“Telegram is not a private messenger. There’s nothing private about it. It’s the opposite. It’s a cloud messenger where every message you’ve ever sent or received is in plain text in a database that Telegram the organization controls and has access to it”
“It’s like a Russian oligarch starting an unencrypted version of WhatsApp, a pixel for pixel clone of WhatsApp. That should be kind of a difficult brand to operate. Somehow, they’ve done a really amazing job of convincing the whole world that this is an encrypted messaging app and that the founder is some kind of Russian dissident, even though he goes there once a month, the whole team lives in Russia, and their families are there.”
" What happened in France is they just chose not to respond to the subpoena. So that’s in violation of the law. And, he gets arrested in France, right? And everyone’s like, oh, France. But I think the key point is they have the data, like they can respond to the subpoenas where as Signal, for instance, doesn’t have access to the data and couldn’t respond to that same request. To me it’s very obvious that Russia would’ve had a much less polite version of that conversation with Pavel Durov and the telegram team before this moment"
Opinion: I think painting in Signal in such negative light is more harmful in the practical sense. Having fragmented messaging towards the public that does not care about many of these aspects just makes them a lot more hesitant to change, from my perspective.
We as a community should, in my opinion, pick a “good enough” solution for the majority of the people we interact with. That in itself is a market force to show interest and demand for private solutions. Most people I know don’t have the tools or knowledge or time to understand nuances and all they’ll hear are conflicting messages.
For us more technically inclined people: hell yeah, let’s figure out the ideal model and bring it up to maturity so others can join when it’s fleshed out. E.g. when lemmy came to my attention in the reddit 3rd party app fiasco, I was really confused on how to sign up and use it. And I’m no stranger to tech.
Edit: spelling
I’d probably suggest Deltachat. It’s defederated and has always on encryption, but is so incredibly simple and easy to onboard and use, and doesn’t require a phone number or even an email. It also works on all platforms with a single app.
There are plenty of good enough options like SimpleX Chat out there that don’t have this problem. The whole argument that people should just ignore the obvious issue with Signal is frankly weird.
Accept defects != ignore
My original comment that you replied to was explaining the defects. People are free to decide whether they want to accept them or not. Your comment is saying that it’s harmful to discuss these defects which implies that we should just ignore them.