesses had strongly opposed the bill, but Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government said it was needed to thwart criminals and terrorists who use encrypted messaging programs to communicate.
Regarding the ‘vulnerability or cracking them later’ bit…
Messages that are sent to you are actually sent to your swarm. The messages are temporarily stored on multiple Service Nodes within the swarm to provide redundancy. Once your device picks up the messages from the swarm, they are automatically deleted from the Service Nodes that were temporarily storing them.
From Session’s own FAQ:
Session clients do not act as nodes on the network, and do not relay or store messages for the network. Session’s network architecture is closer to a client-server model, where the Session application acts as the client and the Service Node swarm acts as the server. Session’s client-server architecture allows for easier asynchronous messaging (messaging when one party is offline) and onion routing-based IP address obfuscation, relative to peer-to-peer network architectures.
I wouldn’t touch it with a 12ft ladder.
The thing I find most suspicious is their “onion routing”. An average Joe like me cannot run a node like he can do with I2P or Tor. There is a gigantic upfront payment for that. So that ensures the nodes would be run by crypto bros, companies and governments.
As an Australian, either.do I. They are in Mastodon and I have pointed out that being in Australia should make them a no go for anyone.
FYI, regular Signal now has usernames available with the option to hide your phone number switched on by default (you may still need tithe beta release for the next few months since it’s staggered rollout)
Signal still requires a SIM card & an Android or iOS primary device. Usernames here just let you cloak your phone number, not keep it a secret from the service.
Am i the only one who doesnt use telegram for porn
Nah.
I use it for drugs.
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Nobody in this entire thread of FUD has posted a single link to support any claim of Russian data intrusion.
I mean from what I gather e2ee is not on by default (and unsuppoeted in group) and is proprietary.
The link below talks about why that is; Telegram focuses on features over maximize privacy.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/telegram-encryption-end-to-end-features
Here’s a recent article, Telegram’s Connection to the Kremlin.
A lot of speculation that does end with this in the article:
"After discussing her case with experts, Matsapulina now believes her Telegram messages may have been compromised by a form of spyware. When she was told that a hacking device would need to be physically nearby to infiltrate her phone, a memory resurfaced: At times before her arrest, she had noticed an unmarked truck with a dome on its roof parked outside her building. She had even jokingly mentioned it to friends on Telegram. Now, she remembered, as the police were banging on her door that morning, she’d spotted the same mystery vehicle parked outside. By the time the police stormed her home, the vehicle was gone.
Matsapulina has since started using Telegram again."
Most messaging apps are vulnerable on the client side with spyware, no matter what E2EE exists along the way.
Russian authorities usually just hijack login sms confirmation codes. This is a common practice in Russia. Not denying that something else shady might be going on, but I do know mobile providers there don’t even bother to ask why - they just provide shit on demand.
Probably this might be related to why tencent removed cloud backups from WeChat. It used to be like telegram, when you login it loaded all the previous messages, now when you login using the sms confirmation code you need to ask (with a different chat app!) three friends to send you a session specific passcode and then all the previous chat history is wiped clean.
(It was a problem to login back to me as I didn’t have three friends)
