this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
26 points (90.6% liked)

Asklemmy

53055 readers
146 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Whenever I glance at darknet forums, people there always use Telegram for instant messaging. This seems like a strange choice for their use case, considering that Telegram is neither secure nor private[1], being centralized with Russia-controlled servers[2], phone number registration, no encryption for personal chats by default in mobile client and no encryption at all in desktop client[3], etc.

So why do they use Telegram instead of actually secure and private alternatives, like Delta Chat, XMPP+OMEMO, etc.?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] Hexadecimalkink@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Telegram is less policed than the American apps with backdoors. It's popular with many people making it easy to connect. (It has a lot of good features). The options you listed all have adoptjon challenges for non-technical people.

[โ€“] umbrella@lemmy.ml 2 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

this is probably the actual reason.

telegram doesn't give a flying fuck about anything that happens in the app, and refuses to moderate much of anything i'm aware of.

paired with the popularity and familiarity people have with it, it makes for a perfect platform provided the cybercriminals take their opsec seriously.