Telegram: a new era of messaging

in #telegram8 years ago (edited)

Hi there.

Today I will introduct you one of the best messaging and chat application for you smartphone, tablet, browser, etc

Let's get straight to the case. Key positions of starting using Telegram messenger-app:

- first you register your app on device with you phone number by receiving SMS

- your Telegram-app connects with your device and you login by starting app with no additional passwords from now on

- you can and SHOULD setup additional password for Telegram app on your device. We call this 2FA (Two-Factor Authorization). Go to "Settings" to do it.

- you should also go to "Settings" and choose username so you can contact with other people worldwide. This is necesarry because Telegram does not disclose your phone number to others (but there is a special button to send a person your phone number) and people there are identified by username they chose. Username preceds "@" symbol, just like in #steemit.

- you can join and create chats now. There are three types of them. Group, supergroup, channel. I will make additional post about them later.

Start using Telegram if you still did not do it. The simpliest way is web-gate https://web.telegram.org

Follow me for more on Telegram and other cool staff. Later we will discuss what differs Telegram from other messengers, learn how and by whom it is developed and more. By the way, I learned about #steemit from @on0tole in one of Bitcoin chats on Telegram. 

Here is English community:

 https://telegram.me/steem_en 

Fell free to join RUSSIAN SteemIt community in Telegram:

 https://telegram.me/steemit  

Additional info in Russian about SteemIt communities in Telegram can be read here: https://steemit.com/ru/@on0tole/soobshestvo-steem-v-telegram

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I would not recommend to use Telegram for truly secure communications. It uses your phone number for authentication. That can not be safe.

We are not fund terrorism or sell drugs in Telegram, we just communicate here, i do not see any problems. I hold BTC in telegram bots, use 2fa and cloud password, and don't worry about this.

you can use the BBM , it is the best messenger app
http://www.bbm.com/bbm/en.html

That's partly true. Telegram uses phone number for registration. You can set up additional authentication factors as I adviced in my article. Set up a password for example and your security rises dramatically.

That doesn't stops bad guys to send messages on your behalf.

You have to nock'em out first to stop'em

Agreed. Better use a messenger like Threema, which doesn't require you to provide a phone number. Also, Telegram's encryption is considered questionable among experts.

It is cross platform? Can I exchange BTC to RUB or USD there?

Shadowcash is going to have a decentralized version of this pretty soon

We're all very excited about blockchain and new technology. So is Pavel Durov the director of Telegram is looking into innovations too. I guess if blockchain chat will have great success then it is possible that Telegram will be upgraded to blockchain too. Though even now Telegram has some decentralization. It is stored on different data-centers that are independent from each other.

Telegram - an excellent messenger, soon I will make a few posts about bots in Telegram

Telegram's crypto has been audited negatively. https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-telegram-secure

Also the server source code is closed.

Signal, with the well-evaluated Axolotl protocol, is the preferred solution from those "phone number as your account" messaging apps. All open source, client and server. However, they still depend on Google's push infrastructure, and actively attacked the LibreSignal fork. https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37

The best solution for today however (if you don't mind creating an account on a server) is the XMPP + OMEMO protocol. An app that supports this is called Conversations.

This is until we have proper server-less p2p messengers (that are easy to use and don't drain battery power on mobile devices too much).

Yet this is rather old info from 2014 mostly. So far so good no one could access Telegram messages without access to you SMS on phone. But if one has 2FA (read in my post what it is) then stealing SMS messages would not work too.

That's not old news, nothing has changed since then, and your answer has nothing to do with the issues I've mentioned.

I agree, this issues might have place and there are apps that more secure. But as for usability-community-security compound Telegram has no competitor as for now. Do others have P2P bots for BTC|LTC|DOG|ETH exchange?

Signal is just as usable, and encrypted chats will work seamlessly across devices (thanks to the mentioned Axolotl protocol), as opposed to Telegram.

I love Telegram and use it as my primary form of communication between friends and family. People love to bring up security when they mention Telegram, but I use it for the features it offers.