Thankfully I don’t have people I need on WhatsApp, but it took some convincing.

Nowadays I only have dentist and barbershop on WhatsApp, all my folks are on Telegram, including all work communications.

WhatsApp was always lacking features; WhatsApp web can’t replace a full featured desktop client which is a must have for me; and its mobile client is inconvenient in every possible way.

Good privacy brings inconvenience, don’t even think this compromise could ever be avoided. Convenient WhatsApp has nothing to do with privacy, whatever their PR department might want you to think.

This compromise is unavoidable, and every user should be forced to make the choice. Every kind of defaults is bad. Can you imagine that a messenger app that forces you to choose your place on the scale of security-convenience during onboarding process gets wide adoption? Me neither…

Telegram defaults are very sane for common users, and they have very easy and convinient way to start a secure chat. Best available messenger app so far.

WhatsApp by default backs up to Google drive, which is laughably insecure.

I don’t know how good is WhatsApp’s e2e implementation, I’ve heard good things about protocol though. But I do know Telegram protocol documentation contains all information needed to implement e2e capable Telegram client, and their e2e is really good, I’ve seen it done by my friend and as I’m a programmer and am interested in cryptography, I followed his work very closely.

I still do not trust e2e group chats, it’s a shaky point in security protocols. There was some kerfuffle about WhatsApp being able to silently add invisible listeners to group chats, wasn’t there?

Telegram very explicitly chooses the right amount of security and makes user aware of inconveniences this level of security brings along. WhatsApp lies in user’s face, making you think it’s secure and convenient.

edit: btw I’m Telegram premium subscriber and love it. I subscribed for the ability to convert voice messages into text. I am aware of privacy concerns, voice messages get sent to some 3rd party for this to work. Pretty often this speech-to-text works not very good, I expect it’s much better for English language though. I still love my Telegram premium, for being able to support developer and to lower the chance of being the product. Cost is negligible, benefits are tangible.

Every service has a product they sell, if a service is free — you are the product.

Need I remind you WhatsApp is owned by Meta? Free service from creators of Facebook and our mutual respect to their privacy practices, all in the same sentence, yeah.

FYI you don’t need static IP for telegram bots if you use polling instead of webhook. So if your house connection is stable enough, you can make do with Raspberry Pi.

I’m hosting my stuff on cheapest DigitalOcean droplet (but still use polling for telegram bots). Any stable VPS provider would do just fine and you’ll have system resources left for other stuff, telegram bots are very light.