I logged into telegram today and found that all my data had been deleted because I hadn’t used it in 6 months. Like I get why that feature might be desirable in some circumstances but for me, I’m not using end-to-end encryption because I’m sharing state secrets that need to self destruct upon opening - I just don’t want the middlemen.
I’ve been looking into alternatives like Matrix/Element, XMPP etc - it sounds like Element might be easier to get non-techy friends to adopt but it, from my understanding, has a fairly power hungry mobile app.
You can set the self destruct option to 1 year in Telegram. Matrix or Signal isn’t as safe as people think they are. One has history of having ties to Mossad and other with CIA. Signal requires phone number and both have huge privacy issues with meta data. XMPP and Session seems better option.
Conversations is pretty user-friendly (XMPP front-end). Just sign up, then log in, like email. End-to-end encryption with groups is still as janky as a Windows XP server, but if you don’t need that, then it’s fine.
FluffyChat is a less power hungry alternative to Element. The reason these use so much battery is that they constantly check for new messages and don’t do it over the privacy infringing Google cloud messaging services, also known as Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), if it’s Android. These are integrated into the system and work a bit more efficiently.
I logged into telegram today and found that all my data had been deleted because I hadn’t used it in 6 months. Like I get why that feature might be desirable in some circumstances but for me, I’m not using end-to-end encryption because I’m sharing state secrets that need to self destruct upon opening - I just don’t want the middlemen.
I’ve been looking into alternatives like Matrix/Element, XMPP etc - it sounds like Element might be easier to get non-techy friends to adopt but it, from my understanding, has a fairly power hungry mobile app.
You can set the self destruct option to 1 year in Telegram. Matrix or Signal isn’t as safe as people think they are. One has history of having ties to Mossad and other with CIA. Signal requires phone number and both have huge privacy issues with meta data. XMPP and Session seems better option.
Sources :
Why not Signal? And the Five Eyes
Matrix and Israeli Intelligence Amdocs
Conversations is pretty user-friendly (XMPP front-end). Just sign up, then log in, like email. End-to-end encryption with groups is still as janky as a Windows XP server, but if you don’t need that, then it’s fine.
FluffyChat is a less power hungry alternative to Element. The reason these use so much battery is that they constantly check for new messages and don’t do it over the privacy infringing Google cloud messaging services, also known as Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), if it’s Android. These are integrated into the system and work a bit more efficiently.
The more direct competition to telegram is signal imo. It has a limit of 1k users versus the like 30k in telegram but otherwise pretty feature parity.