Telegram, the popular messenger with 800 million monthly active users worldwide, is inching closer to adopting an ecosystem strategy that is reminiscent
Hasn't the founder been a vocal critic of Russia for years, including the Ukraine war? I don't really see why that would be a concern, especially since Telegram is supposedly owned by a US LLC
It would only be hypocrisy if it was the US that was calling Russians Nazi's. But instead you used some decades old war, instead of the one going on right now.
It's not about what build they are running. It matters because somebody just glancing at it might misinterpret the situation as "Telegram is open source", but it actually isn't because the server isn't. Just some clients are, which is pretty useless if you can't run a server to talk to them. Just for arguments sake, let's say Telegram gets busted tomorrow in an international sting operation and all their servers get taken offline. The clients will be entirely useless at that point, somebody would have to reverse engineer the server.
I'd like to at the very least be able to run my own server. Not even necessarily federated with the original ones. Just run my own instance if I don't trust the main one runs what they claim.
That's kind of an apples an oranges comparison, WhatsApp doesn't even try to present a facade of being open source. Telegram does, betting that the distinction between server and client code will go over most peoples heads, which it probably does to be honest.
There are two realistic alternatives with hundreds of millions of users. Whatsapp has a closed source client, Telegram has an open source one. The choice for me is easy.
Not open source, centralized servers that store messages mostly without E2EE.
By using Telegram we are locking ourself in situation where they can turn the knobs as they like, while we can't do anything about it.
Well, thats also easy since telegram clients dont do much more than displaying messages stored on a server.
Its more a viewer than a full client.
And that compromises hard on privacy and security, which Signal and Whatsapp dont do, they have proper Clients that have to really handle and store incoming messages.
And the E2EE makes it harder, developing an independent desktop client, like Signal always had and Whatsapp recently got. But both are mediocre at best, sure.