5 ms·

- Telegram has exemplary fast, native clients on most platforms I’ve used it on - Cat stickers - Did I mention it has the best native clients out of all the m

by isatty 2mo ago

- Telegram has exemplary fast, native clients on most platforms I’ve used it on - Cat stickers - Did I mention it has the best native clients out of all the messaging apps? It boggles the mind why other companies can’t get this done.

josephg 2mo ago
I’ve never used the telegram app. What do you like about it compared to signal / WhatsApp?
- isatty 2mo ago
  Signal and WhatsApp are bloated and slow in comparison.
  - Krasnol 2mo ago
    What is slow? I don't understand what there is to accelerate.
    - forgotmypw17 2mo ago
      The main things that are slow are loading the app and opening the app, loading the messages, and receiving the messages. On my phone, this is much slower than Telegram, and on my computer, the WhatsApp program doesn't even work have the time -- it just gets stuck in the loading process. Signal is not as bad, but can still take a minute or two to update everything on my computer. The phone app is better.
      - Krasnol 2mo ago
        Sounds more like your personal problem. I live in Germany and use both. None do that and as I'm "the IT guy" for many people at work an din private, I'd have heard about it. Hell, the whole continent would have heard about it as whatsapp is widely used. My Signal also doesn't do that.
        Paracompact 2mo ago
        There are three people in this thread with this "personal" problem.
        econ 2mo ago
        It's the gold standard for bad support: pretend the user has a problem. There once was this thread on a blog for a windows XP pirated edition. Someone commented that something small didn't work. They replied in less than a minute, that's terrible! 10 minutes later the version was incremented and a new reply said: Try the new version! After 30 minutes the bug fix was confirmed. They weren't trying to be funny but it still makes me laugh how it compares to Microsoft, the 3 trillion software company.
        Krasnol 2mo ago
        I worked for a long time in IT Support and this generalisation, like all of them, is false. If someone tells me that a program crashes in 50% of the time on launch but it's only him reporting it, it is almost certainly his problem and not a problem of the program. Especially if you're supporting millions of people. This is not some prejudice story people make up. It is happening. Every day to thousands of poor IT Warriors on the front.
        forgotmypw17 2mo ago
        But it's not "his" problem or "my" problem, it's "our" mutual problem for "us" to figure out together, collaboratively, down to its root causes, which are yet unknown. (And in the future, to mitigate and prevent, using whatever means are available to us.)
        Krasnol 2mo ago
        Maybe. If someone choses to do so in their capacity. But they don't have to. On the other side, suggesting that it is a general issue with those programs is wrong. Which is what I have been actually pointing out. This gives you the chance to check your devices and seek help if necessary. This doesn't make my comment "bad support". I am not the tech support guy for HN.
    - 0x457 2mo ago
      In Telegram, I can open a chat, find a sticker, send a sticker, post a circle story, and shitpost in another group chat. All while WhatsApp loads my chat history. That is on any platform and any network condition, except for fully offline. Their desktop apps are just Qt and not WebView inside a Qt. Mobile apps are native and not React.
      - Krasnol 2mo ago
        Ok I don't know what finding a sticker has to do with speed. Whatsapp and Signal have stickers too. Kids use them sometimes. They are like in a list. You open the list. Chose one and then it appears. Don't know what there is to accelerate. ...and yeah, whatever language they are. I don't really care because, as said: there is no problem...
        0x457 2mo ago
        > Ok I don't know what finding a sticker has to do with speed. You don't know that it takes time to load graphical assets? And you can't comprehend that I'm using it as an example of how much more stuff Telegram clients manage to do/load in the time it takes WhatsApp to load one screen?
        Krasnol 2mo ago
        No I can't since I've never experienced any delay which would justify this amount of criticism and I mean, Germany is outside of big cities quite messy in it's coverage.
- tjohns 2mo ago
  - Messages send quickly and reliably, even under poor and sometimes hostile network conditions. Telegram just seems to work even when other chat apps struggle. - Telegram uses usernames instead of phone numbers by default, which is good if you're using it as an IRC replacement instead of an SMS replacement. - You can have the client open on essentially unlimited devices simultaneously, including a web app if you need it. - Messages can be edited at any point after sending with no expiry. - You can schedule messages to send later, or send a message silently so it doesn't wake people up. - Different group types - announcement channels, Discord-style groups with sub-channels, flexible moderator roles, etc. (I believe WhatsApp has some of this.) - Support for bots, which is also very helpful for managing large communities. - Community-created, sharable stickers. Seriously, people underestimate how nice these are. The downside is that a lot of this requires state to be stored on the Telegram servers, so most chat's aren't E2E encrypted. (They do have an option for E2E encrypted private 1:1 chats, but you lose most of the polish by using that.) Also, the official apps are open source, so you can modify them if needed.
  - opem 2mo ago
    I'll add a few more: - insanely fast search, chat history browsing and in app navigation - unlimited unencrypted cloud storage, your chats and docs always stays available - ability to send very large files - ability to host large video and voice chats - chat automation - auto translation and transcription - mini apps - open source client, with lots of customization - phone number less sign up (you can purchase a burner number from them and sign up with that, I guess it costs their crypto (ton) tho) - sending gifts
  - darksim905 2mo ago
    - Telegram uses usernames instead of phone numbers by default, which is good if you're using it as an IRC replacement instead of an SMS replacement. --- What? When you register, I'm pretty sure it requires putting in a phone number that preferably isn't a VoIP line and not a username. It's been that way any time I've tried to use the service on mobile. Scheduled messages have been a thing for a long time on Signal, but they seem to be only on mobile, which is wild to me. I would posit that Signal is more for individual to individual. I'm seeing in these comments that telegram is clearly a lot more community centric, ala Discord lite than I realized.
SXX 2mo ago
Durov was smart enough to let community build open source clients and use them. And to make internally built clients open source.
- petu 2mo ago
  Most people use official clients and AFAIK they don't really accept any external contributions? All clients were fully developed by employees.
- tiagod 2mo ago
  That's not it. I believe all the clients were built by employees. What he did was give each client to a very small, experienced team.
  - maqp 2mo ago
    Too bad he gave the job of company cryptography team to his brother, Nikolai who's an expert in geometry, not cryptography.
asdff 2mo ago
Probably still doesn't beat ripcord
mdasen 2mo ago
I'll add: - Telegram had usernames in 2014 before Signal added them a decade later, allowing people to chat without sharing their phone number - Telegram has unencrypted chats which allow for giant chat rooms of 200,000+ and channels with millions of subscribers. Signal warns about performance issues when you have more than 150 people in a group. Telegram isn't just a messenger - it's often used as a social publishing platform like Instagram. I don't use Telegram and use Signal a lot, but I also understand why other people use Telegram: the same reason they use Instagram.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Ah the classic tension between encryption and large groups. You can have e2ee or you can have large groups. Not both. Large groups usually don't need e2ee anyway as the adversary can just join the group - anyone can - that's how they get large.
  - maqp 2mo ago
    Yup but the issue is Telegram already has two separate groups, normal groups (3-200 users), and supergroups (200-200,000 users). For end-to-end encrypted groups, Threema supports 256 members, Signal 1000, Wire 2000, and Matrix has no upper limit. Surely Telegram could deploy E2EE for normal groups. Nobody assumes groups with more than 200 members are private anyway.
- darksim905 2mo ago
  I can't say that I've ever seen genuine uses like this that you mention unless it's a 'community' for adult content or sketchy content. Is this that common?
  - konart 2mo ago
    Uses for what? Here is Russia many companies have (or had) groups (not Slack or something else but Telegram), most communities exists solely in Telegram, most news channes are also there. Not to mention you create ANY kind of bot without any trouble. I guess we just live in two different worlds. Like with China where WeChat is the default. (except we now have fucking Max instead).
hbn 2mo ago
Unfortunately the upselling has got kind of annoying and in-your-face the past few years But indeed their native clients are great, especially on iOS. It legitimately feels more native and intuitive than Apple's own Messages app. Animations run at a smooth, stable framerate. Never hitches jumping between conversations. One of the greatest apps ever made.
Valodim 2mo ago
Simple to do when you don't care about e2e and clients can just show data they receive to the user with little logic of their own. It is a world of difference in complexity. Those nice things are what you get when you're fine having all your data (messages, images, files) forever in plaintext on servers owned by some Russian rich guy. Pray there will never be a telegram.zip torrent.

by isatty 2mo ago

josephg 2mo ago

I’ve never used the telegram app. What do you like about it compared to signal / WhatsApp?

isatty 2mo ago
Signal and WhatsApp are bloated and slow in comparison.
- Krasnol 2mo ago
  What is slow? I don't understand what there is to accelerate.
  - forgotmypw17 2mo ago
    The main things that are slow are loading the app and opening the app, loading the messages, and receiving the messages. On my phone, this is much slower than Telegram, and on my computer, the WhatsApp program doesn't even work have the time -- it just gets stuck in the loading process. Signal is not as bad, but can still take a minute or two to update everything on my computer. The phone app is better.
    - Krasnol 2mo ago
      Sounds more like your personal problem. I live in Germany and use both. None do that and as I'm "the IT guy" for many people at work an din private, I'd have heard about it. Hell, the whole continent would have heard about it as whatsapp is widely used. My Signal also doesn't do that.
      - Paracompact 2mo ago
        There are three people in this thread with this "personal" problem.
        econ 2mo ago
        It's the gold standard for bad support: pretend the user has a problem. There once was this thread on a blog for a windows XP pirated edition. Someone commented that something small didn't work. They replied in less than a minute, that's terrible! 10 minutes later the version was incremented and a new reply said: Try the new version! After 30 minutes the bug fix was confirmed. They weren't trying to be funny but it still makes me laugh how it compares to Microsoft, the 3 trillion software company.
        Krasnol 2mo ago
        I worked for a long time in IT Support and this generalisation, like all of them, is false. If someone tells me that a program crashes in 50% of the time on launch but it's only him reporting it, it is almost certainly his problem and not a problem of the program. Especially if you're supporting millions of people. This is not some prejudice story people make up. It is happening. Every day to thousands of poor IT Warriors on the front.
        forgotmypw17 2mo ago
        But it's not "his" problem or "my" problem, it's "our" mutual problem for "us" to figure out together, collaboratively, down to its root causes, which are yet unknown. (And in the future, to mitigate and prevent, using whatever means are available to us.)
        Krasnol 2mo ago
        Maybe. If someone choses to do so in their capacity. But they don't have to. On the other side, suggesting that it is a general issue with those programs is wrong. Which is what I have been actually pointing out. This gives you the chance to check your devices and seek help if necessary. This doesn't make my comment "bad support". I am not the tech support guy for HN.
  - 0x457 2mo ago
    In Telegram, I can open a chat, find a sticker, send a sticker, post a circle story, and shitpost in another group chat. All while WhatsApp loads my chat history. That is on any platform and any network condition, except for fully offline. Their desktop apps are just Qt and not WebView inside a Qt. Mobile apps are native and not React.
    - Krasnol 2mo ago
      Ok I don't know what finding a sticker has to do with speed. Whatsapp and Signal have stickers too. Kids use them sometimes. They are like in a list. You open the list. Chose one and then it appears. Don't know what there is to accelerate. ...and yeah, whatever language they are. I don't really care because, as said: there is no problem...
      - 0x457 2mo ago
        > Ok I don't know what finding a sticker has to do with speed. You don't know that it takes time to load graphical assets? And you can't comprehend that I'm using it as an example of how much more stuff Telegram clients manage to do/load in the time it takes WhatsApp to load one screen?
        Krasnol 2mo ago
        No I can't since I've never experienced any delay which would justify this amount of criticism and I mean, Germany is outside of big cities quite messy in it's coverage.
tjohns 2mo ago
- Messages send quickly and reliably, even under poor and sometimes hostile network conditions. Telegram just seems to work even when other chat apps struggle. - Telegram uses usernames instead of phone numbers by default, which is good if you're using it as an IRC replacement instead of an SMS replacement. - You can have the client open on essentially unlimited devices simultaneously, including a web app if you need it. - Messages can be edited at any point after sending with no expiry. - You can schedule messages to send later, or send a message silently so it doesn't wake people up. - Different group types - announcement channels, Discord-style groups with sub-channels, flexible moderator roles, etc. (I believe WhatsApp has some of this.) - Support for bots, which is also very helpful for managing large communities. - Community-created, sharable stickers. Seriously, people underestimate how nice these are. The downside is that a lot of this requires state to be stored on the Telegram servers, so most chat's aren't E2E encrypted. (They do have an option for E2E encrypted private 1:1 chats, but you lose most of the polish by using that.) Also, the official apps are open source, so you can modify them if needed.
- opem 2mo ago
  I'll add a few more: - insanely fast search, chat history browsing and in app navigation - unlimited unencrypted cloud storage, your chats and docs always stays available - ability to send very large files - ability to host large video and voice chats - chat automation - auto translation and transcription - mini apps - open source client, with lots of customization - phone number less sign up (you can purchase a burner number from them and sign up with that, I guess it costs their crypto (ton) tho) - sending gifts
- darksim905 2mo ago
  - Telegram uses usernames instead of phone numbers by default, which is good if you're using it as an IRC replacement instead of an SMS replacement. --- What? When you register, I'm pretty sure it requires putting in a phone number that preferably isn't a VoIP line and not a username. It's been that way any time I've tried to use the service on mobile. Scheduled messages have been a thing for a long time on Signal, but they seem to be only on mobile, which is wild to me. I would posit that Signal is more for individual to individual. I'm seeing in these comments that telegram is clearly a lot more community centric, ala Discord lite than I realized.

SXX 2mo ago

Durov was smart enough to let community build open source clients and use them. And to make internally built clients open source.

petu 2mo ago
Most people use official clients and AFAIK they don't really accept any external contributions? All clients were fully developed by employees.
tiagod 2mo ago
That's not it. I believe all the clients were built by employees. What he did was give each client to a very small, experienced team.
- maqp 2mo ago
  Too bad he gave the job of company cryptography team to his brother, Nikolai who's an expert in geometry, not cryptography.

asdff 2mo ago

Probably still doesn't beat ripcord

mdasen 2mo ago

I'll add: - Telegram had usernames in 2014 before Signal added them a decade later, allowing people to chat without sharing their phone number - Telegram has unencrypted chats which allow for giant chat rooms of 200,000+ and channels with millions of subscribers. Signal warns about performance issues when you have more than 150 people in a group. Telegram isn't just a messenger - it's often used as a social publishing platform like Instagram. I don't use Telegram and use Signal a lot, but I also understand why other people use Telegram: the same reason they use Instagram.

inigyou 2mo ago
Ah the classic tension between encryption and large groups. You can have e2ee or you can have large groups. Not both. Large groups usually don't need e2ee anyway as the adversary can just join the group - anyone can - that's how they get large.
- maqp 2mo ago
  Yup but the issue is Telegram already has two separate groups, normal groups (3-200 users), and supergroups (200-200,000 users). For end-to-end encrypted groups, Threema supports 256 members, Signal 1000, Wire 2000, and Matrix has no upper limit. Surely Telegram could deploy E2EE for normal groups. Nobody assumes groups with more than 200 members are private anyway.
darksim905 2mo ago
I can't say that I've ever seen genuine uses like this that you mention unless it's a 'community' for adult content or sketchy content. Is this that common?
- konart 2mo ago
  Uses for what? Here is Russia many companies have (or had) groups (not Slack or something else but Telegram), most communities exists solely in Telegram, most news channes are also there. Not to mention you create ANY kind of bot without any trouble. I guess we just live in two different worlds. Like with China where WeChat is the default. (except we now have fucking Max instead).

hbn 2mo ago

Unfortunately the upselling has got kind of annoying and in-your-face the past few years But indeed their native clients are great, especially on iOS. It legitimately feels more native and intuitive than Apple's own Messages app. Animations run at a smooth, stable framerate. Never hitches jumping between conversations. One of the greatest apps ever made.

Valodim 2mo ago

Simple to do when you don't care about e2e and clients can just show data they receive to the user with little logic of their own. It is a world of difference in complexity. Those nice things are what you get when you're fine having all your data (messages, images, files) forever in plaintext on servers owned by some Russian rich guy. Pray there will never be a telegram.zip torrent.