You know Telegram is secure when every government in the world is trying to ban it.
Just use Signal if you want an easy, relatively privacy friendly and secure messenger.
Telegram hands over data to goverments, is infested with spammers and scammers and its encryption is not end to end for group chat which lets Telegram access those chats.
Edit: Telegram is great for lots of things like big groups, communities, piracy, drugs etc but its just not the place where you should expect secure communication.
I’m not using Signal as long as Signal Foundation is based in the US. Also Signal is not on FDroid, so I can’t use it anyway.
But RusSSian/UAE-based Telegram is fine? 😂
Also, it really doesn’t matter where Signal is based, as long as it’s client code is open source and it uses E2EE by default. Telegram doesn’t encrypt chats by default, and even if you enable ‘secret chats’ it uses a pretty weak encryption protocol.
Btw the official version of Telegram isn’t available on F-Droid either, only a fork called Telegram-FOSS. You can get the exact same thing for Signal from a 3rd-party repo: https://www.twinhelix.com/apps/signal-foss/, or use Molly.
I hijack the post to ask for a telegram client suggestions?
Spain? Really? I thought they had a pretty left government?
This is one of the rare things where the Spanish left and right agree, for different reasons.
Simplifying a lot:
- The left generally supports culture, actors, theatre, writers, Spanish made movies. They see piracy as a threat to the earnings of those people.
- The right has historically cut any sorts of subsidies to the “culture creators”, but they see piracy as a threat to the publishing, TV (…) industries.
They both support SGAE, which translates cleanly to the General Society of Authors and Editors, who protects their interests by charging fees to everyone who dares look at copyrighted work.
- You own a bar and you play TV, Radio, or Spotify? You have to pay SGAE.
- You buy a computer, part of the money goes to SGAE.
- You buy a blank CD, DVD, Hard Drive, you pay SGAE (because they know you will put copyrighted material there, and if you don’t, well, fuck you)
It’s a fucked up system and I don’t know if things have changed in the past few years as I don’t live in Spain anymore. But it honestly feels like a prosecution of the population who is so evil and trying to destroy Spanish Culture.
Tbh switzerland has a similar system to the SGAE, where there is a “hidden tax” on all devices that you can load with data. And in turn the downloading of media (with the exclusion of computerprograms and games) is legal. Only the upload of copyrighted material is forbidden.
Not a bad system imo, the tax is so small that you dont really notice it so its a pretty consumer-friendly and piracy-friendly solution. Altho I assume the swiss government gets away with it because it would be too expensive to lobby/legal for a copyrightsholder-favoured system compared with the small amount of people (let alone pirate) who live here.
Honestly, Telegram sucks. Use Signal for private communications and Matrix for groups/communities.
It’s the best app when it comes to functionality. It has it all.
Can you name a feature that other apps are missing?
- You can schedule messages
- Have supergroups, subgroups, broadcasts, admin roles in groups,…
- Channels can be configured in various ways. For example, you can post messages and choose the type of previews links render.
- You can add voting options to posts
- Members of the channel can only reply in threads so the replies are bundled.
- You can decide wheter new group members can view chat history or not.
- Members can be muted.
- Bots can be built withing the app
- Chats can be arranged in folders *…
I could go on.
Also Telegram Mini Apps.
We don’t need a RuSSian version of WeChat.
Does Telegram have anything that torrents and usenet don’t?
It’s normie-accessible
