Because an instant messaging platform is only useful if there are people to, well, message on it. WhatsApp has the userbase worldwide, telegram does not.
Because whatsapp was huge way before telegram came around and most people dont want to switch. A message platform is only useful if most people you know use it as well.
Riddle me this - Some people’s argument against using telegram is that it is not as secure as WhatsApp(which on face value is true because WhatsApp is E2E encrypted while telegram is not E2E encrypted). Other people claim that only hackers and terrorists use telegram and that is why they don’t use telegram. My question is why are people like hackers and terrorists using telegram in the first place if it has worse security while having no upsides for these kinds of individuals.
As many have pointed out, it isn’t really our choice, since we have to get along and use what most people around us use.
The only solution I see is if the government mandates every messenger to use a common protocol allowing all to co-operate.
Though only for people in the EU. Proud to be one of them. I can now ditch WhatsApp and use Signal. Next month, gatekeepers with instant messaging apps will be forced to comply and find a solution to this till March 2024.
I know a handful of people on WhatsApp, a handful more on Signal, and a single person on Telegram who is a bit strange and thinks the world is a simulation (he’s a hoot). So, basically I don’t use Telegram at all because the only person I know on there isn’t someone I’d want to communicate with anyway.
WhatsApp made a E2EE messenger app (based on XMPP like everything else) the fastest that was reliable, way before Facebook bought it around 2014. Even with FB’s acquisition, things largely remained unchanged and the Stories addition was incredibly well received. It is not as intrusive and addictive as Telegram, nor as dramatic as Facebook, and is more secure than Telegram, Hike, Viber, and its numerous competitors over the years (while being almost similarly less private).
People don’t choose, people use whatever most people around them use. Whatsapp and telegram are both centralized, and shouldn’t be trusted because, by the nature of it, they can (and eventually will) turn user-hostile.
Messengers come and go, if we really want to make some progress in this area, we should embrace federated and p2p protocols as the logical evolution. Anything else is just wasting time and user privacy.
I’d rather push for XMPP personally, the matrix protocol has been a dumpster fire in an “almost ready, trust me bro” state for as long as it has existed, and failed to justify its own weight and complexity. But that’s mostly irrelevant since they are open protocols and can somewhat bridge with one another.
I’m selfhosting a Matrix server and have all my Chats from other apps also bridged to there. For just text chat I don’t feel like Matrix is missing anything, the thing preventing me from getting my not so technically minded friends on it is the missing support for good group voice chat.
It XMPP better for group VC? Is the option available to bridge Messenger like Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, iMessage to XMPP?
I’m selfhosting a Matrix server and have all my Chats from other apps also bridged to there.
Same here, but with XMPP in place of Matrix. For historical context, XMPP was invented about 25 years ago on the premise that people were already tired of having their instant messaging scattered over multiple protocols (rather than Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, iMessage now, it was Yahoo, MSN, AIM, ICQ, … then), so bridging is very much front and center in the XMPP world. Over time, people also realized that bridging sucks in general (you either dumb down your client to the lowest common denominator which sucks for yourself, or your client isolates itself from the source protocol enough that it sucks for everyone else).
To add insult to injury, most modern protocols also forbid, by their ToS, the use of alternative clients (which very much includes bridges), and to the best of my knowledge WhatsApp, Signal and Discord will eventually suspend your account on this basis.
Matrix is still trying to carve a niche for itself in this space, and is failing IMO (judging by the quality/security of the bridges they have come-up with, and the recent libera.chat fiasco). I’d say that the situation in this regard in XMPP is only marginally better due to the fact that XMPP had a decade headstart to fail and try over, and I would not recommend using bridges on either of them if that can be avoided.
It XMPP better for group VC?
I’d say “it depends”. Fun fact, Matrix uses jitsi-meet under the hood (which is XMPP + a media transcoding/multicasting component that doubles as a relay), and jitsi-meet is my recommendation for this use-case: as long as the central server has good bandwidth, you can really scale up your VC to many attendees. On top of that, XMPP has support for peer-to-peer group VC, with the benefit that hosting is simpler, it doesn’t require any central component/relay (but the bandwidth cost is incurred on all participants and you won’t go beyond a handful of attendees that way).
You should definitely give XMPP a chance, but not feel bad about ending-up with whichever feels better: they are mostly fine, and largely preferable to the non-standard/non-federated alternatives.
XMPP is orders of magnitude lighter weight so that might factor in if you have associated costs to running in the cloud.
If you want to get started the easy way, go with ejabberd, it has sane defaults and lots of convenience (e.g. it embarks a stun/turn server to facilitate calling through NAT, acts as a ACME client to renew certificates automagically, …).
On Android, Cheogram is a good client to recommend for power-users, Quicksy/Conversations for those who want to use their phone number for contacts auto-discovery. Desktop has Dino/Gajim, (i)OS(X) has SiskinIM, BeagleIM.
Regarding the libera.chat drama, you can read more here: libera.chat/…/temporarily-disabling-the-matrix-br…
IMO that tells a lot about the people behind Matrix and their overall attitude (I had the same “trust us”, “it’s gonna be soon, I swear!”, “that was bad luck but it’s gonna be fine!” vibes when interacting with the Matrix team members in the early days).
To add insult to injury, most modern protocols also forbid, by their ToS, the use of alternative clients (which very much includes bridges), and to the best of my knowledge WhatsApp, Signal and Discord will eventually suspend your account on this basis.
Good thing that I’m in the EU and the big chat platforms will be forced to open up their API to third-party clients soon with the DMA.
But from my point of view bridging with matrix works well and I have all my chats in one place. And for me that is the only reason I’m sticking with matrix as only one other person I know is using matrix directly. While it would be ideal to get everyone on one decentralized chat platform that is also rather unrealistic… so I’m doing my part using Matrix and getting friends on it when it makes sense but not actively trying to get people on there that don’t have a good reason to use it. And using XMPP mostly sounds like it is just around longer but not that much better, so switching now dosen’t seem to make sense.
Yep, if you are on either, you are fighting the good fight, so keep it up :)
I will! It is a really nice setup for me.
And if you self-host, you’ll find it dramatically easier to do on XMPP (that’s how I ended-up here, after giving up on Matrix’s shenanigans).
Interesting, but I got past that hurdle… and I made it extra hard for myself as I didn’t use the ansible playbook but instead created my own docker setup (own as in writing a docker-compose.yml myself, not as in creating the containers from scratch). But this way I understand the system and could fix problems that I had myself rather nicely.
I was thinking more of the “day to day admin” side of things rather than “getting it running for the first time”: ejabberd really runs like clockwork, demands no effort, no attention, packs all the features you need, and uses close to no resource.
By that time, I’ve been hosting services for communities for decades, and a good argument in favour of keeping XMPP, no matter how much adoption it would eventually get was that ejabberd is one of most “fire & forget” software I’ve ever deployed. Right now I have an instance running with 500 users and it barely ticks above 150MB RSS.
In comparison to that, synapse for a dozen users, especially in the early days, was a burning hot mess. The whole stack is rather fragile and I was always worried about something breaking up, or resources going wild. If you are solo admin with users across timezones depending on you, that might matter a lot.
b) telegram is not end-to-end encrypted by default. And not end-to-end encrypted at all for group chats. That’s kind of a dealbreaker. Telegram is one of the last messaging apps I’d recommend.
In my country whatsapp messenger can and will be seen by the government if there is a request. Have heard it many times. I don’t think any messenger or anything you write is actually secure or actually private. We just came to terms with that.
Well, everyone uses WhatsApp here, and makes it weird when I say I don’t have WhatsApp… I’m still never going to install spyware vulnerable with possible backdoors to my personal device. And that’s how I become so lonely, I have a bit of autism also xD, so I tend to be alone and like to be alone. If someone needs something from me, they can email me or call at my phone (normal calls are neither safe nor secure) and if not I also installed Telegram on desktop where it is open source, but I only use Telegram to download stuff like movies.
Depends on which of your social groups uses WhatsApp or not. If your IRL friends are in IT they might prefer to use Signal because of their knowledge and understanding; but the average person will use the app that everyone else has as well.
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