People who had you listed will just see “Deleted Account” instead of your name, and a little ghost as your avatar.

They will still see your chat history though.

There have been rumors from its start. I have no idea of their validity. Like anything, it’s hard to find the truth.

As for its encryption, while I dislike it’s not open source, and it’s deserving of some criticism, there have been no reported cracks of it that I’m aware.

That said, it seems to store your public key on the server (though I’m not sure of this), which is not ideal, for sure.

But whatsapp is still a better second messenger than telegram.

You didn’t mean that.

Unpopular but true take.

I didn’t use WhatsApp for the last like 3 years already

I have already got rid of the Sim card, but want to setup some sip Sim cards at home for package delivery and work

So like, using WhatsApp is pretty pointless at this point

I miss Wikr

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.

Telegram came out a year earlier in that signal, and because immediately popular amongst young people and drug dealers in Russia

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.

Maybe because it offers public chats and channels? Something other apps lack.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 till several years later.

Comparing telegram to WhatsApp is something really 2015 😅

Now we have many alternatives, and let’s just switch, fb and telegram both suck compared to signal, simplex, session, or even matrix (wait for the new matrix’ update where they add some new encryption stuff)

then your public key is stored in the server

Did you mean private key?

@BearOfaTime Secret chats are tied to a specific device afaik tho.

Edit: yes!

Secret chats are meant for people who want more secrecy than the average fella. All messages in secret chats use end-to-end encryption. This means only you and the recipient can read those messages — nobody else can decipher them, including us here at Telegram (more on this here). On top of this, Messages cannot be forwarded from secret chats. And when you delete messages on your side of the conversation, the app on the other side of the secret chat will be ordered to delete them as well.

You can order your messages, photos, videos and files to self-destruct in a set amount of time after they have been read or opened by the recipient. The message will then disappear from both your and your friend's devices.

All secret chats in Telegram are device-specific and are not part of the Telegram cloud. This means you can only access messages in a secret chat from their device of origin. They are safe for as long as your device is safe in your pocket.

(from their FAQ)

@Gooey0210

Telegram hasn’t been secure since basically day 1. IIRC it went something like

Security experts: Never roll your own cryptography.
Telegram: We rolled our own cryptography!
Security experts: Don’t. And it’s broken.
Telegram: uhhhh… We fixed it.
Security experts: It still looks really bad. Stop doing that. Telegram: says nothing

Telegram is still the best alternative despite whatever some russia-phobics in this comment section fantasize about. Anything only remotely russia related raises maximum skepticism and paranoia, like seriously wtf. Telegram is better than whatsapp in e.g.features, and more popular than element or signal so anyhow is the best all around messaging app at the moment.

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.