alt Hacker News> What is encrypted and how is public information. If it doesn't fit your use case don't use it. There is no "spin".
Correct way of speaking about Telegram is - nothing* is encrypted. (encrypted chats are not more than 0.5% of all chats). That would be a "no spin" take.
> one guy dared write a crypto library rather than using their own
Red herring. This library is NOT used for more than 99.95% of chats on Telegram. It is applied only to "secret chat", which is a torture device with horrible UX. I guess that horrible UX is the result of choice of using custom crypto library instead of going with something capable of working when addressee is not online.
> 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.
Phone numbers are still used as anti-spam measure. You are free to get a burner, register an account and throw away the SIM card.
> does not allow open source
Signal client is open source.
> frankly does not work half as well as Telegram in terms of UX.
It works well where it does matter. Vide Telegram's "secret chats".
> All of this is really confusing for me.
You are clearly misinformed. That explains the confusion.
- Messages by default are encrypted in transit. Client to server. Yes Telegram does have access to those messages. (I don't believe we had any e2e encrypted chat service before the likes of signal, matrix etc. Whatsapp added it after Telegram too if my memory is right.)
- The library IS used for all encryption including the above client to server encryption. As far as I can tell from casual use the other end does not need to be online for secret chats per se. There's a key exchange with picture verification that requires the party on the other end to accept the chat request.
- The phone bits in your and the other commenters response sound a little bit handwavy to me.
- Telegram client(s) are also open source. The comment was about the server and interoperability with other clients.
After all it doesn't seem to me that I am more misinformed than yourself.