alt Hacker News> a) people that care about chat encryption and would be willing to change, already did, to Telegram and/or Signal.
It continues to baffle me that the "telegram is encrypted" spin is still widely believed, even on a forum like this. Telegram is for 99.9% of intents and purposes not encrypted.
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People wants simple communication app. Telegram is exceptional with that. Matrix may be encrypted, but everything else is just bad.
What is encrypted and how is public information. If it doesn't fit your use case don't use it. There is no "spin".
People were spreading this kind of FUD until last week when all of a sudden people started claiming it was self evident that "of course Meta can read your WhatsApp messages". I don't get this kind of weird fixation with a product. I suspect it's two things. Perceived Russian origin and that one guy dared write a crypto library rather than using their own. I agree with the latter. The prior is not even true the way people understand it to be. I for one like the stickers. Shoot me :)
We even give companies like Google which we know for a fact is looking at all of our data a free pass with the super western "privacy policy" cop out while judging other tools with a different set of rules.
Another darling is Signal who refused to stop collecting phone numbers until recently even though they never needed it, does not allow open source or other clients to use their servers (and won't release the actual server code) and frankly does not work half as well as Telegram in terms of UX.
All of this is really confusing for me.
And even when you do enable encryption of the chat contents, the unencrypted metadata is often enough for security services to make a suspect out of you. Granted, this is mostly a concern for Russian and Belarusian users.