Comment by VladVladikoff
Comment by VladVladikoff 4 days ago
>lol Telegram
Did I miss something? what's wrong with telegram?
Comment by VladVladikoff 4 days ago
>lol Telegram
Did I miss something? what's wrong with telegram?
> I don't know how they're the only independent app that seems to be able to produce such a well built UI/UX for a chat application in 2025.
Precisely because they don't spend so much effort for privacy. If your server can read all your messages, it's suddenly easier to provide great features. For instance, GMail can add your next hotel stay to your calendar automatically because it has access to your emails. That's great UX, but poor privacy.
This is not entirely true. For example, Calendar.app does the same by locally extracting the .ics out of Mail.app without ever sending anything to Apple.
I don't think Telegram's UX is tied to their permissive privacy, but they do seem to start with UX then do what's needed to support it. That does give them an edge. (Instagram has terrible privacy and actively mines information from chat and their UX is only passably good.)
> This is not entirely true.
My point is that it's generally harder to add those features in a privacy-preserving way. GMail couldn't do it if it couldn't read the content of the emails, period. It doesn't mean that there is no way to have nice features in a privacy-preserving way. I just said it's harder (sometimes impossible).
> I don't think Telegram's UX is tied to their permissive privacy
Not exclusively, but it is obviously a lot easier! Take a web client: if the server has access to the data, your client can just fetch it. If the server doesn't even know about the existence of the group, that's harder. Why do you think only the "secret chats" are E2EE in Telegram (and those don't support groups)?
> then do what's needed to support it
What do they do to support privacy? They don't have E2EE except in the secret chats! That hasn't changed in a decade!
> Instagram has terrible privacy and actively mines information from chat and their UX is only passably good
This keeps getting further from what I said :). Of course, it's possible to do worse than Telegram!
This is such an odd comment.
What on earth makes you think that the same engineers responsible for fluid and smooth UI/UX are the ones who’d ever influence the cryptography/privacy/security? Whether or not the chats are encrypted has zero to do with this.
Telegram has almost universally smooth scrolling, things work well across platforms, it’s native pretty much everywhere with low memory usage and mostly platform specific behaviors. Signal half asses this, and Element is… shoddy, at best, in comparison.
Unless you're extremely privileged, privacy does play a role in every feature. There is no user experience if you're imprisoned for speaking your mind and your government intelligence has pwned Telegram servers.
Making a smooth app isn't that hard. Inventing the cryptographic protocols to enable group management without server-side control, and proving their security is the hard part. Something Telegram's developers haven't the faintest idea of how to do.
> What on earth makes you think that the same engineers responsible for fluid and smooth UI/UX are the ones who’d ever influence the cryptography/privacy/security?
Did you even read my comment? I gave an example of how privacy directly impacts UX: GMail couldn't automatically add your events to your calendar if it could not read the content of your emails. I never talked about engineers, just the technical reality. If you don't have it, you can't read it. That seemed absolutely obvious to me: the best UX for a car would be one that doesn't need a source of energy, fits in my pockets and instantly teleports me anywhere I want. Go ask your engineers to make a car that allows that perfect UX, and see how they react.
Telegram has no E2EE except for the secret chats. Last time I checked, the secret chats were not synchronized between devices (i.e. the privacy has an obvious impact on the UX).
So no, I don't think it was an odd comment. It just feels like you don't know how it works technically.
Telegram certainly has an excellent UI/UX. On the Element side, its quality bar has very much been the target for Element X - and (in my biased opinion) we are getting very close, if not exceeding it in some places. For instance, we just landed The Event Cache in Element X and matrix-rust-sdk (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/issues/3280 - closed 2 days ago after a year of solid work), which provides seamless offline support and local encrypted-at-rest caching of the messages it's seen, which in turn then makes the native SwiftUI and jetpack-compose UIs go brrrrrr.
> its quality bar has very much been the target for Element X
I sincerely hope you get there, but it's really hard to believe it at the moment. You're not even at feature parity with the app (Element vs Element X) you're replacing, and it's been out for a bit now.
i.e, you have significant user experience related features that keep people using Element (open graph previews, just to name one).
It's just because all the effort has gone into EX over the last ~2 years, and it's a way way way better app (even if it doesn't have threads/spaces yet).
Meanwhile, Element One will support it shortly - the missing piece was MAS in production, which is now happening on matrix.org as per the OP.
I assume it's the lack of end-to-end encryption by default on basic features.
Good service btw, but not the best from a privacy point of view.
Besides that there it's also them choosing to roll their own crypto instead of using established cyphers and protocols.
And every time someone makes this comment. MTProto 2 uses standard crypto primitives. Besides this, do you know who else rolled their own crypto? Moxie. You don't get to roll your own crypto first and then weaponize this against your opponents but that's exactly what he did along with abusing words like "plaintext" to describe any encryption not E2EE.
AES-IGE is not best practice. Neither is this https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/telegram-ecdh/
The difference is Moxie isn't an amateur when it comes to cryptographic design. Wikipedia actually lists him as a cryptographer. The company has also employed an actual mathematician/cryptographer, Trevor Perrin.
Meanwhile, Telegram employed the CEO's brother who's a geometrician, which is not the same. You wouldn't hire a dentist to perform brain surgery even though both studied medicine.
Signal protocol's double ratchet is considered best practice by pretty much every competent cryptographer.
MTProto's main issues are not the teething issues of the yester-years. It's the fact every chat is sent to the server that can then read the messages. Telegram only has E2EE in internet debates about it's non-existent E2EE in practice.
It's nice to see their reasoning, but the issue remains: Telegram can read most direct messages (because almost no one uses private chats) and everything sent in groups.
It's a good service and in some cases it can compete with Matrix, Signal, etc, but most direct chats and all groups have no privacy from Telegram (and anyone with access to their servers).
I don't understand why you're downvoted for this question.
What's wrong with Telegram is the privacy story. It's not end-to-end encrypted, meaning that the server can read the content of your messages.
I hear that Telegram has a great UX, which makes it popular. But in terms of security... it's wanting.
Telegram is a joke in professional cryptography circles https://x.com/matthew_d_green/status/726428912968982529
To me it's just not an encrypted messaging app. I don't even get all the discussions about it...
It's a bit like if we analysed the E2EE guarantees of email over and over again. Every year, multitudes of people would publish a post explaining how email is "badly encrypted". Well, email is not E2EE, period. If you want E2EE, use a system that has E2EE.
You're again linking to old critiques of an old protocol no longer in use. Can you stop doing that, please?
1. It's not end-to-end encrypted by default.
2. No group chat, even a small one between close friends is end-to-end encrypted.
3. Almost all desktop clients support no end-to-end encryption for 1:1 chats, meaning if you use the desktop client as part of your workflow, you're forced to drop using the end-to-end encrypted secret chats.
4. No cryptographers have ever worked in the company.
5. Horrible teething issues for the protocol:
Telegram hosted a cracking contest back in 2013. Everyone in the industry know they are bullshit, and this was discussed back in 2013 The Fallacy of Cracking Contests (1998) | Hacker News The tldr is, Moxie issued a counter challenge to Telegram where he presented the same goals with already broken primitives like MD5, to break the encryption. Telegram never proved the challenge could be won even under those conditions. (Also again, given that Telegram’s built in backdoor of “people are lazy” exists, the cracking contest was pointless. It doesn’t matter how good the encryption is if the adversary wears you down to hand over the keys).
http://unhandledexpression.com:8081/crypto/general/security/...
https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20160425091011/http://www.alexra...
https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/telegram-ecdh/
Also this:
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2024/08/25/telegram...
I'll tell you what's right about Telegram: I don't know how they're the only independent app that seems to be able to produce such a well built UI/UX for a chat application in 2025.
I maintain that someone should fork their codebase and bolt on a different backend (Signal, Matrix, whatever). It's right there and it's very, very good.
(Yes, I know it's not as simple as "bolt on a different backend". You know what I mean.)