Technology
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agreed. but chats are there to keep in touch, collaborate, and communicate. so we don't have much of a choice, especially since most people just don't care about security and stick with Messenger or similar. in my circles though, it's a lot easier to convince someone to use Telegram unlike one of the many XMPP clients, and seeing as it runs natively, it's my only real choice.
personally, I'd be all over DeltaChat if it wasn't running on electron. brilliant idea for sure, as there would be no convincing necessary to keep in touch with practically anyone on the planet.
You can collaborate on WhatsApp or Signal as well, both messengers are using the end-to-end encrypted Signal protocol. Even in group chats. Telegram is not E2EE per default.
Of course, with WhatsApp Meta collects all your metadata so they have a very detailed network of basically all the people in this world... At least without all their messages.
both use Electron (which is the problem and why Telegram is literally the only modern option on the market) so they aren't options either. If Electron wasn't a problem in and off itself, I wouldn't use either of those anyway since I could use DeltaChat, be secure, and not need to bother to "convert" anyone to use the client since it's literally a chat client built on the email protocol (which everyone on earth has).
Caring about the technology of an app more than about its privacy is really strange to me, but you do you.
electron slows everything on your computer down (by design). for each individual electron app you're running concurrently, you're burning another huge volume of resources and sacrificing performance that normally would have been shared. even well-optimized electron apps can't do anything to avoid this due to the inherent design of electron. because each runtime of electron has to load all its junk separately from one another. it's a burden on your hardware that developers just don't give a shit about because electron makes it easy to push out apps with minimal coding effort and let you ignore native platform support. if they did give a shit they wouldn't use electron. electron basically makes a flagship computer behave like a 90ies computer due to lazy convenience of the coder. i'd propose that any developer who opts to us electron can't be trusted because they obviously don't care (or know) enough to develop real software. almost every electron app is basically a patchwork put together from various github sources and frameworks.
regardless. even if i wanted to use one of the privacy focused applications despite electron, i would have a total of 0 users to chat with, making the chat app useless. people want their modern features and are beyond willing to pay with their privacy. so not only does telegram offer a non-electron native client on all platforms. they also offer all modern features and design elements users have come to expect.
and as said. if i had to pick one chat application i'd prefer over anything else. i'd go with delta chat. since i wouldn't need to convince anyone to install it and still be able to chat with them. but it's unlikely the delta chat developer will rewrite it. heck, most of the actual interface is just another lazy copypaste. so, i do me.