There's a disconnect between critiques of Telegram and its practical use that have made me uneasy about joining technical pile-ons around how it's not really encrypted messaging. Let me use the example of Telegram use in the Hong Kong protests
No matter what any frothing-at-the-mouth, armchair ‘security expert’ tells you, it all boils down to your own personal threat assessment. If you are a journalist who’s about to blow the lid off a grand governmental plot, you’re going to need a lot more security than a regular schmuck who’s texting back and forth with his girlfriend about where they’re going to go for dinner Friday night. Don’t get me wrong - privacy IS very important, but FFS people…context is everything. Telegram is a great and private messaging app for most regular cases. The people screaming otherwise are usually just trying to redirect people over to their own pet project.
Especially the type of people who then praise the Fediverse as some kind of privacy alternative as if their data isn’t hosted by some kid below their parents’ kitchen sink.
how is that a problem with matrix? it has minimal metadata, encrypted, and don’t require any form of identification to use.
sure mostly everyone use the matrix.org instance, but that’s a problem of most federated services. we’re all here on lemmy.ml, while we could be elsewhere. but that’s also the whole point of a federated service. you could host it yourself. if your threat level required it.
you can’t host telegram. you can’t host signal.
sure, could be argued that XMPP is a better option than matrix. it’s old. relatively stable. and still somewhat familiar and popular throughout all these years. but that comes at the cost of no modern clients. no modern features. and opposite to matrix, no central hub/gateway or client for casual users to adopt a core service and participate through - which is pretty important if you actually plan to use a social medium.
Tbh fediverse is strange in that you use it for the decentralized federation model more than anything else.
Everything else is up to the instance and how it handles things.
Telegram non-encrypted conversations are nowadays comparable to Skype. Now, reread the above, substituting “Telegram” with “Skype” and you’ll see the problem. If somebody calls you, all phones with your telegram account will keep ringing after you take the call. This is why you should move to signal, it is safer and less annoying for now.
No matter what any frothing-at-the-mouth, armchair ‘security expert’ tells you, it all boils down to your own personal threat assessment. If you are a journalist who’s about to blow the lid off a grand governmental plot, you’re going to need a lot more security than a regular schmuck who’s texting back and forth with his girlfriend about where they’re going to go for dinner Friday night. Don’t get me wrong - privacy IS very important, but FFS people…context is everything. Telegram is a great and private messaging app for most regular cases. The people screaming otherwise are usually just trying to redirect people over to their own pet project.
Especially the type of people who then praise the Fediverse as some kind of privacy alternative as if their data isn’t hosted by some kid below their parents’ kitchen sink.
Lol , all those data are public anyway.
Not all (e.g. personal conversations)
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how is that a problem with matrix? it has minimal metadata, encrypted, and don’t require any form of identification to use.
sure mostly everyone use the matrix.org instance, but that’s a problem of most federated services. we’re all here on lemmy.ml, while we could be elsewhere. but that’s also the whole point of a federated service. you could host it yourself. if your threat level required it.
you can’t host telegram. you can’t host signal.
sure, could be argued that XMPP is a better option than matrix. it’s old. relatively stable. and still somewhat familiar and popular throughout all these years. but that comes at the cost of no modern clients. no modern features. and opposite to matrix, no central hub/gateway or client for casual users to adopt a core service and participate through - which is pretty important if you actually plan to use a social medium.
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Tbh fediverse is strange in that you use it for the decentralized federation model more than anything else. Everything else is up to the instance and how it handles things.
Telegram non-encrypted conversations are nowadays comparable to Skype. Now, reread the above, substituting “Telegram” with “Skype” and you’ll see the problem. If somebody calls you, all phones with your telegram account will keep ringing after you take the call. This is why you should move to signal, it is safer and less annoying for now.