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Telegram starts to look like a super app, echoing WeChat
(techcrunch.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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Telegram is a suprisingly good app.
I wish other apps were half as good as Telegram.
It bothers me that the major complaint is not the privacy issues or the people who own it behind the scenes...
but the technology used to build the desktop application. Electron is just a tool.
Owned by the Russians
Partnered with the ~~CCP~~ Tencent
Hasn't the founder been a vocal critic of Russia for years, including the Ukraine war? I don't really see why that would be a concern, especially since Telegram is supposedly owned by a US LLC
Russia has an army of "vocal critics" who play an important role in the pantomime, you see them on RT regularly. It doesn't prove anything.
Sure, but they were compromised by Russia in June 2020.
a yes, the ceo that isn't on russia and is viewd as a criminal for being against the war?
If that's the definition of trustworthy Prigozhin was a saint
Prigo was definitely not against the war.
Better than being owned by Americans.
Why does it need to be owned by anyone? There are chat protocols that are public knownleage.
"the russians" is the new "the jews" but for liberals, right?
Nah more “the Nazis” vibes to it really.
Russians didn't invade Iraq, Americans did.
America has invaded a lot of places and I’d not recommend people use services from there either if you value privacy.
Especially if you are Muslim. I remember a data being sent from a French-origin Muslim-targetted international app to the US army!!!
Whataboutism detected.
Whataboutism is the logical and correct response to hypocrites.
Actually, it's a logical fallacy.
hah, this is ridiculous.
I will continue to point out hypocrisy. You do your thing.
Telegram has the best clients ever. But those clients need to connect to something and this is where we encounter a big problem.
But isn't that the whole point of a messaging service? Connect to something else that's not local and have your messages exchanged?
I think smileyhead is alluding to the fact that Telegram servers are not open source, just the clients are.
Why would it matter if the servers are open source? How would you ever verify they are running the exact build they claim they are?
I'd like to at the very least be able to run my own server. Not even necessarily federated with the original ones. Just run my own instance if I don't trust the main one runs what they claim.
It's not about what build they are running. It matters because somebody just glancing at it might misinterpret the situation as "Telegram is open source", but it actually isn't because the server isn't. Just some clients are, which is pretty useless if you can't run a server to talk to them. Just for arguments sake, let's say Telegram gets busted tomorrow in an international sting operation and all their servers get taken offline. The clients will be entirely useless at that point, somebody would have to reverse engineer the server.
By running it myself, duh.
Not open source, centralized servers that store messages mostly without E2EE. By using Telegram we are locking ourself in situation where they can turn the knobs as they like, while we can't do anything about it.
For whatsapp nothing is opensource
That's kind of an apples an oranges comparison, WhatsApp doesn't even try to present a facade of being open source. Telegram does, betting that the distinction between server and client code will go over most peoples heads, which it probably does to be honest.
There are two realistic alternatives with hundreds of millions of users. Whatsapp has a closed source client, Telegram has an open source one. The choice for me is easy.
That sounds like a false dichotomy and I'm not sure why you even think the number of users is relevant. Why not choose something fully open source?
Because there is no alternative that is on my friends phone.
yeah it is too good for just to be called a messaging app, hope it will be more privacy focused
Well, thats also easy since telegram clients dont do much more than displaying messages stored on a server. Its more a viewer than a full client.
And that compromises hard on privacy and security, which Signal and Whatsapp dont do, they have proper Clients that have to really handle and store incoming messages. And the E2EE makes it harder, developing an independent desktop client, like Signal always had and Whatsapp recently got. But both are mediocre at best, sure.
I prefer Telegram to something owned by an American corporation.
Being foss and available on Linux is the prerequisite, it doesn't make the app "good"
Yet WhatsApp is neither.