Not in this case, but if you aren't building it to put humans in it at all, you can build it with higher requirements in mind. Traditionally there's no point building a plane that can withstand much over 9g.
I've got a few planks over a ditch in my garden. The bridge only needs to be designed for the load and then some. In this case, this seems to work just fine.
The counter to this is the UK.Gov website. Very simple and basic, modern (maybe) but very accessible. Government websites should put accessibility over everything else.
Agreed. I don’t see the appeal compared to Signal. Although, Signal is also sketchy with an operating cost in the tens of millions of dollars per year. Where does the money come from?
- Telegram had usernames in 2014 before Signal added them a decade later, allowing people to chat without sharing their phone number
- Telegram has unencrypted chats which allow for giant chat rooms of 200,000+ and channels with millions of subscribers. Signal warns about performance issues when you have more than 150 people in a group. Telegram isn't just a messenger - it's often used as a social publishing platform like Instagram.
I don't use Telegram and use Signal a lot, but I also understand why other people use Telegram: the same reason they use Instagram.
Yup but the issue is Telegram already has two separate groups, normal groups (3-200 users), and supergroups (200-200,000 users). For end-to-end encrypted groups, Threema supports 256 members, Signal 1000, Wire 2000, and Matrix has no upper limit. Surely Telegram could deploy E2EE for normal groups. Nobody assumes groups with more than 200 members are private anyway.
I can't say that I've ever seen genuine uses like this that you mention unless it's a 'community' for adult content or sketchy content. Is this that common?
Not a regular telegram user here but I follow a Ukranian guy who hand builds led bulbs/products by hand. He has a telegram group chat where he enthusiastically posts pictures of everything he's doing, it's great.
Curious seeing as he's in Ukranian, is there also a mindset/distrust of U.S. centric products/services and wanting to feel safe posting updates of whatever it is someone may be doing? Cool!
He fled Ukraine actually and setup shop in Scandanavia, in Sweden I think. He doesn't seem political at all, he just does lights. https://t.me/sunlikenews
Uses for what? Here is Russia many companies have (or had) groups (not Slack or something else but Telegram), most communities exists solely in Telegram, most news channes are also there.
Not to mention you create ANY kind of bot without any trouble.
I guess we just live in two different worlds. Like with China where WeChat is the default. (except we now have fucking Max instead).
AvaloniaUI has their community in Telegram, and there are other tech ones. Endless meme channels in different languages too. Also, most of Russian-speaking emigrant groups & news channels are in Telegram, some of them with tens of thousands of participants.
I'm in groups/channels about stuff like memes, news, hosting providers, software/OSS, or niche/hobby topics, and some of those groups are massive (100k+). I don't think any of those are sketchy or adult.
Unfortunately the upselling has got kind of annoying and in-your-face the past few years
But indeed their native clients are great, especially on iOS. It legitimately feels more native and intuitive than Apple's own Messages app. Animations run at a smooth, stable framerate. Never hitches jumping between conversations. One of the greatest apps ever made.
Simple to do when you don't care about e2e and clients can just show data they receive to the user with little logic of their own. It is a world of difference in complexity.
Those nice things are what you get when you're fine having all your data (messages, images, files) forever in plaintext on servers owned by some Russian rich guy.
- Messages send quickly and reliably, even under poor and sometimes hostile network conditions. Telegram just seems to work even when other chat apps struggle.
- Telegram uses usernames instead of phone numbers by default, which is good if you're using it as an IRC replacement instead of an SMS replacement.
- You can have the client open on essentially unlimited devices simultaneously, including a web app if you need it.
- Messages can be edited at any point after sending with no expiry.
- You can schedule messages to send later, or send a message silently so it doesn't wake people up.
- Different group types - announcement channels, Discord-style groups with sub-channels, flexible moderator roles, etc. (I believe WhatsApp has some of this.)
- Support for bots, which is also very helpful for managing large communities.
- Community-created, sharable stickers. Seriously, people underestimate how nice these are.
The downside is that a lot of this requires state to be stored on the Telegram servers, so most chat's aren't E2E encrypted. (They do have an option for E2E encrypted private 1:1 chats, but you lose most of the polish by using that.)
Also, the official apps are open source, so you can modify them if needed.
- insanely fast search, chat history browsing and in app navigation
- unlimited unencrypted cloud storage, your chats and docs always stays available
- ability to send very large files
- ability to host large video and voice chats
- chat automation
- auto translation and transcription
- mini apps
- open source client, with lots of customization
- phone number less sign up (you can purchase a burner number from them and sign up with that, I guess it costs their crypto (ton) tho)
- sending gifts
WhatsApp will have usernames too in the near future and one will be able to reach out to a WhatsApp user solely by username hiding the phone number. One can create a username already reverse it. Sounds very similar to the Telegram username approach but we will see.
- Telegram uses usernames instead of phone numbers by default, which is good if you're using it as an IRC replacement instead of an SMS replacement.
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What? When you register, I'm pretty sure it requires putting in a phone number that preferably isn't a VoIP line and not a username. It's been that way any time I've tried to use the service on mobile.
Scheduled messages have been a thing for a long time on Signal, but they seem to be only on mobile, which is wild to me.
I would posit that Signal is more for individual to individual. I'm seeing in these comments that telegram is clearly a lot more community centric, ala Discord lite than I realized.
In Telegram, I can open a chat, find a sticker, send a sticker, post a circle story, and shitpost in another group chat. All while WhatsApp loads my chat history. That is on any platform and any network condition, except for fully offline.
Their desktop apps are just Qt and not WebView inside a Qt. Mobile apps are native and not React.
Ok I don't know what finding a sticker has to do with speed.
Whatsapp and Signal have stickers too. Kids use them sometimes. They are like in a list. You open the list. Chose one and then it appears. Don't know what there is to accelerate.
...and yeah, whatever language they are. I don't really care because, as said: there is no problem...
> Ok I don't know what finding a sticker has to do with speed.
You don't know that it takes time to load graphical assets? And you can't comprehend that I'm using it as an example of how much more stuff Telegram clients manage to do/load in the time it takes WhatsApp to load one screen?
No I can't since I've never experienced any delay which would justify this amount of criticism and I mean, Germany is outside of big cities quite messy in it's coverage.
The main things that are slow are loading the app and opening the app, loading the messages, and receiving the messages. On my phone, this is much slower than Telegram, and on my computer, the WhatsApp program doesn't even work have the time -- it just gets stuck in the loading process.
Signal is not as bad, but can still take a minute or two to update everything on my computer. The phone app is better.
I live in Germany and use both. None do that and as I'm "the IT guy" for many people at work an din private, I'd have heard about it. Hell, the whole continent would have heard about it as whatsapp is widely used.
Since the whatsapp cliënt on desktop was replaced by a web wrapper it's even worse.
I don't even remember how the previous cliënt did it but my spelling suggestions are in English (as is the OS) but my chats are all in Dutch. Most words have a red underline.
It recently gave up downloading images. Turned out it was no longer allowed to write to its own folder. Not sure if this should be blamed on MS but from the (many) user perspective it just stopped working.
It keeps limited chat history which makes it inferior to IRC.
Exactly, signal is decent on all the platforms, while mobile clients for whatsapp is somewhat tolerable if you ignore the constant AI push. But the web/desktop client is a pain in the ass to use.
I agree on all the content related things but your argument was about speed.
I use whatsapp web every day at work.
The page. In my Firefox browser.
It's almost constantly open. Never had any issues with that.
The phone app just does what it's supposed to do and even on my Pixel6, it's just fast. I mean there is always faster but it's not even a second.
I use Whatsapp only because I have to. Privately, I prefer Signal. Works also great. Same with the windows app. Been using both since day 1. On a Pixel7Pro....
Not at all, telegram clients in every platform are much much faster than whatsapp, signal etc. on the same platform. Although, this is more visible on older devices and on poor network conditions, I clearly see a difference in my newer devices too.
It's the gold standard for bad support: pretend the user has a problem.
There once was this thread on a blog for a windows XP pirated edition. Someone commented that something small didn't work. They replied in less than a minute, that's terrible! 10 minutes later the version was incremented and a new reply said: Try the new version! After 30 minutes the bug fix was confirmed.
They weren't trying to be funny but it still makes me laugh how it compares to Microsoft, the 3 trillion software company.
I worked for a long time in IT Support and this generalisation, like all of them, is false.
If someone tells me that a program crashes in 50% of the time on launch but it's only him reporting it, it is almost certainly his problem and not a problem of the program. Especially if you're supporting millions of people.
This is not some prejudice story people make up. It is happening. Every day to thousands of poor IT Warriors on the front.
But it's not "his" problem or "my" problem, it's "our" mutual problem for "us" to figure out together, collaboratively, down to its root causes, which are yet unknown. (And in the future, to mitigate and prevent, using whatever means are available to us.)
Maybe. If someone choses to do so in their capacity.
But they don't have to.
On the other side, suggesting that it is a general issue with those programs is wrong. Which is what I have been actually pointing out. This gives you the chance to check your devices and seek help if necessary.
This doesn't make my comment "bad support". I am not the tech support guy for HN.
I sometimes send an email with 1) the things that don't work, 2) terrible ui, 3) possible improvements. Most often I've moved on to similar software that does what I want.
I get responses like. 1) It works for me, 2) you should have looked at this and that, 3) no one wants that/it works fine the way it is.
The worse part is that they wasted their time reading and responding.
I've had wonderful feedback on things I've made. The funniest were people who didn't understand standard ui convention. It had me wonder if I can expose mission critical parts some other way in case the user doesn't know how a hamburger menu works.
Imagine my shock when I learn a young user conditioned by modern flat buttons thought [shall we say] windows 95 industrial buttons are decorations. You can click on that???
If I pretend it is their problem I haven't actually solved anything.
I can't work with this generalised approach as it's not helpful or meaningful.
In this case here, OP is obviously overdramatising the situation. Adding to this is the lack of details. This happens really often and the cause is many times not in the hands of the people who are confronted with the problem.
So you can assume that if someone took their time to read your complains, they would have taken the time to consider it. Therefore chances are quite good that the answer you've gotten really means that you're the problem.
I don't say there is no lazy support. It happens but just because you get the "your problem"-answer, doesn't mean it's always lazy support.
From USA, one mainly needs WhatsApp to chat with Latin Americans. Judging from the billboards I have seen in Argentina and Uruguay, there are a lot of Latin Americans getting WA free. So of course, why pay more?
I'm confused about how it is that because it hasn't happened to you or anyone you know, it's my personal problem that closed-source software that I have no capability to modify is working slowly or failing to work at all?
As I wrote: If "WhatsApp program doesn't even work have the time -- it just gets stuck in the loading process." this would be true for half of the European Continent, since it's very popular there, there would be uprisings, memes, news. You could read people trying to fix it, find out why, etc.
There is nothing. It's not just me who doesn't know ANYBODY with those issues.
So the logical conclusion is: you're either lying or you have a problem on your own device other people don't have.
The appeal of Telegram over Signal or WhatsApp is that it is not an American or BigTech service. (And, ofcourse, it's really good). Signal is funded by 2 rich American entrepreneurs who made their fortune when their services were acquired by Twitter (TextSecure / RedPhone) and Meta (WhatsApp), respectively. Whether it is indeed altruism behind this, you'll have to judge for yourself ...
> Signal is funded by 2 rich American entrepreneurs who made their fortune when their services were acquired by Twitter (TextSecure / RedPhone) and Meta (WhatsApp), respectively. Whether it is indeed altruism behind this, you'll have to judge for yourself ...
To be fair, Telegram is funded by billionaire Pavel Durov, co-founder of VK, the most popular social network in Russia and one of the most visited websites in the world.
Would you explain why "American or BigTech" is worse than some sketchy bro sitting in tax haven?
Would be good if we can compare technologies rather than feelings. I hate what US tech has turned into, but presence of E2EE on whatsapp makes it incredibly way better than telegram to that matter. Even though undoubtedly Meta farms metadata on WA.
Ideally, yes, if all else were equal we would only be making a purely technical comparison. But that's not how it works. People also factor in the business model and values of the company before making purchase decisions. (That applies to countries too - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycotts_of_Israel ). For many of us, Meta and its founders score very low on the "trustworthy" factor, when it comes to privacy. As for E2EE, despite allegations that Telegram's encryption is weak, nobody has yet demonstrated that by breaking it. And, those who care about E2EE should perhaps use Signal over WhatsApp, as WhatsApp itself uses their technology.
I’ve always been under the impression that Signal is for secure, private chats and group chats amongst friends and small groups. While telegram is often used more like discord or irc, with “secure” and “private” group chats that are extremely large and semi-public. “Invite only” but invites are handed out easily. Those chats are pretty obviously not as secure, as basically anybody can join them and decrypt the chat. On the surface its somewhat more secure than discord, where discord will be scanning all chat content.
The bigger issue is Telegram advertises it as more private option to WhatsApp although Telegram collects more metadata, and also the message content. People think Telegram is more private, they don't use it as a public forum replacement. Also, institutions running Telegram have people form closer working groups that become groups for friends, who don't necessarily realize they should be moving to Signal the moment the members start sharing things they don't want everyone to know.
Signal users who want to use it with their agents are running an unofficial extracted-and-patched `signal-cli` off GitHub. It's based on an archived official Signal repo and then patched for years by some random accounts. It looks incredibly untrustworthy.
Meanwhile Telegram has bot support and added features specifically for interacting w/agents. It's incredibly easy to write clients and work with it. No one should use it, and I never would, but you can see why it's winning.
Signal's lack of features (like an official Signal CLI) and bots (even attached to existing phone numbers and limited to the owner) is making people less secure than they could be. And unfortunately there are no great alternatives.
Wait, the open source cli of an E2E encrypted messenger seems untrustworthy, but the official API of a completely unencrypted messenger seems trustworthy?
I guess "we can definitely spy on your messages" is a lot more honest than "we are very unlikely to spy on your messages", if it turns out spying takes place.
Signal does not have an official Signal CLI (or method of creating integrations) so users are compromising their use of Signal by using heavily patched and out-of-date code written by unknown third parties.
Telegram has support for integrations and clients but isn't a service anyone should trust.
Telegram offering bells and whistles that leaks everything to the service provider is not an argument for Telegram the same way "it launches the video game" isn't an argument for video game cracks that carry ransomware.
Both are called Trojan Horses and are considered malware.
I've used and promoted Signal for years and I've recently become suspicious of them and their funding as well after looking into starting my own encrypted communications app.
It's not cheap sending dozens or hundreds of megabytes of video files or whatever ... whenever the user feels like it, mind you ... with a monetization strategy that's literally simply hoping that donations will cover it?
I was always under the impression Moxie who created Signal was well accepted in Information Security circles. But you bring up a good posit that running a service probably isn't cheap behind the scenes. Given that Signal is a unique identifier for anyone who uses it, maybe they have funding behind the scenes from Governments.
Absolutely, but more focused on smaller groups. Family and friends. I think it has to do with the encryption scheme. Large groups are probably tricky. Therefore the app isn’t built for them. But small groups are perfectly fine.
Telegram is important if you get your news from sources outside of the 'Anglo American empire'. People all over the planet use Telegram to curate their own news feeds and cultivate their own communities. This is generally done with a view to promote understanding rather than to spread misinformation. Telegram is great if you want the perspective of 'the other side' or 'both sides' if you 'trust but verify'.
Some people can get the Telegram app and never get to find any of these communities to never understand what Telegram is really about. Usually though, channel owners repost from other channels and promote channels they like. If you follow one channel then it should not be hard to find other channels in the way. You can also see what other people are subscribed to, depending on their privacy settings.
Importantly, there is no algorithm on a home page, urging you to sign up for promoted content.
As for 'where does the money come from', there are ways to subscribe to get a few more bells and whistles, with many that cultivate a community choosing to do so, in order to manage their channel(s). Few normal users pay up, and the app isn't paywalled or 'pay to post'.
There is a whole parallel universe of drug dealers and women that sell their bodies, all of which is a search away. I doubt these people are paying for premium accounts either.
IMHO only a modest amount of money is needed, sure, bandwidth has to be paid for, however, the app is already written and it is very good. I have no idea why the likes of Meta need tens of thousands of 'engineers' for optimising doom scrolling 'with AI'.
With Telegram, you could have 1% of 1M users paying $10 a year, meaning revenue of $100k a year. That would be okay if it was Pavel and his bro in his mum's basement with one server to pay for.
Scale this up to a billion and now you are talking. Since the app scales, are more staff needed? A few devs, but not that many managers since the founders are technical and therefore don't need the useless hordes of non-technical managers. Yet the money is now 1% of a billion. Multiply that by $10 a year, every year, and Pavel ends up asking finding his Bugatti on the moon.
This sounds manageable to me, no need to run in debt, have shareholders or be beholden to vested interests.
At Meta et al., there is a need to feed the greed of the stock market, pay billions in debt, do billions in share buybacks, do the AI nonsense, keep the advertisers happy, keep America's Greatest Ally happy, sign a secret deal with Five Eyes and the list goes on.
I have never met Pavel or the Meta guy, whatever his name is, but I suspect the former is getting more out of life than the latter.
It’s quite easy to anycast an IP to multiple physical datacenters. Their DC nomenclature is probably a relic from when they really had a single datacenter for each region.
On the other hand, it wouldn’t shock me if they had no site redundancy. It’s a free service, it’s not like there’s SLA agreements you paid for on signup.
The article says each user is associated with a single DC, and if that DC is down the user has no service. You kind of have to conclude from that the users data is not replicated across sites or there is some other architectural issue causing this. And they do have paid tiers.
wait ... when was it not sketchy? Did people not know the intentions behind it? Damn, wild. I get that there are some people that may use it as a communication medium for benign purposes, but it's filth all the way down.
Are they actually worse than businesses though? The internet, jet engines.. in fact whole swaiths of technology have been created under governments not enterprises. This just feels like an economic concept people blindly accept.
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