this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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Every single person I know or meet uses WhatsApp. About 90% of the businesses I interact with use WhatsApp Businesses. My whole family uses WhatsApp.
Moving to another system is going to take a lot a lot of work.
Say it with me.... M O N O P O L Y
Here in Germany in my circle (which has people from mid-twenties to 60+, from the North to the center), most people use Signal, with Telegram being a rare outlier. WhatsApp is what everyone uses, though.
Here in Australia Signal tends to be used by the left leaning (because of Snowden's endorsement) and Telegram by the right leaning (they hate Snowden).
Also there are a lot of large chat groups on Telegram - not so many groups on Signal from what I noticed.
I don't understand why people would share their phone number with strangers like that.
I'm Australian but living in the USA now, and practically everyone I chat to uses Facebook Messenger after switching from MSN Messenger when it shut down. I've got Signal and Telegram installed but barely anyone I know uses them.
Telegram has some nice features and I can understand that people want to go away from WhatsApp, but as you said it doesn’t even have end to end encryption and additionally belongs to some Russian. How’s that a beginning?
If you’re already switching, why not go to matrix or signal instead if they are, as you said yourself, most likely the better choice? If you’re switching because of the features, okay. But switching, because of privacy concerns or the company behind it makes absolutely no sense imo.
For as long as Telegram has existed (a little over 10 years now), there has been a concerted effort to discredit it. Because of a game I played 10 years ago, I was on Telegram from its first month. A quick walk through that history:
As to the criticisms around End-to-End encryption:
I'd be quick to leave if Telegram gave me reason to, but it doesn't. Its status as not-quite a big player keeps them innovating, and its founder's attitudes leave me tentatively trusting that he's going to do the right thing.
I’ll take back the the "Russian" comment, then. I already mentioned the larger feature set of telegram and it’s totally fine to switch because of that.
I’m also aware of the optionally encrypted chats, but them not being the default, as well as being more cumbersome to use and without a notification preview means that basically no one uses it (at least in my experience).
As I understand it the feature set wasn’t the reason for switching so I’m curious in what areas telegram might be considered the better choice compared to Signal/Matrix or even WhatsApp. As I see it it’s missing e2e encryption and isn’t as wide spread as WhatsApp.
Telegram has also some big issues with misinformation and conspiracy stuff due to its "hidden communities" and social media aspect with broadcasting and gigantic groups. I personally know people that have been sucked into this and it makes me quite sad.
So I’d be working hard to convince people to switch (which I’ve actually done already with telegram when it first came out) with no real upside and mostly downsides.
I use all three apps, WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal, because others use them. And yes, none of my chats on telegram is encrypted because I'm mostly only in groups anyways.
What I've discovered is that especially groups show a certain inertness. For example, I observed that people from a certain context in one city all use signal but people from the same context in a neighboring city all use telegram. So all my groups from city A are in one messenger and groups from city B are in the other. This is weird, right? And these are really the same circles of people and I share many contacts between all groups. But I think it is just important what they started using and now they create more and more subsequent groups in the same messenger. None of them gives a reason to really switch to the other, so they don't.
Oh, and WhatsApp is only for the few people in my life that are quite unpolitical and uninformed, i.e. 'ordinary people'. Like people I meet at a language course or something work related etc.
Well, when telegram alucnhed whatsapp did not have e2e encryption so it was more secure than WhatsApp. Then whatsapp implemented it while telegram pushed tons of new features. It's been some time.
This is only for 1:1 chats. Telegram doesn't offer E2EE for group chats at all.
Do you have data to back that up? From what I can see, Telegram has 700 million monthly active users (from https://telegram.org/faq) whereas Messenger easily has over a billion. It hit 1.3 billion in 2017 (https://www.adweek.com/performance-marketing/1-3-billion-facebook-messenger/) and the number of Facebook users has been going up since then. As far as I know, they don't break out Messenger vs Facebook users in their data, but the number of Facebook users is shown in the slides for the earnings reports: https://investor.fb.com/investor-events/
SimpleX uses Signal's protocol but requires no phone number or sign up.
In business there isn't a monopoly just yet teams and slack are way more common
Correct. It's specifically prohibited on my company's devices.
We are required to use the company provided Teams for instant messaging.
It's still a little buggy, and I'm all for free and open source, but the whole ecosystem is invaluable for herding cats and dealing with people that forget the passwords they should be using every day.