Aside from the lack of E2EE, why is Telegram not trustworthy?
A lot of privacy guides suggest avoiding Telegram. I understand that in its default mode there's no E2EE (and no E2EE for groups at all).
If people I know don't wanttko use Signal, isn't Telegram the lesser evil given it's nicer privacy policy (than other popular ones)?
For casual shit like sending files to yourself, bullshiting with memes, or stuff like that, the unknown factor of telegram doesn't matter.
But it is an unknown. We don't know what their server code looks like. So you can't trust that it isn't doing things other than what it is supposed to.
The server’s trustworthiness does not matter for Signal. The app is designed to work securely regardless of the server. Moreover, even if the server software is open source, you cannot be sure that they run the same code that they publish.
I don't think that they published it as a response to the angry users. We wern't that loud and signal had a reason to do so. That was when they worked on the cryptocurrency and the spam protection.
In signals case it dosn't matter much if the server is compromised since the important part happens on the client side. The server can only forward encrypted salad or not deliver a message. Or log the meta data of the messages. E2e will always be there, despite the server being compromised.