Comment by maqp

Comment by maqp 6 days ago

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.

izacus 6 days ago

People communicated via unencrypted phone calls and SMS and other unencrypted mediums for decades so you might just be massively overstating the importance of E2E message encryption for an average person.

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maqp 5 days ago

That was the time before we lived our half of our social lives online in group chats and social media.
My calls and texts used to be about me agreeing with my buddies when to hang out. They weren't nearly as private as me keeping in touch with buddies I rarely see IRL, online.
Also, there was a period of transition. Had I known the MSN messenger was completely unencrypted, in that everyone, not just Microsoft, could listen in, I might have felt my privacy violated. I sure as hell feel that in hindsight.

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- palata 5 days ago
  
  What the hell was MSN messenger plaintext over unencrypted transport? I'm genuinely shocked, I didn't know! I naively assumed it was at least encrypted to Microsoft. But now that you say it, it makes sense...
  Also feels like missed opportunities :D.
  
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kelnos 6 days ago

The world has been changing a lot over those decades, and the technological and surveillance capabilities of state actors (and malicious, non-state actors, for that matter) has increased dramatically. Not needing E2EE a few decades ago has nothing to do with whether or not we need it now.

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- izacus 4 days ago
  
  And how exactly has that surveillance changed the life of an average westerner?
  
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palata 5 days ago

The world was fine without Internet for most of its history. What's your point?

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Klonoar 6 days ago

> Unless you're extremely privileged, privacy does play a role in every feature.

No, dude. Come on - you really think that plays a role in how smooth a listview renders? Or whether it follows the correct tab focus order? I don't think I could be more clear about what I'm saying in my last comment. Their client side app is incredibly smooth and well built. Signal, Element, etc do not stack up.

> Making a smooth app isn't that hard.

Yes, it surprisingly is. Multiple chat apps in 2025 still fail at this.

> 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.

This isn't even in the realm of what my point was.

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maqp 5 days ago

>Come on - you really think that plays a role in how smooth a listview renders?
That's not a feature. Stickers is a feature. Calls are a feature. Messages are a feature. Group chats are a feature. Group video calls are a feature. Link thumbnails are a feature. Forwarding messages is a feature.
>Their client side app is incredibly smooth and well built.
Yes, and the Trojan horse was so beautiful John Oliver would totally have hit on it.
Telegram UI is fine, I'll give you that. But it was created at the expense of designing the app private. Move fast yolo security isn't the justification.
They'd have to re-design the protocol from scratch to make it E2EE by default. Hell, you can't even get feature parity with secret chats. E.g., stickers do not work.
Signal might not have every bell and whistle like pinned messages, but when it eventually does, I will know it's done with proper privacy design.
I get that your point is to bore exclusively in the UI/UX with, admiring the forest from the trees. I'm saying the true beauty is with the ridiculously seamless and easy to use end-to-end encryption for everything Signal provides. Both phone app, and all desktop apps stay in sync, all 1:1 chats are E2EE and they are available on all platforms, unlike Telegram where they're limited to phone only. All group chats are E2EE and they're available on all platform, unlike Telegram that doesn't have E2EE for group chats. All chats are E2EE by default, unlike Telegram where no chat is E2EE.
Privacy and security are integral part of every feature. Everything else is a footgun. Arguing about how well the footgun is polished, doesn't make it any less of a footgun.
Signal has over time polished its secure features.
Telegram isn't in the process of securing it's polished turd of a protocol.

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- Klonoar a day ago
  
  > That's not a feature. Stickers is a feature. Calls are a feature. Messages are a feature. Group chats are a feature. Group video calls are a feature. Link thumbnails are a feature. Forwarding messages is a feature.
  K, and? Every comment I've typed in this thread was surrounding how these things are implemented on the rendering layer. Whether or how those are encrypted is of no relation to my point. Badgering on about it more won't help you make a point.
  > Signal might not have every bell and whistle like pinned messages, but when it eventually does, [...] > I'm saying the true beauty is with the ridiculously seamless and easy to use end-to-end encryption for everything Signal provides.
  You seem to be under the impression that I am knocking Signal as a client, and I'm not. It is my primary messenger.
  I just expect better of them and I do not believe for one moment that they couldn't have the UI/UX of Telegram. You are more than welcome to get all tied up in the crypto/privacy/security arguments - I have never argued those because they are (a) boringly obvious points and (b) not the fucking point of my comment chain.
  Privacy and security have jack shit to do with how well an engineer implements rendering code, full stop. Telegram does it better and Signal/Element/etc need to do better.
  
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est 6 days ago

> privacy does play a role in every feature

It really depends. People discuss and communicate in public channels like IRC or Discord.

A large chunk of chatting is shitposting with anonymous identity.

Secure chat is only needed in some scenarios.

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