For me, telegram's biggest feature is normie appeal. I have been able to migrate like 5-6 of my normie friends from whatsapp to telegram. I have been able to migrate 0 normie friends to signal.

"Has more stickers ... so it's gonna be popular with the Zoomers" Wow, I got completely called out, my zoomer brain prefers it because of the big ass stickers packs(The limit is 120 I think) and the "You don't actually need your phone to use the desktop app", shitposting without having to constantly babysit my phone so it doesn't disconnect me because it got idle for too long is probably the main reason I mainly use Telegram

You talked about governments being able to block its traffic, but in fact, the Russian government tried for more than a year, failed eventually, and made temporarily unavailable quite a few innocent services in the process of blocking supposed telegram IPs. That is because it has a distributed server architecture, so they won't be screwed if one or 2 hosting providers kick them off or a government blocks some IP ranges or dns domains.

Unlike Signal, Telegram has native GNU/Linux desktop application, not some electron bloat.

"Supergroups can have 5000 members" yet the group open towards the end of the video has 6k+? Edit: Apparently the member cap is actually 200k.

Channels are the killer feature of Telegram. Only Telegram and Viber have that feature, and Viber is shit

You forgot to mention unlimited storage. You can send file of almost any size and any kind. Tho distribution of illegal content will get the channel banned

Not a fan of the "roll your own" encryption and the proprietary, source-available nature of the app

How did people tolerate whatsapp and it only being able to be used on 1 device

I expected you'd smash it for the self-made encryption and not defaulting to E2EE, and yet...

When I first heard this program's name, I immediately thought of the vintage Telegram from the early 20th century.

"What do you have to hide from facebook? why are you so afraid?" -Everyone I have to talk to and won't leave whatsapp.

woah just got this reccomended

2:20 the ones that are remotely privacy-respecting don't want your phone number.

Russian government already try to block telegram, but they couldn't

The problem with temp numbers for signing up is that they never seem to work, they either have been used before or are simply denied

I try to pull my friends to telegram once in a while, and for some time it works but there always comes a time when they just randomly revert back to fb messenger for some bizzare reason like the share button from facebook allowing them to share stuff directly thru messenger. Boggles my mind, especially during the pandemic as facebook blackouts are so often and you just can't message anyone for half an hour, and messenger group chats were probably designed on shrooms as on pc a more lively convo just leads to the site crashing. Also the inability to send a picture without lossy compression makes me just furious

So essentially we need a open source version of this MATRIX can help BTW, will you make a video about how to use GPG????

tfw normies discover telegram

Great video as always. I like Telegram's interface, and sometimes the bots come in clutch. Trying to use Signal more and more.

As a man that is using telegram for 3 years, yeah your review is very correct and you mentioned almost everything that normal user would do.

I've considered this app the "gateway drug" into private E2E communications. Most of my non tech friends got this at some point, and then theyll ask me "hey whats this secret chat end to end encryption thingy". Then I explain it, and then they say something like "Oh so like how Facebook and that sell your data" comes up soon after. Soon after that, many of them either end up using Secret Chats exclusively (when they can) or they'll make a bigger jump and go to something like signal. Telegram itself may not be the best option out there, but it's a way of alluring people who are not techies with big colorful stickers and fun features. I mean, Russia's Internet oversight authority RosKomNadzor has tried to block Telegram, but in the end it basically wiped out half of all AWS servers while Telegram barely even went down. I realise that's more a feature of their infrastructure, but it's got a good track record so far in terms of resilience to blocking attempts."Has more stickers ... so it's gonna be popular with the Zoomers" Wow, I got completely called out, my zoomer brain prefers it because of the big ass stickers packs(The limit is 120 I think) and the "You don't actually need your phone to use the desktop app", shitposting without having to constantly babysit my phone so it doesn't disconnect me because it got idle for too long is probably the main reason I mainly use Telegram

@8:10 I'm sure that customizing of this program does not involve getting rid of overlay-scrollbars and having traditional (useful) ones so that one is not forced to kill one's hand when scrolling tens of pages back...

I get it man. Degrees of privacy and/or security. I use telegram first of all because it has better privacy respecting policies (given the latest censorship wave hitting most of main social media) and secondly I appreciate the features. I am fully aware of some OpSec. I assume that all data that has been put through the internet via encrypted channels is potentially usable against you. Everything is a trade-off. In short. I trust Telegram at this time. If it changes too much over time, I will simply move to a new tool. And in the process I will not put things I am not comfortable with online. I appreciate Telegram more for its neutrality when it comes to politics. A rare thing to find almost nowadays.

Telegram is definitely less secure by design than Signal. The first problem is that chats aren't really more encrypted than using TLS to the central server. Even the "secret chats" are problematic because any end-to-end-encryption can be broken easily if it relies on a centralized structure. The central server can therefore perform a man-in-the-middle-attack on any user really. That also applies to Signal and Threema. Threema responded to this problem in a relatively good way by showing the state of physical verification in the contact list visually. So every user can easily see if the communication channel is trusted. Signal uses a "security number" to check just like WhatsApp which is obscuring the whole verification process of the encryption (which is not quite great) and it's pretty much hidden in the UI in comparison to Threema. Also when the security number in Signal changes (so your communication partner changes, their device changes or somebody else interfered the channel) you get a small notification in the chat (which gets basically ignored by most users). This does not happen on Threema because you need to explicitly clone your local key from device to device to keep your chats (so the key won't change) or you would need to use a new key and loose all chats at the same time. This may be inconvenient for general users but that's the price for actually good usage of encrypted chats.

Hello mate! im honestly a big fan of your channel and i love it a lot! great content! Also can you please do a video about deep packet inspection? i can't see mto find any information about it , or just a lil small info

I don't like the non-default e2e encryption and non-FOSS. I think Element could be good if getting it working wasn't such a pain

The problem about these sorts of programs is that barely no one ever uses them. At least there are people who kind of use Telegram, but not so much other more security/privacy focused similar programs.

Mental, my dude, love your content Howewer the blocking thing about Telegram is wrong. Apparently it is very difficult to block out. About a year ago РКН in russia attempted to do just this for about 6 month, as a result it killed a whole bunch of payment and other services when telegram kept working

I was nervous predicting you to say closed-source every time before 5:24, huh...

Hey if you have the time could you look at the purism librem collection in one of your videos? specifically the mini? Love your videos, keep it up:D

Actually you will see ads in channels (maybe russian thing?), but ads are placed in 3rd-party platforms and channel owners just make posts with ads. Upcoming solution is to provide telegram's own ad platform and to make possible to distinguish ad posts from normal posts Reason for Telegram popularity is simple: enough features and at least some privacy. Open api made possible creating 3rd-party clients and bots, channels and groups gave basic social functions, community stickers with anime girls… And it is convenient for end user

Can you do a video explaining why peer-to-peer messaging clients never really managed to catch on?

could you add spanish subtitles? i want to share this with some of my irl friends (since that's the only thing i used whatsapp for) but i live in spain and spanish people don't speak good english

Def interested in that Threema video, no actual PFS, only via TLS, so I do wonder why they might be more secure than signal

Some minor corrections/additions to the video: - Channels are not like in discord. They are more like groups in social media I guess? Some limited amount of users (admins) can write, all others (subscribers) can only read. - Comments are made in a weird way: when you write a comment you actually writing a messenge to the linked group which is a replay to the past you comment (and you also do so without joining). - The bot API is BAD. It's good that it even exists, but overall it's just bad weird and not well thought. E.g. all strings are UTF-8 but code point indices they send to you are for UTF-16 strings (I was working with the API for a long time and there are a lot of similar weird things, trust me). Also the docs are only available in a human readable html, you can't use it to auto gen client libs. - The mtproto is even worse (though I didn't work with it). - Telegram is pretty resistent to government block, e.g. it was blocked in Russia and worked most of the time (and if it didn't you could setup a proxy). The government blocked half of the AWS trying to do something, but didn't succeed anyway. Also I assume it's 'blocked' in Iraq, but I don't know how well it works there (I've also heard that it works). Overall I would say that it's a good apps, but the "point" is totally not security (is better that WhatsApp, but I wouldn't call it secure anyway). The point is that it's easy to use, convenient and popular. Better than most social networks, but again: not private messaging app.

I use Telegram but mostly as a social network for people banned from Twitter and other mainstream social network sites. That is mostly passive. I rarely if ever comment. My preference for secure communications is Threema on the phone although that will likely change when I de-Google. I also use Signal, Wire, Element, and I would use Tox but no one I know is on it or seems interesting in using it.

I really like telegram, it's more secure, has it's downsides but was easier to get people into

Telegram also provides a REST-ish API that allows you to build your own frontend app for it, there are a lot of apps for telegram like Unigram. I suggest anyone who doesn't like the original TG app try them instead.

I appreciate all of this information.

Groups can have 200000 members And you can send upto 2gb of files

7:00 It seems like AdGram is just an optional revenue source for willing channel maintainers charging a ten per cent commission.

How to start xorg as non-root and why you deleted video about it?

Telegram features are simply astonishing.

I've been using it since 2017 with all my IT friends. It's pretty nice app :)

signal should be the next popular messaging app.. telegram is a good step forward, but signal takes it a leap further

do a review of Signal vs it's fork Silence. also, Session - what do you think?

LMAO that Взломай Парня(hack your bf) channel at the end had me dieing

Thank you Outlaw!

I think silence + twinme will be perfect alternative to WhatsApp or even Signal as twinme & silence are completely Open source & P2P thus 100% transparency and no downtime at all, but peer discovery isn't possible in it. That's where silence comes in, it uses existing network providers SMS infrastructure to send encrypted invites.

keybase and tox ?

I was told abit back I sign up singel with just a email. On Google play is like need a phone number. But I got it anyhow never know when I need to use it. I did look in to theema still up in the air about it. I would pay for it if I got friends come and pay with me.

I don't buy the "don't roll your own" attitude that is common in the tech space. Sure you should give it a go and that will show you how much you don't know and you'll learn to value existing solutions. But to not roll your own as a rule? What if Satoshi followed the principle?

But does it ask you to file a bug report if you shake your device in anger?

Telegram Bot API is so underrated, you can build almost any application with it and still have a decent UI... i use it for my personal services and its awesome.

can you review Element/Matrix?

I wish Briar had some more features and a better UI.

Hey man, can you do a GrapheneOS review?

opinion on tox protocol?

Telegram is basically furry social media at this point

What about Element?

I use it since it was developed. Amazing App! It is growth a lot!

Please, do Matrix next :))

Is Telegram really for profit? As far I know thats not true. The founder Pavel Durov explicitly said once that Telegram is not a for-profit service and that a messenger shouldn't have the goal to make money.

The "easy to block" part looks like an assumption. Russia tried to block it, but no luck. Also in August, there were riots in Belarus with complete Internet blackout: no external resources, and no mobile broadband at all. The whole state was blocked with Sandvine hardware, and even with such restrictions telegram was usable (sometimes with external mtproto proxies), unlike tens of other VPN services. And it was the only reliable way to communicate with other people. So I don't think it's fair just to drop "easy to block" bomb with no evidence or research, just based on assumption of main telegram server being a thing. Also some telegram forks allow you to have some security with fake account, which can be useful when you are forced to show your messages from your own phone. So as a mean to avoid Internet shutdown it's really good and battle-tested messenger, with extra layer of e2e if you need it

You should do an overview for burner sms like you did with burner emails.

Please kindly tell us your telegram nickname so we can do the netstalking, thanks. Also is would be good of you to create a channel so we can do the bulling too.

Telegram is my mobile messenger of choice, just because I trust it more than Whatsapp. I'd rather use the encrypted jabber protocol, but barely anybody is willing or got the echnical background to use this anymore.

What about the chatting app called "Wire"? It seems like a really good option.

I prefer their cloud chat encryption knowing that chats and encryption keys are not stored on the same servers. And they have been around since 2013 and make it clear that their policies mostly apply yo public channels and groups and not private. Also, the fact that you can self destruct your whole Telegram account remotely and your chats are not stored locally means no one can get into your chats or read your texts as they are not stored on your device. Unlike on Signal where your chats are all stored locally and all that would need to be done is bypass your lockscreen and open that app.

please do a review of element/matrix

We should use Matrix.

Do a video on RCLONE: open source Cloud Storage with E2E encryption

yo why does having more features = having less privacy?

I use telegram for years, it's really good on groups, easier to manage and restrict in general or persons individually (no gifs, no stickers, no audio). Voice and video calls works great on telegram, sending files is handy. Not all chats needs do be end-to-end encrypted, but there's the option for who wants it. signal I use only with one contact and I it's ok, but behind telegram on usability.

Him: Going to be popular with the zoomers. Me a furry: oh it goes way further than you think.

Just as a reminder, domain fronting is also blocked in Iran.

Channels on telegram run ads for quite a long time. I guess, what telegram is going to do is to get their cut from those ad revenues by providing a convenient and secure way of running ads both for channels and advertisers.

any thought on ipfs?

„Heavily encrypted“ lmao

Could you review element.io? I think it's even more secure than Signal and if I get my friends to switch, I suggest them to switch to element.

Honestly, good enough middle ground. Don't really care for signal, but I'll change if telegram goes down too.

Telegram: it's where the furries are 🐺🐕

I find telegram to be a good alternative for the masses. You have the best of both worlds (maybe not the best)

Pop! OS review sometime please🥺 best Ubuntu based distro

We would like to see u having a conversation with tech over tea show

'CHADS' was a brilliant comment

Hey, Would you review GNU Jami?

can you chuck a review of session messenger?

Signal on the phone still needs phone number though, downloaded it and found out

3:26 >stand back, we have math PhDs They do lol. Brother or Pavel Durov, Nikolai (i think the main guy behind telegram and other projects) has PhD in Algebraic geometry, arxiv.org/abs/0704.2030 Not that it has to do with anything, but i think it's cool.

If possible please review silence, twinme and briar

why dont people use locally hosted minecraft servers to send messages?

Hey, thanks 😄

Maybe you're right. But Pavel Durov the owner has declared a $10mil reward ro cracking their cryptography, and Russian government failed to block Telegram even though they're benn trying to do this for over 3 years now. I mean, sire it's not the best, but it's pretty damn good. The real concern though, would be the back doors that are probably there.

Let's be real any chat app that have large users base is connected to FBI and CIA , and we forgot the fact that we're connected to the internet that is provided by them, i mean by countries governments.

I used telegram for more than years and it's great with so much good Update support and with actually great Security and privacy .....I love it

10/10 platform as an old term user

All the terrorists seem to love telegram... So, i guess if the government can't catch them, they can't catch me as well...

none of your telegram chats are encrypted at all. unless you use the private chat, which isn't even an option on the desktop app