columbusAll of Telegram's Lies About Privacy
Nothing new here. E2E is only available in one on one chats and is disabled by default.
At least Telegram has an open-source client. Very few messaging platforms can say that, and fewer have a decent UX.
It’s not perfect, but it’s got the best combination of features and multi-platform availability by quite a bit. None of the other messaging apps support all of my devices except Matrix, and Matrix doesn’t have stickers
E2E is only available in one on one chats and is disabled by default.
Considering that there’s no technical problem with enabling it for all one-on-one chats, this tells a lot.
Also no E2EE on desktops.
I hate TG’s UX. It’s atrocious. WhatsApp is the closest to something normal, but imperfect too.
At least it has an open-source client.
Chromium is an open-source browser.
OK, more specifically - what matters is that TG’s protocol is a big ugly target moving fast. So its official client with released sources is in practice the only one. There are things like libpurple plugin and some python TUI client and an emacs one, but they are all lagging behind. And I think they are all using official tdlib.
This tells something too, that their talk about possibility of alternative clients is of the same kind as their talk about privacy.
About the network effect - bring your family and friends to Signal one by one. Of course it won’t happen overnight.