[tlug] Telegram (Was: Shanios?)

["Curt J. Sampson" <cjs@??>]

On 2026-02-05 16:55 -0700 (Thu), David J Iannucci wrote:

> ...but any support beyond basics is only through Telegram (I don't have a
> very good impression of this platform...)

I'm curious as to why you have a bad impression. Is it because Telegram is
terrible compared to something? Because that's absolutely true, in just the
way that when you compare Signal and GitHub, one of these is clearly
completely useless and should never be used.

I'm guessing you're _not_ objecting to the general idea of using text chat,
instead of "bulletin board messages" for support: I've never met anybody
who thinks, "I'd could type back and forth with someone and get answers
back in tens of seconds, but I'd rather type it into a message forum and
wait minutes for replies instead." In this sense, using some text chat
system makes sense (it's how I prefer to support my users), and which one
you use is really more about which five or six different clients you're
willing to keep installed and running.

If it's more about the "security" thing or whatever, Telegram is fine, even
good, if you understand its design goals and they align with your usage.

If it's important to you that your own devices and accounts don't have
access to your own conversations unless you were actually "there at the
time," you don't want to be using Telegram: you want to be using Signal (or
something similar) instead. A typical example is that when you log in on a
new computer or phone, or even that laptop you've not used for a couple of
months, you want to make sure that you can't access your chat history on it
(except for the chat history that had already been downloaded months
before). The reason for this of course, is what if it's _someone else_
logging in there?

But if you want your chat history shared across all devices, in the way
that your e-mail is when you log in to your web e-mail provider, or your
posts on web forums are, you want something less aggressive about ensuring
history is inaccessible. Telegram does this pretty well, while also
stopping far short of Google, Apple and similar organisations that will
actually turn over your entire cloud-stored message history to governments
without much objection. (Telegram-the- organisation goes to special lengths
to try to prevent this from happening, including keeping the cloud-stored
history fragmented across multiple countries in a way that getting all the
data stored in one country doesn't actually reveal any information. Or so
I'm told.)

cjs
-- 
Curt J. Sampson      <cjs@??>      +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
    - L Peter Deutsch