any way to read this without a telegram account?
this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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[Matrix/Element]Dead
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Sorry, should've provided the whole post:
Spoiler
🔎 Search on Telegram is more powerful than in other messaging apps because it allows users to find public channels and bots. Unfortunately, this feature has been abused by people who violated our Terms of Service to sell illegal goods.
💪 Over the last few weeks, a dedicated team of moderators, leveraging AI, has made Telegram Search much safer. All the problematic content we identified in Search is no longer accessible. If you still manage to find something unsafe or illegal in Telegram Search, please report it to us via @SearchReport.
🚫 To further deter criminals from abusing Telegram Search, we have updated our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, ensuring they are consistent across the world. We’ve made it clear that the IP addresses and phone numbers of those who violate our rules can be disclosed to relevant authorities in response to valid legal requests.
☝️ These measures should discourage criminals. Telegram Search is meant for finding friends and discovering news, not for promoting illegal goods. We won't let bad actors jeopardize the integrity of our platform for almost a billion users.
👀 Was this written by AI, or was it a person trying to be as annoying with their emojis as possible?
I can't read this, who thought adding pictures like that was a good idea 😭
Looks like your post was written by AI so given your emoji use 😉
Ya that was the commentary on how shitty the icons were
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Honestly that isn't bad. They were knowingly protecting people who target children.
Privacy should be enforced on a technical level with zero knowledge
They can take down the child weirdos and human traffickers
Take down my rom emulation hosted ZIPs and we'll fucking riot
Well it's only a matter of time
They took down a z- library post It's over
the libgen channel was practically eliminated in the last week
"Protecting the children" is always the excuse for fascism, pay attention.
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So what's the replacement?
For private messaging? Signal was always better. The way I use Telegram, and the way Telegram should be used, is like another public social media. I use it for following channels that give news about things I'm interested in.
All completely irrelevant to most people. Nobody they know is on those platforms.
There are only two alternatives to the Big Tech messengers that are anywhere near critical mass: Signal and the shady one we're talking about here.
Though I would love Matrix to go mainstream.
This is sadly the exact reason it will stay like this. People can't reach me because i don't use WhatsApp? Well bad luck. Use a better app or just don't. I can't reach them because they only use WA? What a bummer but so be it.
As long as people install WhatsCrapp because some distant aunt still uses it for the xmas-greetings, it will continue to be #1.
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Ironically though Matrix has a Problem with metadata leaking out while signal doesn't
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Signal was always better
I love the premise of Signal, but there are too many red flags. Some of my issues are:
- Hostility against 3rd party clients
- US-based legal entity
- Too much tied with Google libs on android
- No official Fdroid support
- Open source claims are undermined by code blackouts from time to time.
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For the illegal goods? Sir this is privacy not piracy.
You really gonna come in here with a "want privacy? Must be because you're a criminal."? Get the fuck out.
Element 2.0 or Signal is only worth ones, I think.
But to be honest - it's only IP and phone number. If you have concerns about possibility of such request about your persona, you always can buy Telegram's anonymous phone number / fake telephone number / use VPN to login.
Just clarifying for the ones who don't know: Element is a Matrix client.
Element I'm not that sure, it's so bloated that I'm surprised it works on mobile phones. Regarding matrix sure
They said element 2.0, which I'd assume means Element X using matrix 2.0. From my testing in the last few weeks, element X has been the fastest messaging app I've ever used. Probably still some bugs but does not feel bloated anymore at all.
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So far, irc, jabber/ xmpp and matrix and plain old email with gpg :-)
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regarding its UX, nothing close exists; when it comes to converting normies, so you have someone to actually talk to, then there are no alternatives. that's a pretty shitty state of affairs for something that shoulda been solved a long time ago.
lesson learned, I guess, don't put all your eggs in one basket and have multiple fallback solutions. I've begrudingly moved to Signal and I'm cursing it out at least once per day, can't believe the navel-gazing, self-righteous cluelessness behind it; but that's the best there is at the moment. it's beyond shitty that we're having trouble achieving what we had in like 2012 by way of XMPP and friends, let alone surpassing it.
XMPP is still around although there's a constant campaign trying to claim it's gone.
because things moved forward in the last decade or so and it's not viable. the same way matrix and element and those ridiculous things aren't viable and never will be. can you use it today? absolutely. can you convert normies to it and make it an actual widely used comms platform? no. fucking. way.
this is coming from a guy running their own prosody instance and utilizing rocketchat on two separate client instances. yeah, I know how to set it up and deploy it; but the amount of absolutely credible complaints I get from normies forced to use it staggering.
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It's shocking how many people just outright ignore UX.
What don't you like about Signal?
to me it looks and feels like shit, compared to Durov's spyware it's like a PoC from 2015 looking for funding. fine demo you got there, now bring us the real thing.
but, to practical things, I lose/sell/buy/switch devices frequently. with telegram, I can lose all my devices, log on from a fresh one and all my shit is there - a decade+ of convos with 100s of people with valuable info. no juggling around with the crappy electron desktop app that doesn't give me access to convos or the inane procedure to replace a lost device and restore chat history... the other day, I successfully retrieved a piece of info from a convo from a decade prior.
I realize there are people out there that need that sort of security, but I don't. I just want Telegram with an OTR plugin (OMEMO nowadays) that prevents any nascent mass surveilance and LLM ingestion and I'm golden. but that shit's explicitly against Telegram's ToS; the only logical conclusion is they're adamant about leaving all your shit unencrypted in the cloud for some specific reason.
I can't think of any such reason that's not malevolent.
I see it a lot when ppl complain about signal, but just can't understand why you would save 10+ years in old msgs. Almost all my signal conversations even GRP chats are set to 1 week auto delete. If something important Is said that I need to save, I copy/paste it into my note app where I can organize it. Its sounds so impractical to dig through 10+ years of data everytime you need something. Plus it would be awful to know there is a log of all the dumb things I said 10 years ago lol.
Completely agree! The ephemerality of Signal is a feature, not a bug.
I didn't always see it this way, but then a thought occurred to me. None of the conversations we have in person are recorded. Those communications are just as meaningful if not more so than text conversations, and yet somehow we get by just fine without them being stored indefinitely on some personal device, let alone in someone else's datacenter.
This is a case of technology controlling us when we should be controlling it.
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How about something e2ee? (Even Whatsapp is more privat than telegram)
Wire. Fully encrypted, easily anonymous because no phone number needed
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The first messenger without user IDs
Other apps have user IDs: Signal, Matrix, Session, Briar, Jami, Cwtch, etc. SimpleX does not, not even random numbers. This radically improves your privacy. Why user IDs are bad for privacy? How does SimpleX work? Security assessment
Shout out to right wing nuts for rushing to Telegram early on - keeping me from ever using it.
Good thing I never used telegram.
when free & democratic country jails your ass one time
"Protecting the children" is always code for "We're manufacturing consent to fuck you over."
It's not like they exactly didn't before: https://www.androidpolice.com/telegram-germany-user-data-surrendered/
Also, nothing said about whether they're going to start making transparency reports, not that I've expected anything else from this crapshow of a messenger...
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