this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Just use Signal if you want an easy, relatively privacy friendly and secure messenger.
Telegram hands over data to goverments, is infested with spammers and scammers and its encryption is not end to end for group chat which lets Telegram access those chats.
Edit: Telegram is great for lots of things like big groups, communities, piracy, drugs etc but its just not the place where you should expect secure communication.
I'm not using Signal as long as Signal Foundation is based in the US. Also Signal is not on FDroid, so I can't use it anyway.
I installed Signal via Obtanium. Just use this URL when searching/adding the app
https://signal.org/android/apk/
Why would you need to use obtanium to get the Signal apk file from that link?
You can just download the apk from that website and install it. The app can update itself.
The app doesn't auto update for me.
Huh, that's strange. On my 3 Android devices, I downloaded the APK from the website, and it always auto-updates.
It existed ever since they added the APK to their website as a compromise for people who don't want to get Signal from the Play Store.
You can side load.signal though from their website
https://signal.org/download/android/
It's Signal Foundation's hostility to open and non-Google platforms that is very disturbing.
This might not be relevant because you have other reasons not to use Signal, but you can get android signal directly from their website and via aurora store (on fdroid)
It's more the attitude that bothers me. Signal's refusal to support alternative appstores and clients is very disturbing. It gives the impression that Signal is a honeypot.
You seem to have really high standards around who you trust and in the same moment you call Telegram secure. I feel like you should atleast use the same amount of scepticism for Telegram that you use for Signal.
The official version of Telegram isn't available on F-Droid either, and it doesn't use end-to-end encryption by default, so it's much more likely that it is a honeypot
What? https://f-droid.org/packages/org.telegram.messenger/
That is not the official Telegram app. It is a fork called "Telegram-FOSS". If you go to the F-Droid page and click on 'Source code', you will see that it links to this repo: https://github.com/Telegram-FOSS-Team/Telegram-FOSS
This is the description of that GitHub repository:
Its seems quite active the repo:
https://github.com/Telegram-FOSS-Team/Telegram-FOSS/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed
But RusSSian/UAE-based Telegram is fine? 😂
Also, it really doesn't matter where Signal is based, as long as it's client code is open source and it uses E2EE by default. Telegram doesn't encrypt chats by default, and even if you enable 'secret chats' it uses a pretty weak encryption protocol.
Btw the official version of Telegram isn't available on F-Droid either, only a fork called Telegram-FOSS. You can get the exact same thing for Signal from a 3rd-party repo: https://www.twinhelix.com/apps/signal-foss/, or use Molly.
Better than USA-based.
Absolutely not.
Signal releases their own self-updating apk on their site, and this release doesn't use Google services for push notifications. There are legitimate reasons why publishers sometimes avoid f-droid.
Also there's Molly, which is a signal fork that allows database encryption; or Session, which doesn't require a phone number for account registration and is decentralized. Both of these forks have repos that you can add to f-droid.
I do understand the hesitance to use a platform that has its infrastructure in the US, but I will say that international compliance with the US is a problem even if the infrastructure is located elsewhere. Session is a really promising option, since it's decentralized, and I'd love to see more people using it.
It would be better even if they just hosted an F-droid repo for their app. If they don't trust the f-droid organization with building the app, that's fine I guess. But as I'm aware, they had said no to allf of what is f-droid.