Comment by ornornor

>Telegram has way, way more features than Signal.

Except when you enable E2EE, you lose a lot of the features like stickers.

Also, enabling E2EE manually leaks additional metadata about intent to hide content from the service provider. That's insanely valuable even if you can't see the content.

Telegram treats E2EE like a door wreath hung from a nail. Practically all private messengers like Signal treat it like the foundations of the building.

>much better behavior for large groups

Telegram leaks a group as large as the size of 3 members, to the server, always, with ZERO way to opt-out. That's not better behavior. Whatever seasoning you apply on top of a turd, won't change what you're eating.

>far more sophisticated and granular permissions system for admins in groups

Yeah when you remove the "server has no ability to control the group" security feature you can do all sorts of things really easily.

>It also has way more security features too, such as the ability for any session to de-auth any other session

Way more in this case is clearly one. And this is a trade-off. Any of your devices gets stolen and the attacker can lock you out.

>so you're screwed if you lose that.

No you can keep backups in the cloud these days to recover your account. Unlike Telegram, the backups are actually encrypted so that the service provider can't read them.

>Also tons of detailed permissions for who is allowed to see what information of yours and add you to groups.

You mean, it allows you to control to whom the service provider yields the data. But the main privacy issue with Facebook, Telegram and any other surveillance capitalistic platform is the service provider. And Telegram isn't fixing Telegram learning everything about you.

>The only thing Signal actually does better is E2EE for groups.

Signal does EVERY thing better because every feature is private by design. Even if there's UX stuff to fix. You wouldn't claim some Trojan horse malware is really good because the game crack works and you can play a 30 dollar game while it steals your entire digital life or demands random or whatever.

>I think it's simplistic and short-sighted that many tech people seem to think that "security" means E2EE and absolutely nothing else.

In private messaging apps security begins with E2EE. Then you add tons of other features, like forward secrecy (Signal does it better than Telegram), future secrecy (Signal does it better than Telegram), Post-quantum security (Signal has it and Telegram doesn't), cross-platform messages usage (Telegram has no cross-platform E2EE), default security (Telegram has none), and that's just content. There's much more private tools for metadata protection, and on top of that you have advanced issues like endpoint security to deal with. E2EE is the bare minimum for e.g. PrivacyGuides app recommendations, and Telegram can't even cross that bar.

The onboarding experience with Telegram is extremely easy, which is useful when dealing with non-technical audiences who might not even have a social media account (but do have smart phones).

My Bible study class has grown enough that standard SMS/MMS group texts are hitting up against Verizon's carrier limit (I think we have only two people who use Verizon), and RCS isn't an option. Telegram wasn't my first choice, but it was a lot easier for everyone, and it supports tablets out-of-the-box.

Matrix also has that.

It's just extremely scamming or disinformation friendly

It's less about what they have but what the people they want to communicate are using.