Definately not the same. For a better snapchat—like feature, where you want reasonable protection against your coms partner telegram is way better. Also protects you from screenshots etc (again: reasonable privacy relative to threat model)

does it protect you from taking a picture of your phone?

i'd rather have a foundation of properly functioning, award winning cryptography than "features" designed for people who haven't thought through their threat model sufficiently.

castles made of sand melt into the sea eventually

My threat model with nudes are different from my whistle blowing.

Signal also makes trade offs in order to het crypto to the masses.

Yeah, but “supporting plaintext comms by default” is not a trade off to get crypto to the masses, it’s a failure to do so at all. What’s wrong with the disappearing messages feature?

Disappearing messages are per thread. In telegram i can choose to 'disapear' single messages.

You can turn it on and off for the conversation whenever you want.

But I can't go back and delete a message. I can prepare to delete the next message. Not, a message.

I mean, that feature can be abused in a whole host of ways

In a private chat... thats a feature. Imo

How can crypto be better or worse? It's either works or it does not. I did not hear about anyone breaking Telegram crypto.

Telegram have said that you can’t trust Signal because the developers live in the US and something something the CIA, which is pretty ridiculous. They rolled their own crypto and they aren’t cryptographers, which should be reason enough not to trust its security: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-telegr...

This answer is ridiculous. They got world level mathematicians in their team, what more do you want? Who are those "cryptographers"? And why those cryptographers don't break Telegram if they think that their crypto is broken?

Again, crypto is either broken or not. Telegram crypto is not broken. It's fine. Not everyone might like it, but that does not matter. I don't know story about CIA (although I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Signal is honeypot), so can't comment about that.

Mathematicians are not cryptographers. Crypto is harder to trust when the rationale behind it hasn’t been justified. Signal’s crypto is very easy to justify. That’s about it.

>Again, crypto is either broken or not.

Security is not a yes/no thing. It is equal to the price to break it. If the cryptography is well-tested for decades, the price is much higher. This is not true for Telegram. It does not matter how good its creators are.