Whenever I glance at darknet forums, people there always use Telegram for instant messaging. This seems like a strange choice for their use case, considering that Telegram is neither secure nor private[1], being centralized with Russia-controlled servers[2], phone number registration, no encryption for personal chats by default in mobile client and no encryption at all in desktop client[3], etc.
So why do they use Telegram instead of actually secure and private alternatives, like Delta Chat, XMPP+OMEMO, etc.?
Telegram is indeed neither private nor secure (that is if you don’t use secret chats), but the stupidity of people believing the narrative of
will never cease to fascinate me.
You know which group of people know for certain that this is not true?
Russians.
How can they be so sure?
Because of their government’s constant attempts/threats to block it / slow it down. All in an effort to make people move to an actual messaging app controlled by them (MAX messenger).
Yes, absolutely, Russian government is trying to stop people from using an app they control, this totally makes sense.
And if it doesn’t, you can always come up with some totally reasonable and totally not a conspiracy theory of them just pretending to trying to block it so that you think it is secure. And people might even believe it. Except for Russians, for whom Telegram voice calls are broken (blocked) again, and MAX is advertised as an alternative.
For fuck’s sake…