• Graveyard Leprechaun
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    122 years ago

    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.

    • plu
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      102 years ago

      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.

        • plu
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          32 years ago

          Not all (e.g. personal conversations)

        • @sibachian@lemmy.ml
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          92 years ago

          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.

    • @peppermint@lemmy.ml
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      2 years ago

      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.

  • Jay Baker (he/they)
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    102 years ago

    There are definitely pros and cons and I agree with many comments here that it’s about threat models and personal preference while making informed choices and promoting the importance of privacy. On a related note, the most alarming thing for me about Telegram is probably the fact that almost every Linux channel on there is full of fascists (and I’m talking literal neo-Nazis with Nazi stuff in their profile photos)! Grotesque and utterly bizarre!

    • plu
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      72 years ago

      We have Wolfballs here on Lemmy too so we can’t exactly complain

      • @Peter1986c@lemmy.ml
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        42 years ago

        I did not see them here yet (although I am only really visiting this instance), but maybe I am not seeing that well. :P

  • @toneverends@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    Compare this to Signal, where you saw everyone’s phone number and it was buggy as hell

    [emphasis mine]