Search on Telegram is more powerful than in other messaging apps because it allows users to find public channels and bots. Unfortunately, this feature has been abused by people who violated our Terms of Service to sell illegal goods.
To further deter criminals from abusing Telegram Search, we have updated our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, ensuring they are consistent across the world. We’ve made it clear that the IP addresses and phone numbers of those who violate our rules can be disclosed to relevant authorities in response to valid legal requests.
regarding its UX, nothing close exists; when it comes to converting normies, so you have someone to actually talk to, then there are no alternatives. that’s a pretty shitty state of affairs for something that shoulda been solved a long time ago.
lesson learned, I guess, don’t put all your eggs in one basket and have multiple fallback solutions. I’ve begrudingly moved to Signal and I’m cursing it out at least once per day, can’t believe the navel-gazing, self-righteous cluelessness behind it; but that’s the best there is at the moment. it’s beyond shitty that we’re having trouble achieving what we had in like 2012 by way of XMPP and friends, let alone surpassing it.
What don’t you like about Signal?
Requires both a phone and a phone number
to me it looks and feels like shit, compared to Durov’s spyware it’s like a PoC from 2015 looking for funding. fine demo you got there, now bring us the real thing.
but, to practical things, I lose/sell/buy/switch devices frequently. with telegram, I can lose all my devices, log on from a fresh one and all my shit is there - a decade+ of convos with 100s of people with valuable info. no juggling around with the crappy electron desktop app that doesn’t give me access to convos or the inane procedure to replace a lost device and restore chat history… the other day, I successfully retrieved a piece of info from a convo from a decade prior.
I realize there are people out there that need that sort of security, but I don’t. I just want Telegram with an OTR plugin (OMEMO nowadays) that prevents any nascent mass surveilance and LLM ingestion and I’m golden. but that shit’s explicitly against Telegram’s ToS; the only logical conclusion is they’re adamant about leaving all your shit unencrypted in the cloud for some specific reason.
I can’t think of any such reason that’s not malevolent.
I see it a lot when ppl complain about signal, but just can’t understand why you would save 10+ years in old msgs. Almost all my signal conversations even GRP chats are set to 1 week auto delete. If something important Is said that I need to save, I copy/paste it into my note app where I can organize it. Its sounds so impractical to dig through 10+ years of data everytime you need something. Plus it would be awful to know there is a log of all the dumb things I said 10 years ago lol.
Completely agree! The ephemerality of Signal is a feature, not a bug.
I didn’t always see it this way, but then a thought occurred to me. None of the conversations we have in person are recorded. Those communications are just as meaningful if not more so than text conversations, and yet somehow we get by just fine without them being stored indefinitely on some personal device, let alone in someone else’s datacenter.
This is a case of technology controlling us when we should be controlling it.
I agree that we are fine even without it. But that does not mean it’s better than not having that history.
An easy example that comes to mind are all arguments wherr someone remembers one thing while someone else remembers another thing.
Decent counter-example. In turn I’d say that’s an edge case where we could still survive just fine without knowing the relevant fact for sure. And certainly not worth the cost in privacy terms of recording and storing everything.
XMPP is still around although there’s a constant campaign trying to claim it’s gone.
because things moved forward in the last decade or so and it’s not viable. the same way matrix and element and those ridiculous things aren’t viable and never will be. can you use it today? absolutely. can you convert normies to it and make it an actual widely used comms platform? no. fucking. way.
this is coming from a guy running their own prosody instance and utilizing rocketchat on two separate client instances. yeah, I know how to set it up and deploy it; but the amount of absolutely credible complaints I get from normies forced to use it staggering.
XMPP would be viable in theory but for whatever reason no one wants to build a modern client out of it.
How do you define modern? I would call these modern clients personally:
modern as in stable, good UX, plug-and-play, and supporting features a modern chat client is expected to have with zero hassle.
the stuff needed to convince your mom to install it.
It’s shocking how many people just outright ignore UX.