WhatsApp users are flocking to Telegram

pinball wizard said:
What the **** are you saying? I would love more people to use alternatives to mainstream apps in any instance.
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me as well, but then, as was the problem with whatscr@p,
get too big, and too much money comes in,
and guess what, human Greed is a thing.

so sell out to a corporation who DOESN'T value privacy and security
happened before, and will happen again.

would love something like this to get traction,
Conversations on Android, that uses Jabber or XMPP, that are open source protocols.
and you use whatever program you like to use,

kind of like how SMTP is, you can use outlook, Thunderbird or whatever you like,
but it works the same.
 
eg2505 said:
getting annoying seeing all the people suddenly joining telegram,
where were you guys for the last 10 years?
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They're like anti-Trumpers. They hardly bothered to follow US politics until Trump came along and now they're suddenly concerned. Same with WhatsApp's privacy policy changes.
 
pinball wizard said:
That's not really the point, and not really why people are up in arms about their recent policy change. It's a cute thing to say, but misses the mark entirely.
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Going forward sure Telegram might be better for future communications. But, WhatsApp already has all your dick pics.
 
eg2505 said:
been on Telegram for years and years, and now complaining everybody wakes up
and discovered they are sheep. and suddenly my nice quite home-screen is cluttered with all their chats

quite annoying really, as go somewhere else like Viber or line or any of the other dozen chat programs.
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I'm trying to figure out how everyone waking up is a bad thing. If they made the wrong choice in the past, now they change their minds to a better one... surely that's good? Or must a person be eternally condemned because of what messenger app they chose to install?

Also, you can turn off notifications for when a contact signs on. It's in the settings.

Why else are you using a chat program if you want to be left alone?

eg2505 said:
would love something like this to get traction,
Conversations on Android, that uses Jabber or XMPP, that are open source protocols.
and you use whatever program you like to use,
Click to expand...
Would you like to have the same central server but the freedom to use your own app? Telegram has that facility, AFAIK.

Or would you prefer a de-centralised / federated thing? Briar, Session and Jami all take that approach, I'm testing them out right now. (I have a thread on it, it's almost a ghost-town...)

Or both? There's a protocol called Matrix, which I haven't tried out in anger. It has its own technical challenges, it's not really mature yet AFAIK.

XMPP still exists, but it's not terribly secure, and since Mxit's demise and Google Talk having undergone so many revisions, I'm not sure how many servers still exist. You can run your own if you want.

The problem that all of these have is a lack of mainstream adoption. So they're all interesting ideas but so far I'm finding them fairly useless at their main stated purpose.

Although if you want a nice clean home-screen with no notifications, they might be just what you need.
 
May AppsWhat fall - their direct links to Big Tech and how Big Tech is now, at this very minute, censoring, de-platforming, shadow banning any and everybody, left-right-and-center that DOES NOT agree with Big Tech's 'religion' or point-of-view...well, they must go and fukc themselves.

This article from the horse's mouth so to speak:

''I hear Facebook has an entire department devoted to figuring out why Telegram is so popular. Imagine dozens of employees working on just that full-time.

I am happy to save Facebook tens of millions of dollars and give away our secret for free: respect your users.

Millions of people are outraged by the latest change in WhatsApp Terms, which now say users must feed all their private data to Facebook’s ad engine [1]. It’s no surprise that the flight of users from WhatsApp to Telegram, already ongoing for a few years, has accelerated.

At about 500 million users and growing, Telegram has become a major problem for the Facebook corporation. Unable to compete with Telegram in quality and privacy, Facebook’s WhatsApp seems to have switched to covert marketing: Wikipedia editors have recently exposed multiple paid bots adding biased information into the WhatsApp Wikipedia article [2].

We have also detected bots that spread inaccurate information about Telegram on social media. Here are the 3 myths they are pushing:

Myth 1. “Telegram’s code is not open-source”. In reality, all Telegram client apps have been open-source since 2013 [3]. Our encryption and API are fully documented and have been reviewed by security experts thousands of times. Moreover, Telegram is the only messaging app in the world that has verifiable builds both for iOS and Android [4]. As for WhatsApp, they intentionally obfuscate their code, making it impossible to verify their encryption and privacy.

Myth 2. “Telegram is Russian”. In fact, Telegram has no servers or offices in Russia and was blocked there from 2018 to 2020 [5]. Telegram is still blocked in some authoritarian countries such as Iran, while WhatsApp and other “supposedly secure” apps have never had any issue in these places.

Myth 3. “Telegram is not encrypted”. Every chat on Telegram has been encrypted since launch. We have Secret Chats that are end-to-end and Cloud Chats that also offer real-time secure and distributed cloud storage [6]. WhatsApp, on the other hand, had zero encryption for a few years, and then adopted an encryption protocol funded by the US Government [7]. Even if we assume that the WhatsApp encryption is solid, it’s invalidated via multiple backdoors and reliance on backups [8].

In 2019 alone, Facebook spent almost 10 billion dollars on marketing [9] (I guess this includes paid bots on Wikipedia and other sites).

Unlike Facebook, Telegram doesn't spend any money, let alone billions of dollars, on marketing. We believe that people are smart enough to choose what is best for them. And, judging by the half a billion people using Telegram, this belief is justified.

[1] – WhatsApp Gives Users Ultimatum – Share Data with Facebook or Lose Access (https://www.trustedreviews.com/news...are-data-with-facebook-or-lose-access-4117377)
[2] – In December 2020, the Wikipedia article about WhatsApp had the label “This article may have been created or edited in return for undisclosed payments, a violation of Wikipedia's terms of use”.
 
yes, complaining everybody suddenly wakes up and realizes what idiots they are.

just like the mixit/BBM days, when everybody used one system and to hell with the "much better" rest.
Ive turned off my setting that automatically adds, but they still keep showing up. quite annoying,
where were you for the last 10 years?

so its as if people woke up from a coma, and realized what Whatsapp is and how it defeats their privacy.

Telegram is good, but again, wasn't Whatsapp is the same boat as them a few years back?
somebody will write a cheque to Telegram, and hey presto,

Telegram belongs to Microsoft.
or Google or Blackberry or whoever.
 
eg2505 said:
yes, complaining everybody suddenly wakes up and realizes what idiots they are.

just like the mixit/BBM days, when everybody used one system and to hell with the "much better" rest.
Ive turned off my setting that automatically adds, but they still keep showing up. quite annoying,
where were you for the last 10 years?

so its as if people woke up from a coma, and realized what Whatsapp is and how it defeats their privacy.

Telegram is good, but again, wasn't Whatsapp is the same boat as them a few years back?
somebody will write a cheque to Telegram, and hey presto,

Telegram belongs to Microsoft.
or Google or Blackberry or whoever.
Click to expand...
Then we'll just move on over to Signal or Threema https://threema.ch/en/messenger-comparison or one of the zillion others that'll pop up.
 
I don't have a such problem with Telegram as such but this is somewhat misleading.

Slegdehammer67 said:
Myth 1. “Telegram’s code is not open-source”. In reality, all Telegram client apps have been open-source since 2013 [3]. Our encryption and API are fully documented and have been reviewed by security experts thousands of times. Moreover, Telegram is the only messaging app in the world that has verifiable builds both for iOS and Android [4]. As for WhatsApp, they intentionally obfuscate their code, making it impossible to verify their encryption and privacy.
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While the clients are open-source, and they do document their architecture reasonably well, their server source code is not open, and it *could* be doing other stuff without them telling anyone.

They say it doesn't, and it probably isn't, but there's no way to know really unless they release the code.

Slegdehammer67 said:
Myth 2. “Telegram is Russian”. In fact, Telegram has no servers or offices in Russia and was blocked there from 2018 to 2020 [5]. Telegram is still blocked in some authoritarian countries such as Iran, while WhatsApp and other “supposedly secure” apps have never had any issue in these places.
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But it doesn't have no links to Russia at all. The founders are Russian. They're not in Russia anymore, and they have a habit of fighting with the Russian authorities. It's not hard to explain this though, and just saying "we have no servers or offices in Russia" while technically the truth, leaves out an important piece of information.

Slegdehammer67 said:
Myth 3. “Telegram is not encrypted”. Every chat on Telegram has been encrypted since launch. We have Secret Chats that are end-to-end and Cloud Chats that also offer real-time secure and distributed cloud storage [6]. WhatsApp, on the other hand, had zero encryption for a few years, and then adopted an encryption protocol funded by the US Government [7]. Even if we assume that the WhatsApp encryption is solid, it’s invalidated via multiple backdoors and reliance on backups [8].
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To my knowledge, the Signal protocol was not funded by the US government. They (the US government) probably hate that it exists, it was mostly done in response to the PRISM programme.
It's also disingenuous to say that there are multiple backdoors. Possible attack vectors have been demonstrated by security researchers but it's not known whether those are exploited.

Telegram messages OTOH are encrypted, but Telegram also holds the keys to decrypt them. So take that for what it's worth.
 
backstreetboy said:
Then we'll just move on over to Signal or Threema https://threema.ch/en/messenger-comparison or one of the zillion others that'll pop up.
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problem, as @newby_investor pointed out, is the users move to whatever in fashion now. danm annoying, like sheep.
I mean wouldn't it be great, if you on whatsapp, could message me on telegram,
while speaking to a colleague using viber and another on Line.

one standard, to rule them all, and you can use whatever you want to connect.
again, like SMTP or POP was for email.
 
newby_investor said:
I don't get it. So you'd rather that everybody stay asleep and remain idiots?
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they did up to now, only a few ventured out and tried telegram, and were happy
to use it instead of whatsapp.

now its become like Whatsapps baby brother,
and Human greed is a thing.

somebody will throw money at them, and "own" telegram
 
eg2505 said:
problem, as @newby_investor pointed out, is the users move to whatever in fashion now. danm annoying, like sheep.
I mean wouldn't it be great, if you on whatsapp, could message me on telegram,
while speaking to a colleague using viber and another on Line.

one standard, to rule them all, and you can use whatever you want to connect.
again, like SMTP or POP was for email.
Click to expand...
It was tried with XMPP but failed.
 
eg2505 said:
I mean wouldn't it be great, if you on whatsapp, could message me on telegram,
while speaking to a colleague using viber and another on Line.

one standard, to rule them all, and you can use whatever you want to connect.
again, like SMTP or POP was for email.
Click to expand...

I see what you mean. And in principle, I agree with you. But I just don't see a practical way to make that work. Each of these things have subtle differences which make proper interoperability impossible.

Plus the owners of the respective services likely won't want to work together.

eg2505 said:
Human greed is a thing.

somebody will throw money at them, and "own" telegram
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Maybe, maybe not. I hope not. I think that Telegram's owners won't sell out. I wouldn't bet my life on it though.
 
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