Tell HN: Telegram sole reason why I still have my contacts since 10 years
Today my new Android Motorola just died, I don't know why, maybe it was a terrestrial cosmic ray? And I don't use backups because of privacy reasons and the Cloud options have anyway too little storage space. So all my stuff over the last year is gone.
Now Whatsapp, every time something like that happens, just deletes everything. On contrare, Telegram saved me like 5x already. Why do we still use Whatsapp I don't understand, its such a crappy experience in comparison.
40 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 93.9 ms ] threadIt's near monopoly status (despite the poor UX) predates the Meta acquisition, and in fact was probably the main reason for the it.
It's available as self hosted, or paid hosting.
If privacy is a concern (and it should be) then why not simply host an instance of say Nextcloud and use something like DavX5 to sync contacts to it. Add incremental encrypted backups to a 3rd service and your good.
This is my setup at least.
I think he means Telegram already has his contacts since he uses it to communicate with them.
>I think he means Telegram already has his contacts since he uses it to communicate with them.
I am confused over the statement that local backups are not being done due to privacy concerns, while Telegram, which is not a end-to-end encrypted service, is. These two facts stand at odds with each other.
If your immediate local surroundings are not safe enough for encrypted backups of your own data, then remote environments which you have no control over are not going to be any more secure or safe.
One way or another my backup is stored on a 3rd party service, though I confess, it is of course better if it is encrypted.
I don't buy that Whatsapp cares about my privacy. Why would the option to encrypt be optional?
It would seem that the original title does not match what is being talked about.
Storing you chat logs is a completely different discussion altogether.
And frankly I do not have a horse in this race, as I trust neither Telegram nor Whatsapp and treat all my chat logs as disposable.
Contacts however I save via my own infrastructure, as previously mentioned.
Yes. Good that we are on the same page here somewhat.
> while you hint at 15GBs as being too little
I wonder if you checked the image I provided in the link. There you can read that Whatsapp would store all messages and media, with the option to also include videos. Take notice that it is the only option to have a backup provided by Whatsapp. I don't have the direct option, as you previously had mentioned, to create a local backup. The backup that Whatsapp creates can only be used in combination with google drive.
> It would seem that the original title does not match what is being talked about.
You introduced the topic of local backups; that is not possible with Whatsapp.
Storing you chat logs is a completely different discussion altogether.
I don't know how you would do that without 3rd party software for Whatsapp.
> And frankly I do not have a horse in this race, as I trust neither Telegram nor Whatsapp and treat all my chat logs as disposable.
Good for you to have an opinion on a problem that we don't share.
> Contacts however I save via my own infrastructure, as previously mentioned.
I actually also save (very important) contacts somewhere else, but that doesn't mean that Whatsapp inconveniences me A LOT, whilst its competition never causes me similar problems ever.
:::
EDIT: After much thought I guess I understand what is confusing about my message. Let me put it this way:
Whatsapp:
hypothetical option 1) Limitless storage unencrypted or encrypted on whatsapp: I take it
real option 2) Limited storage unencrypted or not on whatsapp: No
real option 3) lose all my candies
Telegram:
real option 1) Limitless storage unencrypted on telegram: I take it
Telegram helped me to look up for contacts searching for their name and translate them to Whatsapp, since many people only use Whatsapp actively.
"Why don't people just" is a train of thought that comes from a very privileged place, which whilst well-intentioned, frequently is oblivious to how fortunate they are.
Facebook and Whatsapp compare the interlinked contacts aggressively, have done so in the past https://blog.f-secure.com/why-does-facebook-want-my-phone-nu... and will continue to do so. It's false to believe Meta is not milking our data.
EDIT: I'm not saying you believed that, I'm just stating that at least at Telegram I've limitless storage for a decade now AND they don't pretend to lose my contacts.
WhatsApp has your data but they can't decrypt it.
With telegram your data must be unencrypted in the cloud.
If you value privacy stay with WhatsApp.
I'm also not the biggest fan of WhatsApp, but a lot of its quirks and oddities do come down to one big design decision, which is that all your chats are e2e encrypted, with the key to the encryption living in your phone. This makes for (relatively) secure communication, but it has the side effect of making the UX in other areas suffer. For example, if your phone dies and you don't back up your chats, there's no way of getting the data back, because the encryption key necessary to unlock the data in the first place lives in your old, dead phone. Or the kind of irritating way that WhatsApp Web works: it needs to connect to your phone because your phone is the only place that your messages are stored.
If you compare this to Telegram, they can do a lot of this stuff more clearly, but this is because they store your messages on their servers, which means that you only need to connect to their servers to view the data. This is obviously a lot more convenient, but the cost is privacy: your communication can no longer be e2e encrypted because otherwise the Telegram servers wouldn't be able to act as a middleman. (Which, as I said earlier, is necessary for the UX experience you're after.)
This is a broad simplification, and there's a bit more going on than just this, but it's a good mental model to have when understanding why the UX of Telegram and the UX of WhatsApp are so different in certain places.
That said:
* "WhatsApp isn't completely e2e, there's flaws/loopholes/situations where not everything is encrypted" - this is almost certainly the case, I'm not saying that WhatsApp is the be-all-and-end-all of encrypted communication, and it is still a company that you're trusting with your data. Think of WhatsApp more like a bike lock: for most people it doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be hard enough to get in that it's not worth doing. If your actions make you more likely to be targeted, then WhatsApp may well not cut it as a tool.
* "You can encrypt messages in Telegram" is another valid point, and I did do this with my partner for a few years. In practice, the UX here is far worse than that of WhatsApp, and now we mostly use normal Telegram chats. This might have changed more recently, but a lot of the big issues (like not being able to see the chat on multiple devices) are limitations of the technology rather than implementation.
* "There are tools that do have end-to-end encryption but much better UX" - I am sure this is true, but at least where I am, the three main competitors are SMS, WhatsApp, and Telegram. I'm told Signal is pretty good, but no-one around me uses it so there's not much point using it. Hopefully with the new EU legislation around being able to sync up messages from different applications, this space will become more active.
- But both me and Meta know that they have at least my contacts. Couldn't they at least keep those intact? Or optionally store them? What about stickers?
- Why are you talking about UX if it is a technical limitation? And an artificial limitation I'd argue .. they could store my encrypted data on their servers, that would be useful.
The reason why I'm talking about UX and technical limitations at the same time is because they're often linked, and particularly so in this case. The technical limitations of a tool will partially define how that tool can be used, and the desired usage of a tool should often help define the technical functionality of that tool. UX is not simply a layer you can slap on at the end.
Okay, good for you. Consider using a phone that allows you to store backups on your own disk if you care about privacy.
"At least the Russians don't pretend to lose all my candies, which is highly convenient for me, and I don't have to spend money on storage"
WhatsApp stores the list of numbers who are in your contacts, not the rest of the information and does not share the list with the rest of Meta:
https://faq.whatsapp.com/1191526044909364/
> We care about your privacy and we don't share your contact list with Meta Platforms Inc. or other Meta Companies for their own use, even when they provide us with services.
If your argument is nothing more than ‘Meta is evil and everything they do is evil and they do everything that is evil’ then just say so, we can just end this thread because it is pointless.
It doesn't even store the numbers. I lose my phone I lose all my conversations and numbers I had prior. In my recent example it deleted all conversations I had, except the ones I had open in the browser, but it deleted all contents within these conversation and removed the names of the contacts. And I don't believe that Meta doesn't link the data, they lied in the past and there is no reason they wouldn't lie now.
> If your argument is nothing more than ‘Meta is evil and everything they do is evil and they do everything that is evil’ then just say so, we can just end this thread because it is pointless.
My argument is that I lost my contacts for the 5th time already, whilst Telegram in 10 years has never done me this favor.
If you want to keep your data, make backups. You’re not convincing anyone.