So this is coming up again, so I feel like I need to talk about it. Do not use telegram, the messenger. At all, there is no reason to use it. Telegram, a lot of people using it have this idea that it is a private messenger. It's not. A lot of people have the idea that it is end to end and crypted. It is not. A lot of people have the idea that is some kind of alt-tech or decentralized system. It is not. It is just as bad as using Facebook Messenger in terms of your privacy and security. In fact, there is a good reason to think that using something like WhatsApp, even though it is a spyware program, is better for your privacy than telegram. Telegram honestly sucks, there is no reason to use it. There are alternatives before I even go into why telegram is bad. There are many other alternatives that are actually good, that do the things that telegram pretends to do and do it much better and do it in a much more usable way. There are two main ones. The more old-fashioned and still very extensible one is XMPP. That is a protocol that can be used for chat, it can be used for voiceover IP. There are a bajillion different programs that run it, XMPP. A more normy friendly, aside from XMPP, a more normy friendly thing that does what telegram does is what is called matrix. So, both matrix and XMPP function basically in the same way. It is the same way like an email server works. Anyone can install this kind of software, you can install a matrix server and you can create accounts there, you can create accounts on any matrix server or XMPP server out there. And you can communicate with anyone in the system, in the same way that you use an email address, you might have a Gmail address, but that can communicate with addresses off of Gmail. Okay? Same concept. So, these are decentralized and all free software equivalents. Matrix is very easy to use if you are just looking for a messenger, for you and your friends or your groups, look into matrix because it is much better than telegram and it actually is what telegram pretends to be. So let's talk about telegrams pretenses. Firstly, people say that telegram is open source. Okay? The telegram messaging system is open source. It isn't. They have open source clients that you can download on your phone or download on your computer, but they directly interact with a proprietary server side that is entirely centralized. Right? So there is one telegram botnet that everyone connects to and it is not, we have no idea what it is running. Okay? Even the source code for the desktop and mobile clients is very slowly released so that, you know, that's another questionable thing. So it's not, you know, telegram is not in any meaningful sense open source. It is not an open source system because the server side, we don't know what it's doing. Secondly, telegram is absolutely not into end encrypted. Your messages, all your group messages are totally readable by telegram and basically all of your private messages are readable by telegram. They are not into end encrypted. And what I mean by that is into end encryption means sending a message that only the intended recipient can actually decrypt and read. Telegram does not work like that. Telegram invented their own kind of encryption scheme where messages are encrypted to their server where they have the decryption key and they can decrypt any group message or anything else. And then messages are reencrypted and sent to the other person, but telegram themselves can read anything. Okay, that is on their server. There is no message you send over there that is going to be private. Okay, and this is not the case in matrix and xmpp. You can have truly end to end encrypted communication, including groups. It's a trivial thing to do, but telegram actually does not have that. Telegram can absolutely monitor your chats. Now some people say, oh, well telegram does have this ability to have end to end encrypted chats. And that is true. There is an option for that, but it's not used by many people and it only works on mobile and it only works with one device at a time. So you can't hook multiple mobile devices up to it. You can't, you know, if someone sends you a message to, you know, your account on telegram, you can't read it on desktop if it's into end encrypted because it doesn't work on the desktop because telegram invented their own encryption scheme and they haven't figured everything out with it, right? To be able to do this kind of stuff. Matrix, xmpp, it works out of the box. You don't have to worry about it, okay? That is something that they should not have to be dealing with, but you know, that's how it is. Thirdly, so it may, again, el-err, excuse me, telegram is it's not really open source in any meaningful sense. It's not encrypted in any meaningful sense. And it's also not a good alternative alt-tech company because it's just a centralized system in the same way that Facebook or Twitter or any of these other communication platforms are, okay? Email, xmpp, matrix, they are all decentralized. There are many different servers you can create an account at and you can use that account to talk to anyone else on any other server, okay? That's how email works, that's how xmpp works, that's how matrix works, that is not how telegram works. You have one account with telegram. They control it if you are banned from telegram, you are banned for life, if you are monitored by telegram, you know, all your eggs are in one basket, okay? That is not the case in matrix, that is not the case in email or xmpp, they are anyone who has any kind of technology, most of the people watching my channel who watch my stuff you know, and sort of know how to run a Linux server could very easily in 10 or 15 minutes start a matrix server or an xmpp server. So that means that anyone could host this kind of stuff, so you could host it yourself, you could go with a friend that you trust or anyone else, like it works fine, there is no, the network itself cannot be censored in the way that telegram can be censored. People say a lot of very stupid things about telegram because they're not thinking it through. People will say, oh, telegram is used by dissidents in Russia or Iran or something like that. And if that's the case, I pity those people because they are stupid, that is a stupid thing to do, because you will ultimately are trusting telegram with all of your information and maybe telegram has had run-ins with the Russian government and you know, they haven't given the decryption keys to the Russian government or something like that. But I would rather use a messaging service where I don't have to trust anyone and that is the case in matrix, that is the case in xmpp, all of my communications to people, they are the people running the servers cannot decrypt them, they are absolutely safe, there's nothing I have to worry about. The worst thing that could possibly happen is maybe the servers are aware of your IP addresses or something like that, but they're not going to be able to decrypt your messages, okay? So people who say, oh, I trust telegram because blah, blah, blah, no, screw that, you shouldn't be trusting anyone who is designing software. You should be using software that is trustless, you don't have to rely on people. And that is what upsets me about this telegram stuff. I did a video on this last year, but it keeps coming up. What upsets me about telegram is so many people use it under the false idea that it is somehow a private service, it's something uniquely reliable, it is trash. In fact, you know, when I did my video last year on this, I said more or less the same thing. And you know, I said it's basically no better than Facebook, Messenger or WhatsApp. And I actually got corrected on that because really WhatsApp is a much more secure platform than telegram because telegram uses an unvetted encryption scheme that they invented, whereas WhatsApp is actually, even though Facebook is monitoring, it's a much more reliable encryption scheme, okay? So anyway, that's some things to think about. Don't use, okay, get all your friends off telegram. There's no reason for you to be on that. You can everything that you can have in telegram. You can have in matrix. And even more, you can start any kind of matrix account on any server. You can start your own server if you know how to do it. You can have voice chat. You can have channel kind of things. You can do lots of crazy stuff. And in fact, it can even interface, you can do work on your GitHub from matrix and all this kind of crazy stuff. It can even talk to XMPP, that other protocol I mentioned. That's how extensible protocols are supposed to work, right? You're supposed to be able to add stuff into them and they're supposed to be flexible. Telegram is not one of those things. And it is no, telegram isn't even more usable than matrix. It's very streamlined at this point. So look into that. Maybe if you guys use matrix, put your server of choice in the comment section because I don't know, people will want to know where they should go. A lot of people go to matrix.org to start their account. But I don't know, there are too many people there. I think it's better to spread out to different servers because they're too big. But either way, yeah, don't use telegram. It's just honestly stupid. Just, yeah, don't.