Telegram is just actually superior in terms of features I don’t get it.
Because it what the people, I need to contact with, use.
I didn’t choose. Literally every single person with a smartphone in my country uses whatsapp so that’s what I use too.
Because an instant messaging platform is only useful if there are people to, well, message on it. WhatsApp has the userbase worldwide, telegram does not.
people use the messaging app that their friends are on
doesn’t matter if it’s objectively terribleSignal is much better than Telegram in terms of privacy. Do people find Telegram more convenient?
I don’t consider privacy a primary reason for someone to choose one service over another because most don’t care. What I mean is that telegram has more features in general.
What do you say to all of the people who use Whatsapp instead of Telegram because its default privacy is better? Privacy is one of the main selling points of WhatsApp, even though Signal has better privacy.
I’d say that why not just use signal if you actually care about privacy lol…
WhatsApp is more convenient than Signal and more people are on WhatsApp
I think you mean Signal.
I mean telegram
Wooosh
Brotha it wasn’t a joke
It was a joke, but you appear not to have gotten it. Hence the wooosh sound.
Bring that back over to reddit.
Pretty much one of the last messaging platforms I’d try to use.
Makes a post about messaging superiority by advocating for inferior app. Lol. Gotta read the room better buddy.
Why are you taking such a confrontational approach?
Original commenter and you give no information on what makes Signal better. Signal is outside of the topic scope anyway, but would be a fair extension of it. Instead you use an insulting tone and completely dismiss their approach.
And this shit gets more up than downvotes. Makes it clear this platform has group-think toxicity issues too, moreso than promoting fair and good-intention discussion.
It’s probably no more or less confrontational than OP’s question
The tone makes a huge difference.
OP tone is mainly confusion with an open question. They disclose their belief/understanding which they acknowledge either contradicts or puts into question the evident state of things they see.
I don’t see how that’s confrontational similar to the commenter dismissing their whole approach as a definite statement without points you could argue. It’s a closed dismissal and in an insulting tone.
What makes you think they are similar? Or to what degree?
I don’t know about you, but the tone of the original question come across very dismissively to me. OP isn’t asking what they missed, why WhatsApp might be as good as Telegram. They’ve flat out declared the winner and are asking why nobody else is agreeing with them.
I can see your point, and agree with it for the most part. But they’re still posting on Asklemmy implying it is a question or interest of reason. It also doesn’t dismiss a person directly/specifically, nor is the tone insulting.
In regards to Whatsapp. If I were talking about signal vs telegram then this comment would be relevant but I’m not am i
I mean, Telegram is the worst of the bunch, but putting that aside, the point is that people aren’t comparing telegram and whatsapp, they’re comparing telegram, whatsapp, signal, matrix, sms, imessage, facebook messenger, instagram messenger, session, wire, wechat, the crypto ones, kik, and a dozen other chat clients you’ve never heard of. And most people are not actually making those comparisons, most people just use the one their friends use, or the one that their phone came with. Nobody, anywhere, is pretending there are only two options and picking one of them.
Nope! Telegram because you know what they say in cryptography circles: always roll your own! Oh wait…
Currently using signal but have been intrigued by some of the no phone number alternatives like SimpleX
Personally I prefer signal, and that’s the problem isn’t it.
Telegram has no end-to-end encryption for normal messages
Because everyone else uses Whatsapp. I don’t like it either but I need it for work so I use it. It is what it is.
Here in Costa Rica people are used to using WhatsApp. Even after the terms controversy they kept on using it
People don’t care what’s superior, they care about if their friends are already on the app. And whatsapp built up that critical mass first, so it’s the default.
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Telegram gives me:
- Roll-their-own encryption off-by-default without cross-device support or group chat available.
- The ability to talk to strangers I don’t want to talk to
- An open source client, but a proprietary, non-federated server
- An unmoderated social network that’s a free-for-all for crypto scammers, extremists, and other nuts
WhatsApp gives me:
- Signal’s encryption algorithm on all chats
- Whatsapp web (still with encryption)
- Encrypted group chats
- The ability to talk to human beings I actually know and want to talk to
Neither respects my privacy.
Not sure why I would bother attempting to use Telegram again.
WhatsApp gives me:
1,2,3 - closed source app that has not been audited but you chose to believe that is backdoor free, ok then
4 - half true, whatsapp business is full of automated responses, not too many human beings there
I do not use “whatsapp business,” no idea why I would.
I do not seek to use a service and then interact with the people who happen to be on that service, I seek to interact with people and meet them on the service they’re using. The fediverse is an exception, because I believe in the principles, but the experience sucks because it’s all tech with no real community (Lemmy/Kbin) and none of the people I want to follow (Mastodon).
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This is the best answer, IMHO. Also, network effects means that everyone’s already on WhatsApp, so it’s only natural that people use it more than Telegram
People don’t choose, people use whatever most people around them use. Whatsapp and telegram are both centralized, and shouldn’t be trusted because, by the nature of it, they can (and eventually will) turn user-hostile.
Messengers come and go, if we really want to make some progress in this area, we should embrace federated and p2p protocols as the logical evolution. Anything else is just wasting time and user privacy.
I’d rather push for XMPP personally, the matrix protocol has been
a dumpster firein an “almost ready, trust me bro” state for as long as it has existed, and failed to justify its own weight and complexity. But that’s mostly irrelevant since they are open protocols and can somewhat bridge with one another.I’m selfhosting a Matrix server and have all my Chats from other apps also bridged to there. For just text chat I don’t feel like Matrix is missing anything, the thing preventing me from getting my not so technically minded friends on it is the missing support for good group voice chat.
It XMPP better for group VC? Is the option available to bridge Messenger like Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, iMessage to XMPP?
I’m selfhosting a Matrix server and have all my Chats from other apps also bridged to there.
Same here, but with XMPP in place of Matrix. For historical context, XMPP was invented about 25 years ago on the premise that people were already tired of having their instant messaging scattered over multiple protocols (rather than Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, iMessage now, it was Yahoo, MSN, AIM, ICQ, … then), so bridging is very much front and center in the XMPP world. Over time, people also realized that bridging sucks in general (you either dumb down your client to the lowest common denominator which sucks for yourself, or your client isolates itself from the source protocol enough that it sucks for everyone else).
To add insult to injury, most modern protocols also forbid, by their ToS, the use of alternative clients (which very much includes bridges), and to the best of my knowledge WhatsApp, Signal and Discord will eventually suspend your account on this basis.
Matrix is still trying to carve a niche for itself in this space, and is failing IMO (judging by the quality/security of the bridges they have come-up with, and the recent libera.chat fiasco). I’d say that the situation in this regard in XMPP is only marginally better due to the fact that XMPP had a decade headstart to fail and try over, and I would not recommend using bridges on either of them if that can be avoided.It XMPP better for group VC?
I’d say “it depends”. Fun fact, Matrix uses jitsi-meet under the hood (which is XMPP + a media transcoding/multicasting component that doubles as a relay), and jitsi-meet is my recommendation for this use-case: as long as the central server has good bandwidth, you can really scale up your VC to many attendees. On top of that, XMPP has support for peer-to-peer group VC, with the benefit that hosting is simpler, it doesn’t require any central component/relay (but the bandwidth cost is incurred on all participants and you won’t go beyond a handful of attendees that way).
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You should definitely give XMPP a chance, but not feel bad about ending-up with whichever feels better: they are mostly fine, and largely preferable to the non-standard/non-federated alternatives.
XMPP is orders of magnitude lighter weight so that might factor in if you have associated costs to running in the cloud.
If you want to get started the easy way, go with ejabberd, it has sane defaults and lots of convenience (e.g. it embarks a stun/turn server to facilitate calling through NAT, acts as a ACME client to renew certificates automagically, …).
On Android, Cheogram is a good client to recommend for power-users, Quicksy/Conversations for those who want to use their phone number for contacts auto-discovery. Desktop has Dino/Gajim, (i)OS(X) has SiskinIM, BeagleIM.Regarding the libera.chat drama, you can read more here: https://libera.chat/news/temporarily-disabling-the-matrix-bridge
IMO that tells a lot about the people behind Matrix and their overall attitude (I had the same “trust us”, “it’s gonna be soon, I swear!”, “that was bad luck but it’s gonna be fine!” vibes when interacting with the Matrix team members in the early days).And to add to @u_tamtam@programming.dev’s info about setting up XMPP here is a ansible playbook that you could use to deploy matrix: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
I would look at what you want to use it for and see if you can do that better with XMPP or Matrix. The factor that is keeping me on Matrix is that I have all diffrent chats with people on different platforms in one client that is cross platform. Here is the list of available bridges in Matrix to get other chats into it: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/
But keep in mind that is is against ToS for most apps, so there is a small risk of getting banned from other platforms. I can only tell you that I’ve been using it with WhatsApp, iMessage, Discord and Signal for half a year and am not banned anywhere. That is with running my own Matrix Server and bridges on a rented VPS.
For information about what XMPP can do you’ll have to do research on your own as I don’t know anything about it besides that google kinda “killed it”.
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The factor that is keeping me on Matrix is that I have all diffrent chats with people on different platforms in one client that is cross platform.
yeah, as I wrote above, that’s no different in XMPP (but probably much more secure and better maintained: till recently most of the bridging in matrix-world was leveraged by libpurple, which has an horrendous security track-record).
If you are getting into bridging in XMPP, I recommend giving slidge a try: https://sr.ht/~nicoco/slidge/that is is against ToS for most apps
https://slidge.im/core/user/low_profile.html#keeping-a-low-profile
google kinda “killed it”.
And yet it has hundred folds more users than Matrix :) XMPP is ubiquitous (it props up google cloud/nintendo switch push notifications, if your online game has a chat system with million users that’s it, WhatsApp is using it, you have billions of IoT devices running it, …) so just like Linux it can’t really be “killed” at this point as a critical piece of software infrastructure. On the user-facing side, things are alive and kicking with great and well-maintained clients (which is more than can be said about matrix, being a single-source implementation held together by a single company constantly fighting financing issues).
To add insult to injury, most modern protocols also forbid, by their ToS, the use of alternative clients (which very much includes bridges), and to the best of my knowledge WhatsApp, Signal and Discord will eventually suspend your account on this basis.
Good thing that I’m in the EU and the big chat platforms will be forced to open up their API to third-party clients soon with the DMA.
But from my point of view bridging with matrix works well and I have all my chats in one place. And for me that is the only reason I’m sticking with matrix as only one other person I know is using matrix directly. While it would be ideal to get everyone on one decentralized chat platform that is also rather unrealistic… so I’m doing my part using Matrix and getting friends on it when it makes sense but not actively trying to get people on there that don’t have a good reason to use it. And using XMPP mostly sounds like it is just around longer but not that much better, so switching now dosen’t seem to make sense.
Yep, if you are on either, you are fighting the good fight, so keep it up :)
And if you self-host, you’ll find it dramatically easier to do on XMPP (that’s how I ended-up here, after giving up on Matrix’s shenanigans).
Yep, if you are on either, you are fighting the good fight, so keep it up :)
I will! It is a really nice setup for me.
And if you self-host, you’ll find it dramatically easier to do on XMPP (that’s how I ended-up here, after giving up on Matrix’s shenanigans).
Interesting, but I got past that hurdle… and I made it extra hard for myself as I didn’t use the ansible playbook but instead created my own docker setup (own as in writing a docker-compose.yml myself, not as in creating the containers from scratch). But this way I understand the system and could fix problems that I had myself rather nicely.
Why would I use russian whatsapp owned by russian Zuckerberg living in Dubai?
If anything Signal would be the superior alternative.
But as stated by other ppl before me, I use whatsapp because at least where I live almost everyone uses it and Telegram is for conspiracy theories and Nazi or russian propaganda.
