this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024

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Privacy

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Finally got rid of telegram, congratulations to me (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Am i the only one who doesnt use telegram for porn

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Nah.

I use it for drugs.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh, yeah, the porn channels are really good indeed

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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)

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

I only use it for porn groups🗿

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Porn groups are good indeed!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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).

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[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I up this one, there are many messengers, all have different clients, just choose one, or make? I like the UI of WeChat, should I use it then?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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

No code available for the backend though.

[1] https://core.telegram.org/mtproto

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Ah well, my bad, things have changed since last time I checked.

So better of what I thought, but still not great. Also the fact that it's a Saudi Arabia company now (where they are not exactly famous for their human rights protections) does not bode well.

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