Comment by tamimio

Signal has probably the worst UX of any messaging app. It also used to require sharing phone numbers to add contacts, which imo is already a privacy violation.

Telegram is fast, responsive, gets frequent updates, has great group chat, tons of animated emojis, works flawlessly on all desktop and mobile platforms, has great support for media, bots, and a great API, allows edits and deleting messages for all users, and I really like the sync despite it not being e2e.

The worst UX you can provide. Clumsy, slowly switching views, search worse than on WhatsApp, stickers like from 2005, no formatting, no bot API (of course there are few "hacked" ones implementations, but is it really the way?), margin and padding bloated UI.

# No smooth animations - that's makes Telegram stand out from everything else here, but maybe not everyone is happy when 6-core phones can deliver something more than 60fps in 2024...

That's what I remember and yes - mostly those are probably easy to fix UI/UX features/bugs, but even being open-source - they aren't.

Telegram is great for large groups. It's better to compare Telegram to Reddit than Signal.

Signal is excellent for tiny groups of known participants. I prefer it over anything else for this use case. The group permissions Signal introduced a few years ago are well suited for that purpose. I've recently started running small groups on Signal with about 100 participants who mostly know each other, but not tightly. The recent addition of phone number privacy makes this feasible.

Once you start moving up in scale you really need moderation tools, and Signal doesn't do so well there. When you have thousands of people and it's open to the public you need to moderate or else bad actors will cause your valuable contributors to leave. Basic permissions like having admins who can kick people out and restricting how new members can join only gets you so far.

The issue is that in Signal there is no group as far as the server is concerned: The state of the group exists only on client devices and is updated in a totally asynchronous manner. As a consequence it is more difficult for Signal to provide such features. For example, Signal currently has no means to temporarily mute users, to remove posts from all group members, easy bots to deal with spam, granting specific users special privileges like ability to pin messages, transferable group ownership as opposed to a flat "admin" privilege, etc.

Think about the consequences of Signal's async nature with no server state: What does it mean to kick someone out? An admin sends a group update message that tells other clients to stop including that user in future messages. Try this: Have a group member just delete Signal and then re-register. Send a message to the group. They're still in the group. You get an identity has changed message. These are really only actionable with people who you know... that is, in tiny groups.

And then, the biggest strengths of Signal, which are its end to end encryption and heroic attempts to avoid giving the server metadata, are less valuable in the context of a large public group: Anyone interested in surveilling the group can simply join it, so you have to assume you're being logged anyway. Signal lacks strong identities as a design choice, so in big groups it's harder to know who you're really talking to like you know that "Joe Example, founder of Foo Project" is @Foo1988 on Telegram and @FooOfficial on X and u/0xFooMan on Reddit.

This is one of those questions where it's hard to answer but it's obvious once you use it.

What's the difference between a fiat and a ferrari? What's the difference between CentOS and Linux Mint? What's the difference between a macdonalds and a michelin burger?

I have friends and groups on both platforms. On Signal, I'm basically just sending messages (and only unimportant one, like, when are we meeting. Sending media mostly sucks so I generally only have very dry chats on Signal).

Whereas on Telegram, I'm having fun. In fact it's so versatile, that my wife and I use it as a collaborative note-taking system, archiver, cvs, live shopping list, news app (currently browsing hackernews from telegram), etc. We basically have our whole life organised via Telegram. I lose count of all the features I use effortlessly on a daily basis, and only realise it when I find myself on another app. This is despite the fact that both Signal and whatsapp have since tried to copy some of these features, because they do so badly. A simple example that comes to mind: editing messages. It took years for whatsapp to be able to edit a message (I still remember the old asterisk etiquette to indicate you were issuing a correction to a previous message). Now you can, but it's horrible ux; I think you long press and then there's a button next to copy which opens a menu where you find a pencil which means edit, or sth like that. In telegram I don't even remember how you do it, because it's so intuitive that I don't have to.

Perhaps that's why I find the whole "Telegram encryption" discussion baffling to be honest. For me, it's just one of Telegram's many extra features you can use. You don't have to use it, but it's there if you want to. I don't feel like Telegram has ever tried to mislead its users that it's raison d'etre is for it to be a secret platform only useful if you're a terrorist (like the UK government seems to want to portray it recently).

I get the point about "encryption by default", but this doesn't come for free, there are usability sacrifices that come with it, and not everyone cares for it. Insisting that not having encryption by default marrs the whole app sounds similar to me saying not having a particular set of emojis set as the default marrs the whole app. It feels disingenuous somehow.

> What's in Telegram that you don't see in Signal?

The first feature that comes to mind for me is being able to use multiple devices. Signal only allows using it with one phone. If you add a second device, the first one stops working. You can use a computer and a phone, but not multiple phones. Telegram supports this without any issues. I still struggle to understand this limitation.

User base, large groups (I think the max is 200k members), channels, bots to automate work, animated stickers, video messages (not the calls one), and video/voice calls within the group (not sure if Signal has that), file storage and file sharing, multiple devices without worrying about losing messages -and you might mention the security part and that’s ok, I want the accessibility, if I want security I will look somewhere else- among other features. Those are on top of my head.

Cross-device message history for me. I can go back to my very first message sent. Signal to this day sucks for message history.

People.

Signal doesn't provide a web app, unlike Telegram.

For me, that I can just do apt install telegram-desktop

Good desktop client.

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