I get from the text that you can have peace of mind and progress towards your goal. That peace of mind allows you to progress easily, less troubled. It doesn't say your ambitions are invariable once you choose them.
The fact you realize your original ambition is not what you want anymore you still got all the learnings from the path.
You missed my point.
Wrong ambitions that I'm talking about are the ones that make you take actions that have consequences, you chase an ambition that makes you lose other things and you may only realize that once those things are lost forever.
The (highly recommended) Belgian television series "In de gloria" [1] had a teleshopping sketch in which one could order VHS tapes of their favorite tracks. The target audience was pensioners who had traveled the same boring track for years.
The irony is that some years later a television channel started broadcasting railway videos all day long.
Not being in either Telegram/Signal camp I see a lot of tribalism in the comments.
It seems that any arguments for/against either one end up in politics.
Like I understand that Telegram is probably not very secure, but seeing what proponents of Signal are saying doesn't really make me trust Signal either.
It is political. As I mentioned elsewhere in HN, Telegram is now being promoted in the US by the political-right there because they have lost trust in US BigTech social media platforms who, they believe, are "unjustly" censoring them on their platform. That is why the right-leaning media are now heavily promoting Telegram ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ut6RouSs0w ) and bashing other platforms ( https://www.city-journal.org/article/signals-katherine-maher... ).
You mean the BigTech social media platforms that use Signal's protocol for messaging ? Wow I wonder why the people who don't trust BigTech social media don't choose Signal that is actually insane.
If it is indeed political don't try to bring some kind of technological merit into this, it makes you look really dishonest.
You missed my point - I am agreeing with you that the arguments for or against both end up political, because politics is the reason both are being promoted. Technically both products are equivalent. And both products may also be sharing data with government(s). The right- in the US just hope that Telegram isn't sharing it with the US government. :)
Don't forget that Signal is the name of the app, and "Signal Protocol" is the name of the E2EE protocol. The parent was talking about the Signal Protocol.
The fact that Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. use the Signal Protocol kind of shows that it is an accepted standard. But of course there are many reasons to use Signal (the App) instead of those apps, for instance:
- The Signal App is open source. You can check the protocol implementation before you use it. For Facebook, WhatsApp and Skype, you have to trust them (or some audits).
- E2EE is only one part: it ensures that nobody except the recipient can read the content of your messages. But there is a whole story around the metadata. The metadata say who writes to whom, and when. It essentially helps build a social graph. Facebook is very interested in this social graph. It would appear that the Signal Foundation is not. And even if it is not perfect, Signal does a lot to try to minimize the amount of metadata it has access to (and quite obviously Facebook has a huge incentive not to do that).
This said, IMHO it is still a lot better to use WhatsApp than to use Telegram, because at least you benefit from a good E2EE.
It's only the protocol for their E2EE chats. There are two big caveats:
- Facebook and Skype E2EE messages are optional, and people rarely use that option, and
- Those apps collect a huge amount of data outside the contents of the messages.
Still I think mentioning the greatest data collection projects in human history in the same sentence as Signal which is supposed to fight that is not very good.
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