Well did it help Epic when they added achievements? Guess not much. Either they never marketed this feature enough or most spending users never cared about achievements on Epic.

If you mean just the percentage of users I might agree. But those people don’t really correlate with the users who provide most of the profit of the platform.

My profile is also not public but it’s visible to friends. Also I can make it public when I want.

There are also achievement statistics.

I see. Still, I can see that for many people achievements with no value are no better than their absence. Platform provides value, and for now only steam provides a lot of it with almost each purchase.

Are you serious? Obviously people don’t care about achievements on a platform that has almost no community-related functionality.

It’s barely anonymous, and poorly encrypted. The latter is the reason Durov is in custody

There is no logic here. If it was poor it would be very easy to track anyone including criminals. You can check the news to find the reasons.

There have absolutely been cases where a backdoor/weakness/lack of encryption used to catch criminals before

I meant telegram related cases.

Some are staying safe, others are being caught precisely because of this.

I didn’t see any proofs of that.

Using better encryption schemes is definitely part of that.

Part of what? I don’t get the point here.

is not any different from just having TLS for transport

Yes, in simple terms, all encrypted transfer protocols are similarly protected from mitm attacks.

That just means that they store both your data in some encrypted way and the key. They can still read it trivially.

They can and they said the decryption keys are always kept separately (there are probably more layers than I can describe) from the data to make sure the servers are not used to decrypt the data locally. They can be lying for all I care. The bigger problem is that people somehow assume this a huge threat, while all previous cases didn’t involve anything like that. People are getting into trouble for their public content - protected by some encryption but visible to anyone interested (who then report it to oppressive authorities).

While some go extra mile to explain to you how you should use e2e for your family group chats, real criminals do their stuff everywhere (especially on telegram) for years, staying safe. Problem is not how weak or strong the encryption is, but that once you are under oppression and do opposition activities, you’re going to learn by yourself how to deal with it. Signal will not save you from people in your group chats if they are there to report on you.

That’s not correct. Toy may call it TLS but it’s a custom protocol. Data is not kept unencrypted on their servers, according to their docs.

Russia holds considerable defense in depth.

I think you have no proofs. As a Russian, it’s insane to assume Russia would spend resources on keeping any meaningful defense far from borders. And from places Putin often visits, of course.

You seem to have a detailed opinion about something you hardly even used, or researched. It’s fine, you don’t have to like it and I don’t care. But I will point out mistakes.

Most people do use it for public communication only. Not in plain text. Telegram was popular even before it started circumventing anything.

Others didn’t try to circumvent much because Russian market is usually too small for any app to care. Telegram’s user base is historically huge is Russia.

If telegram or other parties can access it, is it truly encrypted?

If the website creator and others can access the content hiding behind SSL/HTTPS, is it truly encrypted? It’s similar with telegram, except they also don’t keep the raw data on servers etc.

I used telegram during all that time in Russia. It did circumvent the shit out of the RKN. I guess you used somewhat limited data to learn something from Russia.

Telegram chats are not e2e by design. There is no standard way to handle e2e in group chats, also most chats are public anyway. Chats are encrypted according to their docs. There are no unencrypted chats in telegram. It’s just that people like e2e and call anything that is not e2e “not encrypted”.

On April 16, 2018, the Russian government began blocking access to Telegram, an instant messaging service. The blocking led to interruptions in the operation of many third-party services, but practically did not affect the availability of Telegram in Russia. It was officially unblocked on June 19, 2020

Some say it was unblocked because they made a deal with Durov. Another opinion is that too many people and services including officials continued to rely on it even during the time it was blocked. Regardless, Telegram did a huge job on circumventing those blocks.

Aren’t e2e encrypted by default you mean.

Judging by the size, just another electron app.

That’s not an opinion. That’s the lack of it. Plus a few grams of whataboutism. You’re a victim of Russian propaganda agents.

find sensible solutions

For example? How do you do that with terrorists?

Russia’s anti-terrorism goals

You’ll say this is a quote. The fact that you rely on this very phrase is hilarious. Either Putin equals Russia for you or you accept that he is not a terrorist.

Telegram requires a phone number.

It does and it sucks. But you can still have adequate protection because knowing your number won’t help authorities much. They have to find you in some group they deem illegal for anything to happen. They must find your account first, then add your number and see if that’s your account. Telegram did some improvements on that issue at some point, so it should take much longer and more resources to do.

Also it’s relatively easy to get a sim card not tied to your passport in Russia. Also using a cheap sim from another country is also an option, since you can set up a cloud password so that even if someone has your sim they won’t access your data fully.

This might as well be a honey pot for trapping more lgbt people.

A service requirement of a telephone number is not a honey spot. But sure some groups are honey spots. Yes, authorities mainly operate within the service. It can get to overwhelming extent but that mist mean they don’t have real backdoor-like access.