Personally, I find the edit history a useful feature. But might as well be happy if those settings were customizable when creating the chatroom (such as in SimpleX, where various functions can be adjusted)
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I would argue it is already out of your hand after pressing the send button and being online, because your connection could drop right after that, the server delivers the message anyway. (Other concerns in my post above.)
I get OP’s point wanting a feature that would not show edits before first read, after all, no one would (need to) know if the edit was preemptive.
Off-topic
I hear you, but this should be seen as the Signal equivalent of “Hey, …never mind.” IMO.
However, even in my family someone would try to read between the lines or interpret what that could have meant…
That’s a good point. I personally don’t like feeling rushed when I have to reply to a message. But I often do. My contact is not necessarily putting pressure on me to respond promptly, though that can of course happen, but it’s often me wanting to reply ASAP.
I am sure I am not the only one who, when they see someone make a post about a topic they absolutely want to contribute to, feels pressured to reply right away, when the reality is, there is no rush. It’s just that we really want to add our contribution immediately.
Most of the time there is no rush to reply to a message, but we behave as if there is. It’s kind of like driving. I see so many people driving fast and inappropriately, even when there is no traffic, as if there is some kind of life-or-death emergency, but 99% of the time, that is not the case. People just want to rush.
Fair enough. In this case, I go back to the compromise I suggested earlier. To the extent that most people do not know that edited messages are visible, what we need is the following:
I disagree on this. The recipient doesn’t need to know what you deleted if they never saw it, but I think it’s good to let them know that you deleted a message. Different apps implement this differently. Signal and WhatsApp have similar implementations where they indicate a message was deleted. Telegram doesn’t show the recipient anything, which can betray the integrity of an exchange if it was reviewed later.
I recently had to show WhatsApp messages for a potential lawsuit. Because I prefer to use WhatsApp on web, I took the screenshots from there. However, months after taking the screenshots, I remembered that I have fingerprinting off on Firefox, which changes my time zone.
This means that if a screenshot said I received a message at 10 am, I didn’t actually receive it at that time. I actually got it at noon. The time of the message would likely not matter in the case, but if the contacts I was speaking to are in the same time zone as me, I could be accused of doctoring messages, when I didn’t. At least not intentionally.
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I agree, but there is a great counterargument:
This way, Telegram eliminates one on-device evidence that there has been a specific correspondence between two parties (besides deleting a whole contact chat), which could be seen as a privacy/anonymisation benefit.
Of course, one could always deny any compromisable topic, but a burst of deletion-evident messages (like in WhatsApp or Signal) tied to a specific time frame can suggest involvement in e.g. activistic events, or authoritarian regimes might even consider it obstruction of justice.
Off-topic
I get that, which is why in the early days of WhatsApp, when there was a modded version with “invisible mode”, I used that app because of this single feature.
Also, when they introduced (or was it Telegram?) to disable read-status and online-status in exchange for not seeing them either, I was an immediate adopter.
I can only recommend trying to make a habit out of not immediately replying to feel calmer, and also lift some expectation pressure from your contacts over time.
Downsides are forgetting the notification or dismissing it accidentally and not remembering, which also applies to messages you have read.
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This is why perhaps disappearing messages is the best setting for that context.
Deleting specific messages instead of a whole chat, without any notification that there was any change, can also paint a lie in Telegram. I am not convinced that they had privacy in mind with how they implemented this feature.
Telegram, also doesn’t let you see previous version of messages that you edited, but I remember reading somewhere that they have access to it. Also, when they first introduced edited messages, you could edit any old message, even from weeks or months ago.
So again, you could create a lie, even though there would be an indication that the message was edited. I believe that when they updated the feature, they made it so that you couldn’t edit a message after 48 hours, which is still pretty long. With Signal, I believe it’s only a couple of minutes or at best an hour.
Yeah, I’m sure it was just a simpler implementation to delete a message without a placeholder, the little privacy benefit just came with it.
And yes, you can absolutely abuse this to fabricate a lie or story, but one can’t deny its benefit, albeit a very small and for most people irrelevant one. It’s a double-edged sword.
Think of it as “signal shows YOU that recipient can potentially see all edits” instead of “signal shows recipient all your edits”.
There many forks of telegram that can log all edits and deleted messages, official telegram shows nothing. So people(who are using official tg) might think that if they edited/deleted message - nobody can see original message.
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This is true because to the extent that most Signal users don’t know that their contacts can see their edits, most of those contacts won’t know either.
This is another thing that I didn’t know. As I said earlier, it is my understanding that Telegram has record of your edits, even though you can’t see them yourself.
All that being said, I am surprised that forks of Signal and other messaging apps, allow you to view edits and deleted/disappearing messages. I have always thought of forks and modded apps as good things that allow you to have more features like block ads, but I never saw them as was to do things that are not very ethical.
From a security perspective, I think it would be good for recipients to have an indicator when their contacts are using a fork or modded version of Signal.
I don’t know that but if message was delivered then fork can just keep it forever. If you later delete that message, telegram fork on recipient phone can keep it and just show that this message was deleted.
I’m not sure if it’s possible to mitigate that, signal clients are open source, when client get message - it can store it forever.
Also not sure if this is possible with open source clients. Telegram introduced this feature recently and in couple days most of the popular forks was able to bypass it.