Finally got rid of telegram, congratulations to me

It was a many months transition, and it’s finally done

Fun thing, you can actually make a backup of all* your messages, groups, contacts, etc. So before leaving you can have all of your data in case you need that one contact or something

The final red flag was as that allegedly Russian authorities were messing with people’s deleted messages. Not for the first time there are news that they could read, modify, delete, see location, and etc. Screw it, this is unsafe, I’m out.

Also, these days telegram is really at the state of a pile of garbage, bloated, buggy, and shady messenger.

trippingonthewire,

I deleted telegram long ago, but not my account, just the apps.

As of recent, I wanted to log back in and actually delete my phone number from there, so there’s no more association.

I can’t login. I download the app, and it sends a verification code through Telegram and won’t do SMS, but I’m not logged in at all so I can’t get the code.

I’m stuck there. I contacted support and they’re yet to respond. :p

scratchandgame,

Also, these days telegram is really at the state of a pile of garbage, bloated, buggy, and shady messenger.

Every messenger is.

Gooey0210,

I will probably up this one, it’s really a lot of materials, and articles, and news if you read behind all this war and politics stuff

You should really search, I tried to compile all I could find, but I’m here to stop using tg, not going back to tg and scroll Russian opposition channels for all the mentions of stuff like that

There are some articles in English that describe the events, but most of them are in Russian

Also, from the search it’s really hard to find anything because a lot of stuff about the war

Here are a few topics:

  1. Telegram leaking location
  2. Telegram leaking IP address
  3. Deleted many years ago chats/messages were recovered remotely (just recently)
  4. Telegram is delaying source code publishing
  5. The source code’s build has a different hash and a few mb smaller than the release
  6. Their data sharing reports are empty although they were openly giving data to authorities in e.g. Germany

Compilation of different technical vulnerabilities and issues of telegram(in Russian):

And in general, Russian government unbanned tg after it realized it can read it. I wouldn’t trust anything that was unbanned in Russia or China

And one more article that lists issues of telegram: …medium.com/так-ли-безопасен-telegram-f5a3128a131…

I’m already tired of doing this, I didn’t even start on activists and how they get hacked and stuff

danie10,
@danie10@lemmy.ml avatar

A lot of speculation that does end with this in the article:

“After discussing her case with experts, Matsapulina now believes her Telegram messages may have been compromised by a form of spyware. When she was told that a hacking device would need to be physically nearby to infiltrate her phone, a memory resurfaced: At times before her arrest, she had noticed an unmarked truck with a dome on its roof parked outside her building. She had even jokingly mentioned it to friends on Telegram. Now, she remembered, as the police were banging on her door that morning, she’d spotted the same mystery vehicle parked outside. By the time the police stormed her home, the vehicle was gone.

Matsapulina has since started using Telegram again.”

Most messaging apps are vulnerable on the client side with spyware, no matter what E2EE exists along the way.

Gallardo994,

Russian authorities usually just hijack login sms confirmation codes. This is a common practice in Russia. Not denying that something else shady might be going on, but I do know mobile providers there don’t even bother to ask why - they just provide shit on demand.

Moonrise2473,

Probably this might be related to why tencent removed cloud backups from WeChat. It used to be like telegram, when you login it loaded all the previous messages, now when you login using the sms confirmation code you need to ask (with a different chat app!) three friends to send you a session specific passcode and then all the previous chat history is wiped clean.

(It was a problem to login back to me as I didn’t have three friends)

Ascend910,

I have been living under a rock, what happened to Telegram?

ritchie,
@ritchie@lemmy.world avatar

It is not considered a good alternative as a messaging app for privacy folks and because the source code is not open, it is not E2E encrypted by default (you need to start a secret chat or something to make your conversation encrypted) if I remember correctly.

ris,

You remember incorrect. All Clients are open source:

Telegram apps are open source and support reproducible builds. Anyone can independently verify that Telegram apps you download from App Store or Google Play were built using the exact same code that we publish

In Fdroid there are also forks. But yes, their servers are closed source and centralized.

Still its not recommended. It requires Phone number and as you said its E2ee is not on by default and is not soooo good.

dukethorion,
@dukethorion@lemmy.one avatar

Nobody in this entire thread of FUD has posted a single link to support any claim of Russian data intrusion.

Suffocate9920,

Here’s a recent article, Telegram’s Connection to the Kremlin.

InternetCitizen2,

I mean from what I gather e2ee is not on by default (and unsuppoeted in group) and is proprietary.

The link below talks about why that is; Telegram focuses on features over maximize privacy.

wired.co.uk/…/telegram-encryption-end-to-end-feat…

onlinepersona,

Is it even possible to get a telegram account these days? I heard their SMS service was down or something making it impossible to sign up and they don’t support email.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Yamayo, (edited )

Stop it with the creative commons link in your comments.

Also, there is nothing wrong with Telegram logins or new accounts.

onlinepersona,

Stop it with the creative commons link in your comments.

No.

Also, there is nothing wrong with Telegram logins or new accounts.

Just gave it a shot. Doesn’t work.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Yamayo,

I get notifications of new contacts that join Telegram so it does. I don’t need to try it myself.

And I don’t understand your cc link and your down votes speak for themselves so stop the silliness.

onlinepersona,

And I don’t understand your cc link and your down votes speak for themselves so stop the silliness.

Do you fear what you don’t understand? “I don’t understand it, so stop”.

And I don’t care about downvotes. Go on, downvote. It has no real life effect.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Yamayo,

Your link also has no real life effect.

fluffery,
@fluffery@lemmy.ml avatar

Am i the only one who doesnt use telegram for porn

Dasus,

Nah.

I use it for drugs.

0x2d,

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/3fefe0e6-4fa5-4322-85dd-b04d007d2ee2.png

yamanii,
@yamanii@lemmy.world avatar

The final red flag was as that allegedly Russian authorities were messing with people’s deleted messages

I’m gonna need a source on that, since the creator himself was persecuted and telegram had layers of fake companies to stop Putin from getting to it.

SevenOfWine,

Here’s what I found:

Over the past year, numerous dissidents across Russia have found their Telegram accounts seemingly monitored or compromised. Hundreds have had their Telegram activity wielded against them in criminal cases. Perhaps most disturbingly, some activists have found their “secret chats”—Telegram’s purportedly ironclad, end-to-end encrypted feature—behaving strangely, in ways that suggest an unwelcome third party might be eavesdropping. These cases have set off a swirl of conspiracy theories, paranoia, and speculation among dissidents, whose trust in Telegram has plummeted. In many cases, it’s impossible to tell what’s really happening to people’s accounts—whether spyware or Kremlin informants have been used to break in, through no particular fault of the company; whether Telegram really is cooperating with Moscow; or whether it’s such an inherently unsafe platform that the latter is merely what appears to be going on. … Elies Campo, who says he directed Telegram’s growth, business, and partnerships for several years, confirmed this general characterization to WIRED, as did a former Telegram developer. In other words, Telegram has the capacity to share nearly any confidential information a government requests. Users just have to trust that it won’t.

wired.com/…/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat/

airikr,

I must agree on the bloated part. Telegram was awesome before Pavel got greedy and added more and more stuff that are just not related to any chat service, for an example payments and crypto.

I installed Snikket on my server few weeks ago and are now trying to move everyone to it. It seems to be a very slow process, though.

But I might keep Telegram only for the porn channels. Mighty good stuff!

By the way. Do you have the source for your claim that Russian authorities were messing with people’s deleted messages?

kixik,

XMPP, 🙂

Gooey0210,

Oh, yeah, the porn channels are really good indeed

I’m thinking if I can access them from some telegram channel mirror

airikr,

Well, Telegram already have a preview feature for every public channels. Just copy the direct link to the channel and add /s after t.me/ (or choose “Previous channel” without opening the link in Telegram) and you’re good to go. If only Pavel will add an RSS feed to that feed. That would be mighty-mighty awesome!

More work to save the media files, though. You have to inspect the element and get the direct link to the image through background-image for the tgme_widget_message_photo_wrap class. Much easier and takes less time to just save it inside Telegram, as of now.

Gooey0210,

Good advice, but I will look into converting some to RSS and read in an RSS reader

airikr, (edited )

I just one a solution for that: RSS-Bridge. Just tried it through one of their instances and it works really well. At least for some of the channels.

Safipok, (edited )

So what do you use to send, receive and store 2GB ish files to other people?

Edit: Would be great if some non-selfhosting solution was suggested here.

toastal,

Magic wormhole

Safipok,

How do you share using BitTorrent. I had a lot of problem sharing with BT, especially on tracker choosing reasons and port problems.

Gooey0210,

Depends what people

For family and friends I have nextcloud, many of them are using it (yes, i’m that one out of a million people who made their friends and family use selfhosted stuff and be happy)

SaltyIceteaMaker,
@SaltyIceteaMaker@iusearchlinux.fyi avatar

I only use it for porn groups🗿

Gooey0210,

Porn groups are good indeed!

FIST_FILLET,

critical damage to the “privacy-conscious people are not freaks” message

chaosppe,
@chaosppe@lemmy.world avatar

I thought furry groups use discord?💀

SaltyIceteaMaker,
@SaltyIceteaMaker@iusearchlinux.fyi avatar

I aint no furry❌🗣️

mihor,
@mihor@lemmy.ml avatar

Now, where might one find those? For science, of course…

SaltyIceteaMaker,
@SaltyIceteaMaker@iusearchlinux.fyi avatar

You can actually just search telegram porn groups on you search enginge of choice. Although google usually leads to better results in the pirn department

cordlesslamp,

Eww, disgusting!

Where?

onlinepersona,

Porn groups? What do you do in those groups? Exchange porn? Is there not enough on the internet?

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

clot27,

I never got with these russian authority claims. Telegram is not based in russia, sure its founders are born in russia but they have taken citizenship of France for a long time now, its based in saudi arabia. I never saw a single proof of them giving data to russian authorities, they were banned in russia for that iirc but eventually got unbanned due to mass adoption. At this point these russian claims just seem racism to me.

lorty,
@lorty@lemmy.ml avatar

It’s the usual foreign fearmongering. It’s never phrased this way if the subject is a western company (even though we know they cooperate with the US government).

jol,

Specially since we know for a fact that Meta hands over any and all information the US government wants from all their apps.

Gooey0210,
  1. I never said that telegram collaborates with Russia (I don’t know if they really do, but tg is pretty insecure, and Russian govt is happy to crack it)
  2. They were banned in Russia until they realized why would they ban it if they can read it (unbanning of something in Russia is another sign of something shady going on)
  3. I’m Russian myself, so your gaslighting won’t work, also are you Russian or Slavic too? 🤣
clot27,
  1. Show me the proof, don’t talk on hunches
  2. They really didn’t care, they are banned in Iran too which is their 3rd biggest market. They got unbanned because Russia failed to unban it, there are no cases known yet in which telegram handed over users data to Russian authorities www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN23P2DY/
  3. I am not Russian
LordKitsuna,

Gonna have to disagree. Telegram is the ONLY chat app with ACTUALLY NATIVE code clients on desktop and mobile. Its the only one that isn’t website in a box trash that’s slow heavy and buggy. I use discord mostly because it’s where everyone is but i fucking hate everything about it and wish people would use telegram.

If you think other chat apps don’t read/process metadata from your dms and such your an idiot. Nothing is safe short of self hosted matrix with full E2E encryption or similar and ain’t nobody doing that.

toastal,

My brother, XMPP existed before Web 2.0 where after the cost-cutting way to ship an app was a browser option (browser options help accessibility tho)—where Electron was the most egregious RAM stealer. OMEMO has been around for multi-client double ratchet e2ee since 2015. An ejabberd server can be tuned to handle 2 million simultaneous connects—Synapse folds over like lawnchair at a single user joining a room with a medium-length history.

Im_old,

Nothing is safe short of self hosted matrix with full E2E encryption or similar and ain’t nobody doing that.

Well, I’m doing that. But I’m nobody, so I guess your point still stands 😅

But also, I don’t judge the chats mainly by their client, but the protocol. Telegram is not open and so can’t be audited properly, that’s my concern.

ne0phyte,

Afaik the protocol is documented[1] and the clients are open source[2].

No code available for the backend though.

[1] core.telegram.org/mtproto

[2] telegram.org/apps#source-code

LWD,

At least Matrix lets you encrypt data. Telegram is hostile to that.

And no, taking your most personal data in a decrypted state for no good reason and promising to keep it encrypted is not the same thing. If anything, it’s worse

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • privacy@lemmy.ml
  • kavyap
  • thenastyranch
  • everett
  • DreamBathrooms
  • ethstaker
  • magazineikmin
  • cubers
  • Youngstown
  • tacticalgear
  • Durango
  • slotface
  • ngwrru68w68
  • rosin
  • osvaldo12
  • JUstTest
  • InstantRegret
  • cisconetworking
  • GTA5RPClips
  • modclub
  • tester
  • mdbf
  • khanakhh
  • normalnudes
  • Leos
  • megavids
  • anitta
  • provamag3
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •