I have tried to google, most of them were assumptions or russian agencies using ISPs to login to their account in which case its not telegrams fault. Can you provide a substantial proof?

That article literally praises telegram despite being non e2ee by default, authorities can only get ip address and phone number from it (those are public info already and both of them could be avoided by using voip amd paid VPNs), that just proves how solid mtproto have become. Also they are saying one can see your telegram message when they are physically logged in your account for which the Russian authorities took the help of their ISP, in that case its not telegrams fault, set up 2fa on your account or use VoIP.

They dont ban apple tho

When it comes to clients being not fully compatible - I understand where there might be a problem, but I personally never encountered it. Conversations covers Android, and Gajim is on both Windows and Linux. In my experience, they work just fine with each other, and Android+Windows+Linux covers the majority.

I do use Signal with a few people who refused to use XMPP, but I’d disagree they have good clients for every platform. Because the desktop one essentially doesn’t work without a smartphone. Registering in something like Waydroid doesn’t allow binding a desktop client because it wants to scan a QR code, and Signal-Cli just didn’t work with binding a regular client. So I am stuck using the inconvenient Signal-cli, because the only alternative I saw so far would be using it on Waydroid, which is even less convenient. Not to mention that the client itself is on Electron.

Yea, ive gotten pretty wide adoption from friends and family on Signal, but id love to have a comparable product with even more features/security/privacy

Matrix may get there eventually, but for now its Signal.

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You obviously haven’t seen the charts of the metadata that WhatsApp collects. And we know how anti-consuner, adversarial and anti-privacy Facebook is overall with their tracking pixels, ghost profiles, etc.

Telegram at least doesn’t have the FB dataset. FB knows about me, though I’ve never once in my life been on their website or used anything related to them. Not once. The first I heard of FB I saw immediately the privacy problem with them, and made sure to never have anything to do with them. But they know about me from other peoe posting pics and such, which they then correlate with sites I’ve been on that have tracking pixels. WhatsApp ads a metric shitton of metadata to that pile, with date, time, location, duration of conversations, businesses you’re near at the time, their operating hours, etc, etc. They have a massive, constantly growing dataset, which they can easily correlate elements.

WhatsApp may be encrypted, but I trust Zuck so little that I wouldn’t doubt they capture keystrokes in app before the message is sent. They have the capability as was shown in a recent research article (though no evidence of it happening).

Id rather not use Telegram, but it’s far lesser of the two evils. I’m trying to get folks to other apps. Signal doesn’t sell, SimpleX isn’t quite ready, I think Wire has the same stored encryption key issue, though I may be mistaken (I’m not fully clear how it’s managed).

And that UX makes it a hard sell to non-tech/privacy folks.

I had a few converts, then they pulled SMS. My converts left.

Telegram has its problems, I completely agree the encryption issue is problematic. But how do you get non-tech people to use a tool like this when to have a new device get the history, or signing into multiple devices simultaneously, requires transmitting an encryption key? I really don’t know.

I know SimpleX is working on this very issue - their current approach requires switching between active devices by scanning a QR code (or sharing code between devices out-of-band). So currently only one device can be active with your credsntials/ID. It has an ok UI, I’d say slightly better than Signal. But it’s security and privacy are just about the best I’ve seen.

This seems to be the big hurdle - people want a simple login, most don’t care if their convos are stored in servers iut means they can just login.

I’m using telegram with a few people for just this reason, since it gets us off SMS. They like that they can use whatever device is in front of them.

Getting people to switch to Telegram is far easier than anything else, since it’s UI is much better than Signal, Wire, XMPP clients (which can be some of the best).

We know exactly how bad Whatsapp is from a privacy standpoint - I’d choose telegram over it any day.

the fact that E2EE is opt-in already makes this app ridiculous

in matter of privacy, yes. But it have cool features so.

They’re stored in plain text on Telegram servers

No, non secret chats use mptroto but with different schema, thats not plain servers. And no data breach have been reported in telegram yet if it was “that” easy to breach them. From my last comment: “Also the research you shared is based on mtproto 1.0 which telegram abandoned almost a decade ago and there have been No such defects found in mtproto 2 yet.”