I use the apps my friends use but it gets tiring to keep up with so many.
Whatsapp for irl friends, Discord for online friends and gaming, email for professional communication. Not too complicated
And if you have two phone numbers which you want to use for WhatsApp then you need to clone the damn app because they can’t even make such basic functionality
if you won’t talk to me except through insta then you’re not worth being friends with just fucking text me like a normal ass human.
Are you even a true nerd if you have so many friends?
As long as those friends have strong and inflexible opinions about chat apps then yes.
Wait, do you guys have friends?
I have all of them. Plus linkedin. This is madness
Spoken like a real android user. All my iPhone friends (and especially family) refuse to download any other app, they just complain that I physically can’t download iChat.
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As an iPhone user, iChat is mid. I think it’s only in the Us that it is widely used.
Embrace the beauty of Signal now
Kind of ironic considering that with Matrix…
- Forward secrecy is kinda hosed
- they store metadata permanently on their servers by design
- A ton of stuff that would otherwise be invisible and signal is visible in your Matrix homeserver, including permanent history of all group membership
- Your data does not belong to you, and that’s how the server is built to treat it, e.g.
- GDPR deletion is nonexistent (it won’t delete your username or your messages, making it less effective than on Discord, let alone Signal)
… Etc.
Ironically, older federated messaging systems like XMPP might be better by coincidence. Message archiving was an optional addition and some servers, such as the popular Riseup one, do not implement it.
Yeah, fair. It can’t delete your messages to the extent a centralized system, and that’s an indication of the lack of centralized control? It’s a different threat model I think many find satisfying (though perhaps not most).
All those points are about how one server communicates with itself. Federation doesn’t factor into it
huh, yeah that’s fair i did not actually notice that :/
I don’t have time to respond to everything, so I’ll just respond to the first one- which is that it’s tankie copium. I don’t deny the Signal Foundation might be taking money from government groups- I believe it is. But looking at the groups its pretty clear what it is, Radio Free Asia, as in the Asia branch of Radio Free Europe. Aka, their goal is to make people living in US adversaries rebel. The US does not censor private communication, it would be very quickly found out if I sent a text to my friend and they couldn’t receive it, or I was sent to jail for the content of that speech.(That’s not to say its not spied on though.) However, in many(most?) US adversaries there is active censorship of opposition communication, the US generally(although not always) supports the opposition by nature of them being the opposition- this is why(if you believe the narrative that everything is a cabal of the powerful) US tech companies supported the Arab Spring. This is why Radio Free Europe broadcast in support of Dubček and the Prague Spring, why they also supported the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. All that is just to say the US can follow the narrative of being 100% power seeking while still supporting open communication platforms. (After all, the US government also either directly created or contributed to SHA-2, Tor, and Ghidra too) And, Signal is open source, read the code and network traffic yourself, they won’t remove encryption for US allies.
That doesn’t mean they’re immune to criticism, they may be able to explain it, but I personally probably wouldn’t donate to an organization that has the money to pay part time developers $450,000 according to their Form 990, but its not my money so not my place to judge how its spent.
I think most of your criticism makes sense.
The part about “not reading private messages” I think is mistaken, or rather, maybe amiss. I mean I don’t have evidence, so this is all conjecture. The sophistication of data surveillance and data gathering makes the content of the message rather meaningless in my view.
EDIT: Oh, I don’t think any adversaries of US, even if working together, make any meaningful threat towards it. It’s really hard to imagine, esp. considering the US has a bunch of successful coups & stuff under their belt.
I wasn’t saying the US doesn’t spy on private messages, I was saying Signal is open source so it would be hard to hide a back door. So I don’t see how any other E2E encrypted messages could be more secret then Signal. I guess obfuscating the messaging servers.
The sophistication of data surveillance and data gathering makes the content of the message rather meaningless in my view.
That’s a fair point but I don’t know if there’s any other good solution to that.
yeah i’m rethinking some stuff too, even in some utopia i think some information related to me might make life inconvenient, so the best way to protect that (e.g. not disclosing it digitally) maybe needs outta the box solutions.
related, does anyone even bother to look at physical mail for stuff? like if i put a cipher in a letter with no return address, using that pen ink that you can erase (which comes back if you put it in a freezer) and only i and my contact have the key to the cipher which we exchanged in-person; could anyone reasonably know it?
it seems digital stuff might be a carrot for surveillance people, maybe it can be made into a honeypot and physical or analog means can make a return.
I think finding novel ways to communicate with a specific person and not be monitored is easy. The difficulty is opening a new line of communication on an already monitored one, communicating to new people, and one of those new people not blabbing.
After all, if you play on a private Minecraft server and spell out text with dirt blocks, I don’t think anyone’s going to bother writing code to analyze your Minecraft network traffic.
Meanwhile Matrix was built & funded by Israeli Intelligence (to which I’m sure there are anonymous donors today). It’s expensive replication model means only those with the deepest of pockets can run a server leading many to flock to the mother instance of Matrix.org centralizing, replicating the data to a single node (being decentralized in theory, not so much is practice). It’s funny to see them call out Signal, but luckily there are private, free alternatives to both.
Huh, would it be possible to provide a source? I might be bad at searching, I’m not finding anything…
EDIT: Ok I found one with some search operators. I can provide links, most were less trustworthy, I’d reserve judgement.
- An organization which was initially responsible for Matrix, AMDOCS, is allegedly (I say allegedly since I didn’t confirm it to a reasonable extent) an organization based in Israel which appears to have products related to surveillance
- By association, Matrix is tainted, perhaps it has sophisticated backdoors along with the other myriad of issues mentioned by other commenters
To give an alternative explanation with plausible hypotheses
- An organization linked to intelligence surveillance, created and discarded software, which occurs with most software, and I would imagine occurs with software developed at an organization linked with surveillance as well (if it’s publicly funded, i.e. by a government, I’d lean into this)
- Though suspect in origin, the amount of time the software has been independent, and with its open codebase, means any backdoors or other nefarious artifacts can be reasonably said not to exist
- An organization linked to an intelligence agency would perhaps be the one to expect to have a secure messaging platform, one could imagine said organization would develop a solution in-house as even with software audits, they may not be certain of any external software which may itself be compromised by an antagonist or have vulnerabilities which they could not control
Some food for thought. I’m not one to jump to conclusions, I think claims require proportional evidence, and obviously my judgement isn’t the same as a security researcher or clandestine operator, so settling on what ‘appears’ to be true without proper investigation isn’t something I do.
Thanks for the info though!!
I have 3/7 and I hate it. I wish signal never removed the ability to function as sms
Even if it did, it didn’t support rcs
That’s because Google is gatekeeping the android API for RCS
Wait, I thought Google wanted Apple to start supporting RCS. So that everyone can talk to each other.
So Google is just…trying to strong arm apple to give up their proprietary protocol for their own?
That’s so fucked up.
RCS is an open standard. However, on Android you can only use it with Google chat. So android stops any other apps from using it. Nothing to stop you making your own phone from scratch and adopting it.
It’s incredibly stupid, I know.
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Yeah, it’s mad.
Samsung messages app also supports RCS, depending on your carrier, though? It’s super fucking buggy and frequently switches back to sms so I still switched to Google messages, but it does technically have it.
They only have it because they reached a deal with Google.
4/7 here. I’m fine with it. Though sms should be included.
Just never interact with anyone. Christ, it’s not that hard people! (This comment doesn’t count.)
We’re all bots. You still haven’t interacted with a person.
Everyone on lemmy is a bot except for you.
Speak for yourself. I’m not a bot, I’m a cat walking across an unmonitored keyboard.
So you are a robotic cat, even better!
i really fucking hate discord.
Why does EVERYTHING have to be proprietary. Fucking capitalism.
Its pretty amazing for voice communication in gaming.
As a messenging app? Meh
dude discord has been one of the worst experiences for voip in gaming IME. I started using mumble SOLELY because discord was actually just disappointing. Though tbf maybe if i paid out the ass for nitro it’s better? I ain’t paying for that though.
Though yeah, for messaging, it’s dogshit, It’s a mess.
A funny advice I will give is recommending you and your friends use noise cancelling audio gear. It will help regardless of the platform.
this is honestly the only good thing about discord, the krisp noise reduction is actually kind of good. It only took them like 3 years to implement it on the linux client. And we’ve only had system wide noise filtering since the dawn of time.
Although since we’re on the topic, discord manages input/output in the single most inconceivably stupid manner possible.
On Linux I use an app called NoiseTorch that creates a virtual mic to cut out background noise in any application
i messed with noisetorch for a bit, it seemed interesting, and worked pretty well. Nothing beats push to talk though tbh.
i get much better call quality in telegram
I don’t get why people like it either. It’s a mess of chats.
Gamers using it for gaming. In game Voice communication is trash
And that’s fine, but why do gamers use it over any other VoIP option? And why the infinity chat channels over infinity servers?
Content creator branding, and “community”
Because it’s the standard for gaming. I use it and would drop it in a heartbeat if it wasn’t standard for every mmo out there.
Don’t like it - don’t use it. It’s a free (capitalist) country.
that’s the cool thing, i dont, but you know who does? You, and you know how i would need to contact you? Through discord! Uh oh!
I don’t use discord
damn didn’t know you weren’t all of my other friends.
I think they wanted to be, they were advertising themselves!
I really wanted to keep faith in it after the ui overhaul recently - VoIP performance was SO much better on Xbox, latency specifically. But good GOD the mobile app is just a pile of garbage nowdays. I have so many friends stuck on that platform, I still end up sharing links there to Lemmy memes and like 60% of the time when I share to the app it permenantly sticks on the splash screen??? 🙄 notifications are fucked these days too, myself & my friend group regularly miss messages entirely, even with direct @ mentions?!
Worse, I dropped a crap review and complained that function has dropped horribly since the update and the devs INSTANTLY replied like “Have you tried pretending you’re a beta tester for us? Do you mind doing a buncha troubleshooting you definitely haven’t already done?” (They wanted me to reinstall the app… Smh)
Anyway - fuck discord. I’m planning to shift to Revolt, but if anyone has better suggestions I’d be happy to try some!
im genuinely surprised discord even tries testing things on the two test branches they have. Yes, you heard me correctly, they have TWO separate testing branches. Bugs literally should not exist on the stable branch.
also when it comes to voip, i’ve enjoyed mumble, it’s pretty solid, minimal, configurable (highly integrated into games already, it’s old af though so maybe not new games) and works pretty well. Revolt seems alright, but it’s plagued with bugs, and weird issues, plus it’s self hosting is just, jank.
We could use a self hosted discord replacement tbh.
Reject Discord, go back to Teamspeak
i would fuck with ts if they would release ts5 and have an actual feature release, until then mumble it is. Shit slaps, and is minimal.
Hey what’s the app tho?
From left to right we have instagram, signal, whatsapp, element, discord, telegram, and messenger
Isn’t Instagram the same as messanger?
In terms of being useless, most certainly. But they are two separate services despite being owned by the same company.
WhatsApp is also owned by meta, so out of the 7 options, 3 of them are owned by the same company and yet continue to lack support for interoperability.
The fact that Meta doesn’t even bridge their various services or chat platforms really speaks volumes about what their broader goals and plans are
Well, actually no
Somebody please tell me what’s wrong with just texting? Why did half the world decide MMS needed to be replaced with a proprietary app? It works, everyone has it and there’s no confusion. Unless you are concerned about privacy or something, why not just text?
Edit: MMS not SMS. I didn’t understand the difference.
what’s wrong with just texting
If you have friends in another country, it might cost a quarter every time you send a message.
In regions of the world (e.g. Europe, and a lot of Asia) where some countries are the size of a large city (or perhaps the entire country is one city), that’s a problem. You’d be sending international texts all day every day.
SMS and MMS are literally the worst possible option. Zero security, zero privacy, zero features, dogshit quality photos and videos (especially when messaging an Apple user).
SMS doesn’t handle pictures, videos, gifs, reactions, or group conversations. Things I use all the time. MMS handles some of that, but implementation varies greatly by carrier and device. If you want consistency of that functionality, you have to go with an app. Apple and Google have created replacements for SMS and MMS that could be the next version of “texting” but Apple refuses to let anyone else use theirs (iMessage) and Google has only half opened up theirs (RCS), so those don’t really fix much.
(I guess I don’t know the difference between SMS and MMS.)
I must be using MMS for texting. All of those features work for me and anyone I text with. The only issue I’ve ever had is imessage compressing videos to and from my android.
I still don’t get it
This article does a pretty good job differentiating SMS, MMS, RCS, and iMessages
Wait until everyone and their dogs gets back to MMS…
You know how expensive they were during the upcoming of WhatsApp? Germany paid 0,80€ (at the time. Though the price is probably not much different during the early iPhone/Android 2.3 times) per picture. Compare that to the amount of stuff sent today and at the time you will probably pay 5€ per day just to get some things across.Source: https://www.derstandard.at/story/1747665/deutschland-hohe-preise-fuer-mms-verderben-das-geschaeft
It’s ironic that Europe adopted SMS years before we did in America because texting was absurdly expensive here. I remember paying $0.25/SMS back in 2003 or so (it dropped to a comparable bargain of $0.10/SMS after you sent 20 messages in a month), plus we had to pay to both send and receive them. I remember having to pay my parents $20/mo extra just to have unlimited SMS/MMS on my line only a couple years later once I was old enough to get a job.
I’m surprised that Europe kept up per message charges for MMS so long, they were basically always billed at the same rate as SMS here.
It’s just that almost every phone plan includes sms (dunno about mms) nowadays. So it’s a no brainer and those that are getting pre paid sims probably only need it for calling anyways.
MMS is still 0.37€ for me right now (SMS is free though). Completely unacceptable.
MMS doesn’t have much bandwidth available and it’ll just compress instead of failing to send, so even android to android if you send a long enough HD video the recipient will get compressed garbage. Then, of course, there’s the fact any videos sent over MMS from android to an iPhone(and vice versa iirc) becomes compressed garbage no matter how long or HD the video was, but that’s more Apple’s fault than MMS directly.
Imma be honest, half my communication involves emojis on discord. Jeb with his arms up is part of my personality now and I won’t apologize. When I started seeing someone a few weeks ago I had to explain that he’s missing out on half of my personality by texting. I substitute by jebbing in person but it’s just not the same 😔
(and yes, Jeb has become a verb)
JEB!
Why did half the world decide SMS needed to be replaced with a proprietary app
SMS is even worse in terms of openness. You won’t find a modem that runs open source baseband firmware. It’s because the radios are subject to several regulations which means customers can’t be able to modify that firmware.
It’s unencrypted and we know with certainly that the messages are stored by federal agencies and cell carriers. It also requires giving out one’s phone number which may be undesirable in some situations
because cellular providers are actually criminals.
Also sms (and mms, whatever the fuck else exists, it’s all terrible, shits all packets flowing through the internet, it’s the same shit) sucks, and is bad, and you shouldnt use it.
I only use two of these (signal/molly and discord/aliucord/webcord)
Edit: oo element is on there. I also use that lol.
I use Discord and WhatsApp
Literally me… I’ve 5/7 of these installed and even have Threema in addition. I don’t need more than one Meta Inc product in my life though
I like Threema a lot, but it lacks basic features such as text editing, so I can’t imagine recommending it to anyone.
You mean text editing after sending? I would definitely not consider that a “basic” feature - we are talking about E2EE here, editing a message that you already encrypted locally and then sent on its way is by no means trivial - especially with the kind of E2EE that we have nowadays.
It actually is super easy, barely an inconvenience. When you edit an E2E encrypted message, your client simply sends another E2E encrypted message telling your contact what to replace your previous message with.
How many contacts do you have in Threema though?
Only one that I actually talk to
I think I have like a dozen chat apps installed but everyone I know just sends me SMS instead… Literally the worst option.
Give Beeper a try! It consolidates all the listed apps into one texting app.
Beeper is great
Tried it, its bloated and battery hungry. It isn’t also clear how beeper saves and uses/handles your messages.
People really need to consider the pedigree of the guy who created this company and how willing he is to walk away from a company when it becomes unprofitable. Eric Migicovsky sold Pebble when it became unprofitable, promised that people would still have their jobs as devs, and at the last minute, the sale didn’t include their jobs, so everyone was left fucked out of luck and with no job. Also, the fact that he has zero long term plans for how to keep fighting Apple for iMessage access after he used a teenagers reverse-engineered code to make a standalone Beeper iMessage app which Apple promptly broke after only days. If that’s as far ahead as he was able to “plan” in regards to that, it speaks to his weakness on having a long-term business plan. Lack of realistic long-term business plan coupled with how badly he fucked over the developers when he bounced from Pebble screams “Don’t trust this.”
Seconded. Good support team too
Beeper is just paying someone else to maintain Matrix bridges for you.
And that’s a bad thing ?
Yes… because you have to trust that person/company. Which you implicitly should not… especially since they’re already shown themselves to be untrustworthy in their previous endeavors.
