Comment by axegon_

9 hours ago

A lot of companies do this but I always get a ton of hate for saying this: Telegram is the worst offender I've seen. If you start digging through their apps, you see a ton of security practices that are anything but secure. And one of the hundreds of reasons I treat Telegram as the plague: get it away from me and burn it with fire.

I've never seen a legit good hearted person ever use Telegram. It's usually what grifters and scammers prefer to use. Or Signal.

  • My family uses it to communicate on devices that don't support iMessage (mainly Windows and Linux installs) because it's one of the precious few cross-platform messengers that doesn't treat desktop users as second class or as an afterthought.

  • Signal is legit. The entire stack is open source, and messages are E2EE.

    Telegram is connected to Eastern European and the Middle Eastern countries and not in a good way, and the server-side components are closed source. There is no E2EE by default.

  • There's a few communities that use Telegram because it seems to be one of the few that is both generally usable by the average person and by default has at least a little respect for separating your online identity from your real life identity. Which is sad because I agree it's a bit of a dumpster fire when it comes to security and privacy beyond that.

  • Counterpoint: I have. Although Telegram is less popular in the US. I try to get all my friends using Signal.

    I prefer to keep the contents of my message secure from the panopticon.

  • > I've never seen a legit good hearted person ever use Telegram. It's usually what grifters and scammers prefer to use. Or Signal.

    TIL I'm not a legit good hearted person.

    Guess I'll remove myself from the organ donation registry.