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they think because he inherited a recovering economy, that he himself had some major part in it.

Signal is completely open source and auditable by anyone: https://github.com/signalapp

if you were to create your own clone, it would not interoperate with the real one.

The FBI can’t just force them to add malicious code. A bad actor could try to contribute bad code, but Signal’s devs would likely catch it.

Lacking end-to-end encryption does not mean it lacks any encryption at all, and that point seems to escape most people.

Not using end-to-end encryption is the equivalent of using best practice developed nearly 30 years ago [1] and saying “this is good enough”. E2EE as a default has been taking off for about 10 years now [2], that Telegram is going into 2025 and still doesn’t have this basic feature tells me they’re not serious about security.

To take it to its logical conclusion you can argue that Signal is also “unencrypted” because it needs to be eventually in order for you to read a message. Ridiculous? Absolutely, but so is the oft-made opine that Telegram is unencrypted.

Ridiculous? Yes, you’re missing the entire point of end-to-end encryption, which you immediately discredit any security Telegram wants to claim:

The difference is that Telegram stores a copy of your chats that they themselves can decrypt for operational reasons.

Telegram (and anyone who may have access to their infrastructure, via hack or purchase) has complete access to view your messages. This is what E2EE prevents. With Telegram, someone could have access to all your private messages and you would never know. With E2EE someone would need to compromise your personal device(s). One gives you zero options to protect yourself against the invasion of your privacy, the other lets you take steps to protect yourself.

the other hand, if you fill your Telegram hosted chats with a whole load of benign crap that nobody could possibly care about and actually use the “secret chat bullshit” for your spicier chats then you have plausible deniability baked right in.

The problem here is that you should not be mixing secure contexts with insecure ones, basic OPSEC. Signal completely mitigates this by making everything private by default. The end user does not need to “switch context” to be secure.

[1] Developed by Netscape, SSL was released in 1995 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#SSL_1.0,_2.0,_and_3.0

[2] Whatsapp gets E2EE in 2014, Signal (then known as TextSecure, was already using E2EE) - https://www.wired.com/2014/11/whatsapp-encrypted-messaging/

Telegram, for all their security claims, is basically not actually encrypted at all.

I’ll be honest, not a lot of pros to using Firefox if you don’t care about using the best adblocker (uBlock origin). That said, if you haven’t tried it recently, you should give it a shot. I would recommend installing uBlock Origin and Dark Reader (if you like your pages dark) for the best experience.

It’s not as fast as Chrome (not noticeable on newer devices) but I personally disagree with giving Google so much power over the web, so I’m ideologically opposed to using anything based on Chromium or not open source, so my options are limited.

anything specific that firefox lacks that is keeping you on chrome?