Telegram is fast, responsive, gets frequent updates, has great group chat, tons of animated emojis, works flawlessly on all desktop and mobile platforms, has great support for media, bots, and a great API, allows edits and deleting messages for all users, and I really like the sync despite it not being e2e.

I use both on desktop for different people and the desktop Signal client doesn’t hold up well in comparison. In some ways it feels more clunky than the iMessage ancestor iChat did 20 years ago.

Really? I don't see any real difference between the UX of WhatsApp and Signal for example. And they're really on-par feature wise.

The only things in your list that are not available on Signal are "tons of animated emojis" and "bots". Recently they also introduced usernames to keep your phone number private. And Signal have had all the other things for a few years now, and with actual security.

https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/

Signal doesn't require sharing of phone numbers

It does require a phone number to create an account. That’s the reason I do not consider it being private because at least in Germany a phone number can only be activated by using a personal ID card which it is connected to.

They’re going hand in hand as soon as there’s a data breach or a back door

13 people on iOSes, iPhones from 11s to 15 Pro; 2 Androids.

It no longer doesn't. It took them a while because you can't just slap features like that. It's not a string in a database like with Telegram.

Telegram has great UX because you can build things fast and easy when you don't have to give two shits about the security side of things. You can cover that part with grass-roots marketing department and volunteering shills.

# No smooth animations - that's makes Telegram stand out from everything else here, but maybe not everyone is happy when 6-core phones can deliver something more than 60fps in 2024...

That's what I remember and yes - mostly those are probably easy to fix UI/UX features/bugs, but even being open-source - they aren't.

Signal is excellent for tiny groups of known participants. I prefer it over anything else for this use case. The group permissions Signal introduced a few years ago are well suited for that purpose. I've recently started running small groups on Signal with about 100 participants who mostly know each other, but not tightly. The recent addition of phone number privacy makes this feasible.

Once you start moving up in scale you really need moderation tools, and Signal doesn't do so well there. When you have thousands of people and it's open to the public you need to moderate or else bad actors will cause your valuable contributors to leave. Basic permissions like having admins who can kick people out and restricting how new members can join only gets you so far.

The issue is that in Signal there is no group as far as the server is concerned: The state of the group exists only on client devices and is updated in a totally asynchronous manner. As a consequence it is more difficult for Signal to provide such features. For example, Signal currently has no means to temporarily mute users, to remove posts from all group members, easy bots to deal with spam, granting specific users special privileges like ability to pin messages, transferable group ownership as opposed to a flat "admin" privilege, etc.

Think about the consequences of Signal's async nature with no server state: What does it mean to kick someone out? An admin sends a group update message that tells other clients to stop including that user in future messages. Try this: Have a group member just delete Signal and then re-register. Send a message to the group. They're still in the group. You get an identity has changed message. These are really only actionable with people who you know... that is, in tiny groups.

And then, the biggest strengths of Signal, which are its end to end encryption and heroic attempts to avoid giving the server metadata, are less valuable in the context of a large public group: Anyone interested in surveilling the group can simply join it, so you have to assume you're being logged anyway. Signal lacks strong identities as a design choice, so in big groups it's harder to know who you're really talking to like you know that "Joe Example, founder of Foo Project" is @Foo1988 on Telegram and @FooOfficial on X and u/0xFooMan on Reddit.

What's the difference between a fiat and a ferrari? What's the difference between CentOS and Linux Mint? What's the difference between a macdonalds and a michelin burger?

I have friends and groups on both platforms. On Signal, I'm basically just sending messages (and only unimportant one, like, when are we meeting. Sending media mostly sucks so I generally only have very dry chats on Signal).

Whereas on Telegram, I'm having fun. In fact it's so versatile, that my wife and I use it as a collaborative note-taking system, archiver, cvs, live shopping list, news app (currently browsing hackernews from telegram), etc. We basically have our whole life organised via Telegram. I lose count of all the features I use effortlessly on a daily basis, and only realise it when I find myself on another app. This is despite the fact that both Signal and whatsapp have since tried to copy some of these features, because they do so badly. A simple example that comes to mind: editing messages. It took years for whatsapp to be able to edit a message (I still remember the old asterisk etiquette to indicate you were issuing a correction to a previous message). Now you can, but it's horrible ux; I think you long press and then there's a button next to copy which opens a menu where you find a pencil which means edit, or sth like that. In telegram I don't even remember how you do it, because it's so intuitive that I don't have to.

Perhaps that's why I find the whole "Telegram encryption" discussion baffling to be honest. For me, it's just one of Telegram's many extra features you can use. You don't have to use it, but it's there if you want to. I don't feel like Telegram has ever tried to mislead its users that it's raison d'etre is for it to be a secret platform only useful if you're a terrorist (like the UK government seems to want to portray it recently).

I get the point about "encryption by default", but this doesn't come for free, there are usability sacrifices that come with it, and not everyone cares for it. Insisting that not having encryption by default marrs the whole app sounds similar to me saying not having a particular set of emojis set as the default marrs the whole app. It feels disingenuous somehow.

All those little things combined and when you switch from Telegram to Signal or WhatsApp it feels like going a couple of decades back, or something like that.

Honestly I don't know how much I can trust Telegram and its founder Pavel Durov (I probably shouldn't), but in terms of the quality of software it's unmatched.

It’s more like they implemented it to check a box …

None of the typical criticism against Telegram is directed at whether this is the case or not; usually people start by assuming Telegram is something it doesn't claim to be (a super-secure encrypted-exclusive communications app), and then proceed to attack the scarecrow by pointing out that it's not encrypted-exclusive. Whereas Telegram just says it provides the ability to encrypt your chats if you want to, but otherwise it's more of a multiplatform social platform. It specifically does not state that its sole purpose and raison d'etre is that you, either as a private person or as a terrorist or whatnot, should feel safe and secure using this tool at all times and expect to be untraceable.

The point I'm making here is, if a box needed to be checked and they checked it (properly), then people ranting "ermagerd what about all the other checkboxes that you don't need but other system with different priorities and mission statements have" isn't really useful criticism against the project. Let alone suggesting Signal etc as an alternative, which is like suggesting a raspberry pi to someone wanting a macbook experience.

I guess I fail to see the need for having fun in a messaging app. Signal covers all my major requirements, Telegram, while fun, does not.

As a 'personal' user (rather than sysadmin), I tried more distributions than I can count before settling on linux mint, both 'beginner friendly' and 'advanced (e.g. Slackware/Gentoo)'. Ever since I've discovered Linux Mint I've not looked at another distribution (except occasionally for 'shits and giggles' in at least a decade. I feel it is very respectful of its userbase and has exactly the right mix of user-friendliness and non-patronisingness that I would expect from an OS project.

Small example from the latest release: ubuntu suddenly decided to only provide its thunderbird package exclusively as a snap, so the mint team assigned a maintainer to preserve a mint-hosted .deb file on their own repo. While ubuntu has been moving to snaps and flatpaks, mint has listened to its user-based and allocated resources to 'undo' stupidities by ubuntu where they occur. And they've been wise enough to maintain a debian-based rolling-release alternative as a contingency.

Having said that, I have been using the XFCE variant exclusively over cinnamon, which I got used to when I had a line-up of severly underpowered laptops for years. So a lot of it is probably also habit by this point.

The first feature that comes to mind for me is being able to use multiple devices. Signal only allows using it with one phone. If you add a second device, the first one stops working. You can use a computer and a phone, but not multiple phones. Telegram supports this without any issues. I still struggle to understand this limitation.

E2EE is not important to me. Continuity of chats and lack of friction in accessing them is important to me.

>When you create a so called private chat on telegram, this chat is also only available on the device you created it on.

Signal is able to do this with my phone and my computer. The one-phone limit seems arbitrary.