It was a many months transition, and it’s finally done
Fun thing, you can actually make a backup of all* your messages, groups, contacts, etc. So before leaving you can have all of your data in case you need that one contact or something
The final red flag was as that allegedly Russian authorities were messing with people’s deleted messages. Not for the first time there are news that they could read, modify, delete, see location, and etc. Screw it, this is unsafe, I’m out.
Also, these days telegram is really at the state of a pile of garbage, bloated, buggy, and shady messenger.
Good for you. I’m still don’t know how to move my friends and relatives to Signal. Any tips with that?
Keep bugging them. I almost exclusively use signal for messaging these days and it’s fantastic. It took longer to convince some people than others
Install a family XMPP server like Snikket or otherwise. Show them the benchmarks of how little battery & data plan drain is used from Conversations forks. Explain how bloated Electron apps are & how you don’t wish that on your loved ones vs. Dino, Gajim, or a TUI client. Sidecar a Movim server so y’all can share long-lived, non-ephemeral posts instead of losing memories like photos in some long group thread. Let them know their data is safe with you as the operator instead of some massive for-profit corporation—and if they don’t trust you, they are empowered to start their own server to interop.
(This tactic has yet to work for me, but I will keep running into that wall til it breaks 😃)
Do what I did. Let everyone you care about on TG that you’re closing that crap, with your reasons for doing so. Inform them of your moving to signal, session, whatever. Be clear that, otherwise, they can try calling you and wish them good luck. Close TG on the day you set as deadline. I did that and whomever didn’t get a Signal or Session account has to call me. I’ve never looked back.
Like that, also, a few months prior to the deletion turn off the notifications, and come there every few days, so people need to wait for your reply for days, and when you come you say “oh, I’m not using tg, I switched to signal/session/simplex/bird mail”
These are allngreat suggestions. Another huge advantage is that this help detoxify from the constant pinging with others.
My family is all on iMessage. I told them if they didn’t install Signal I wouldn’t reply to their texts.
At first, whenever they texted I would just reply with something that looked automated like “This user is no longer available via text message. Please install Signal if you wish to communicate.”
That’s freaking epic. Love it.
I did something similar and just sent a link to Signal when IPhone friends and family SMS’d me, worked…eventually :) (am on Android)
Easy! Just replace their usual SMS app with Signal, and then every contact they have that does use Signal is private and secure!
Oh. Wait. That’s exactly the functionality that Signal removed in their effort to ensure that Signal is never widely adopted…
I didn’t agree with their decision at all at the time, but now that I realize they made it a little while after it gained widespread adoption and people stopped using it because “Signal isn’t actually secure!” … seems like people were expecting a secure messenger to be, well, secure. So they would chat about anything and everything thinking “I am using a secure messenger, these messages can’t be read…” and tech ignorance is a dangerous thing if you’re trying to be secure. I would’ve preferred a colored window and un-closable message for SMS chats, but oh well. I like that they’ve introduced usernames so you don’t have to give out your real number.
One day I said that in the future I will only be available via Signal. If not there then there is still SMS. And so far everyone I have contact with regularly installed it eventually.
That’s exactly right.
Is it even possible to get a telegram account these days? I heard their SMS service was down or something making it impossible to sign up and they don’t support email.
Stop it with the creative commons link in your comments.
Also, there is nothing wrong with Telegram logins or new accounts.
Stop it with the creative commons link in your comments.
No.
Also, there is nothing wrong with Telegram logins or new accounts.
Just gave it a shot. Doesn’t work.
I get notifications of new contacts that join Telegram so it does. I don’t need to try it myself.
And I don’t understand your cc link and your down votes speak for themselves so stop the silliness.
And I don’t understand your cc link and your down votes speak for themselves so stop the silliness.
Do you fear what you don’t understand? “I don’t understand it, so stop”.
And I don’t care about downvotes. Go on, downvote. It has no real life effect.
Your link also has no real life effect.
Am i the only one who doesnt use telegram for porn
Nah.
I use it for drugs.
Deleted the app and account recently as well. I’m hoping that having the account deleted means that people don’t try to use it to message me there.
People who had you listed will just see “Deleted Account” instead of your name, and a little ghost as your avatar.
They will still see your chat history though.
What happened with Telegram? I’m unfamiliar with those particular rumors.
… But also definitely not a fan of it in general. Their app has had terrible encryption (when it’s even used) for a long time.
There have been rumors from its start. I have no idea of their validity. Like anything, it’s hard to find the truth.
As for its encryption, while I dislike it’s not open source, and it’s deserving of some criticism, there have been no reported cracks of it that I’m aware.
That said, it seems to store your public key on the server (though I’m not sure of this), which is not ideal, for sure.
There has been multiple breaks, like the good old 2^64 bruteforce attack when they used too short session identifiers, malleability issues that could let the server/hackers change your messages, reordering attacks, etc.
The “no reported cracks” thing is a red herring. You can make an intentionally broken cryptography system and claim it’s unbroken too.
And even if it was sound, it doesn’t really matter because the messages are decrypted by the server for all desktop and group chats, and probably most one-on-one chats too.
What the issue with them storing the public key?
Aside from not storing anything you don’t absolutely need to store, there shouldn’t be an issue there.
Typo
I have been living under a rock, what happened to Telegram?
It is not considered a good alternative as a messaging app for privacy folks and because the source code is not open, it is not E2E encrypted by default (you need to start a secret chat or something to make your conversation encrypted) if I remember correctly.
You remember incorrect. All Clients are open source:
Telegram apps are open source and support reproducible builds. Anyone can independently verify that Telegram apps you download from App Store or Google Play were built using the exact same code that we publish
In Fdroid there are also forks. But yes, their servers are closed source and centralized.
Still its not recommended. It requires Phone number and as you said its E2ee is not on by default and is not soooo good.
The final red flag was as that allegedly Russian authorities were messing with people’s deleted messages
I’m gonna need a source on that, since the creator himself was persecuted and telegram had layers of fake companies to stop Putin from getting to it.
Here’s what I found:
Over the past year, numerous dissidents across Russia have found their Telegram accounts seemingly monitored or compromised. Hundreds have had their Telegram activity wielded against them in criminal cases. Perhaps most disturbingly, some activists have found their “secret chats”—Telegram’s purportedly ironclad, end-to-end encrypted feature—behaving strangely, in ways that suggest an unwelcome third party might be eavesdropping. These cases have set off a swirl of conspiracy theories, paranoia, and speculation among dissidents, whose trust in Telegram has plummeted. In many cases, it’s impossible to tell what’s really happening to people’s accounts—whether spyware or Kremlin informants have been used to break in, through no particular fault of the company; whether Telegram really is cooperating with Moscow; or whether it’s such an inherently unsafe platform that the latter is merely what appears to be going on. … Elies Campo, who says he directed Telegram’s growth, business, and partnerships for several years, confirmed this general characterization to WIRED, as did a former Telegram developer. In other words, Telegram has the capacity to share nearly any confidential information a government requests. Users just have to trust that it won’t.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat/
I must agree on the bloated part. Telegram was awesome before Pavel got greedy and added more and more stuff that are just not related to any chat service, for an example payments and crypto.
I installed Snikket on my server few weeks ago and are now trying to move everyone to it. It seems to be a very slow process, though.
But I might keep Telegram only for the porn channels. Mighty good stuff!
By the way. Do you have the source for your claim that Russian authorities were messing with people’s deleted messages?
XMPP, 🙂
Oh, yeah, the porn channels are really good indeed
I’m thinking if I can access them from some telegram channel mirror
Well, Telegram already have a preview feature for every public channels. Just copy the direct link to the channel and add
/saftert.me/(or choose “Previous channel” without opening the link in Telegram) and you’re good to go. If only Pavel will add an RSS feed to that feed. That would be mighty-mighty awesome!More work to save the media files, though. You have to inspect the element and get the direct link to the image through
background-imagefor the classtgme_widget_message_photo_wrap. Much easier and takes less time to just save it inside Telegram, as of now.Good advice, but I will look into converting some to RSS and read in an RSS reader
Russian authorities usually just hijack login sms confirmation codes. This is a common practice in Russia. Not denying that something else shady might be going on, but I do know mobile providers there don’t even bother to ask why - they just provide shit on demand.
A lot of speculation that does end with this in the article:
"After discussing her case with experts, Matsapulina now believes her Telegram messages may have been compromised by a form of spyware. When she was told that a hacking device would need to be physically nearby to infiltrate her phone, a memory resurfaced: At times before her arrest, she had noticed an unmarked truck with a dome on its roof parked outside her building. She had even jokingly mentioned it to friends on Telegram. Now, she remembered, as the police were banging on her door that morning, she’d spotted the same mystery vehicle parked outside. By the time the police stormed her home, the vehicle was gone.
Matsapulina has since started using Telegram again."
Most messaging apps are vulnerable on the client side with spyware, no matter what E2EE exists along the way.
I only use it for porn grpups🗿
I thought furry groups use discord?💀
Nu uh, I aint no furry❌🗣️
Now, where might one find those? For science, of course…
You can actually just search telegram porn groups on your search engine of choice. Although google usually leads to better results in the porn department
Eww, disgusting!
Where?
Porn groups? What do you do in those groups? Exchange porn? Is there not enough on the internet?
Porn groups are good indeed!
critical damage to the “privacy-conscious people are not freaks” message
Back to Facebook messenger?
The only private one
Me here waiting for the autys to miss the sarcasm and spread some weaponized autism about the most secure ways to chat… Just no EncroChat or Session, please.
what’s wrong with session?
Session is better than Facebook by a long shot. The issues many people have with it seem pretty minor compared to me. At least compared to Signal.
At least compared to Signal
Please enlighten me
So what do you use to send, receive and store 2GB ish files to other people?
Depends what people
For family and friends I have nextcloud, many of them are using it (yes, i’m that one out of a million people who made their friends and family use selfhosted stuff and be happy)
Magic wormhole, Bitorrent
I never got with these russian authority claims. Telegram is not based in russia, sure its founders are born in russia but they have taken citizenship of France for a long time now, its based in saudi arabia. I never saw a single proof of them giving data to russian authorities, they were banned in russia for that iirc but eventually got unbanned due to mass adoption. At this point these russian claims just seem racism to me.
It’s the usual foreign fearmongering. It’s never phrased this way if the subject is a western company (even though we know they cooperate with the US government).
Specially since we know for a fact that Meta hands over any and all information the US government wants from all their apps.
- I never said that telegram collaborates with Russia (I don’t know if they really do, but tg is pretty insecure, and Russian govt is happy to crack it)
- They were banned in Russia until they realized why would they ban it if they can read it (unbanning of something in Russia is another sign of something shady going on)
- I’m Russian myself, so your gaslighting won’t work, also are you Russian or Slavic too? 🤣
- Show me the proof, don’t talk on hunches
- They really didn’t care, they are banned in Iran too which is their 3rd biggest market. They got unbanned because Russia failed to unban it, there are no cases known yet in which telegram handed over users data to Russian authorities https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN23P2DY/
- I am not Russian
Honestly, signal is the only thing I would ideally use. But whatsapp is still a better second messenger than telegram.
I didn’t use WhatsApp for the last like 3 years already
I have already got rid of the Sim card, but want to setup some sip Sim cards at home for package delivery and work
So like, using WhatsApp is pretty pointless at this point
Unpopular but true take.
But whatsapp is still a better second messenger than telegram.
You didn’t mean that.
I’m sorry. It might be meta owned, but its metadata theyre stealing. I still trust the e2e encryption. Naively perhaps
telegram e2e encryption is open-source, whatsapp not
Almost no one uses telegram e2e, because it’s not automatically activated. Also group chats are not e2e.
I still like to use telegram tho.
Also doesn’t Whatsapp just use the signal protocol for e2e?
Also Telegram’s E2EE chats don’t work on desktop apparently, and you are not able to see message contents in the notification (which is a plus or minus depending on you)
Asked a friend earlier today if we could use secret chat. He declined because he mostly chats on desktop, and apparently wants to see messages from notifications while driving.
Jep, all of this is true. I have two chats with some people because of that.
Also you can’t search for words within e2e chats, which is a pain in the ass sometimes.
Whatsapp is built on the Signal E2EE protocol, Telegram has a terrible homebrew encryption protocol with a ton of weirdness and it has had a long history of weaknesses which they lied aggressively about
