- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
You must log in or register to comment.
How about matrix?
Overdramatic blog post,sorry. I can’t stand the whole “fremmium” crybabies that then literally recommend the next freemium or “non transparent funding model” service… And don’t understand the fundamental difference between the Protocol and one of its implementations.
Matrix as a protocol is solid and is used far beyond the Matrix messenger. (e.g. the French and German governmental messenger, the German healthcare messenger,various armies,etc.) With a lot of commits coming from there - but not enough funding,that is definitely an issue.
The current issue with Freemium is solely limited to the matrix.org instance. There are hundreds of federated instances out there that aren’t Freemium and won’t have the need to go that way as they are funded differently.(e.g. the Lemmy Instance I am currently writing from, feddit - we are financed through other means) As they are federated it doesn’t matter - and honestly, I personally tend to see this as a good thing - it will lead users away from matrix.org towards other instances, making the whole network more reliable and decentralized.
There are two other issues that are relevant, though: The way the foundation is run is not ideal, definitely - there are and were issues and I am not happy with some management decisions, but at least they are getting somewhat better recently (government board). The whole protocol does not evolve as fast as it should be and this is an issue,especially as a it also affects bug fixing. As an executive for a (much smaller) company myself I see management issues and infighting due to lack of leadership within the foundation and I am not happy with that. The second issue is Element as a company that does things companies do - focus on making money. This in theory would be a good thing if Element would send enough money AND effort upstream to seriously bring the whole project forward. For a long time this seemed to be the case,but licensing issues and the “stale” development off Element X(Matrix 2.0) has me questioning that as well - but recent changes show us hope in that regard. We also need to carefully reconsider if element is keeping too much"closed" source code for monetized features and what influence VC really has. In conclusion: We need better leadership for Matrix,more transparency and more funding.
The good news is: It doesn’t mattter too much - if the current foundation fucks up and goes belly up it is not the end of Matrix - the protocol is decentralized enough and the licencing of the core components permissive enough for another (better?) foundation to start over. There are dozends of clients available and we have alternative servers available by now.
The funding part nevertheless is my major pet peeve here. All around Europe governments try to get rid of US tech - and use Matrix protocol based products. But they hardly if ever fund that. If Germany, France, Poland and Luxembourg (the big users) would give 5€ per year for each client they implement all issues with funding would be gone, Matrix 2.0 would be available in a few months, VC could be pushed out of elements AND they could mandate more transparency.
The issue with funding is relevant for all NGOs and especially in tech. Running servers costs a fuckton of money.
Signal has a respectable amount of backers but is a centralized protocol and when Trump does something shady moneywise their infrastructure,money and possibly even people will be gone within 24 hours.
Threema has a more sustainable business model but Switzerland is,well, difficult, in terms of privacy and intelligence services overreach, especially towards traffic pointing to foreign servers or hosts.
Revolt is a centralized service with no federation,limited selfhosting capabilities,with unclear funding(we are waiting for a financial transparency report for ages now).
Polyproto is still not quite there feature wise and funding, etc. is unclear.
Delta Chat is indeed an option but has massive technical limitations.
That leaves XMPP as the sole big competition if you want non-centralised, non-US based, privacy friendly, messaging.
That blog post was my reason to double down on Matrix.
Why?
It’s ethical because it runs on donations and has a non-profit business model.
Meta likely spends at least $1 billion a year running WhatsApp.
Please donate to Signal if you use it.
I wish I could do this, but trying to convince people to ditch an app they’ve never had problems with and where they all have their family, friends, work groups and school groups already mashed together, how do you convince them? Its not even about me convincing my friends or family, its about everyone else doing the same and when everyone has so many contacts in WhatsApp, that number starts to snowball real quick. Its just not feasible to try and explain this to someone who literally doesn’t care. I mean even though I myself know what Meta is and how Zuck is complete asshole, I still can’t switch off of WhatsApp because nobody I know is on Signal and I’d just be alone there. What’s the point? WhatsApp is pretty much the first app anyone installs on their phone (regardless of platform), they’re not gonna switch now.
Well, just an anecdote:
I simply deleted my WhatsApp and moved to signal. Just did it.
People installed the app, at least the ones that cared about staying in touch. Which was most everyone I cared about staying in touch with. A few of my friend groups also moved the group chat to signal, though all of them do have other ones with the people who didn’t care enough to move too, but I hear it isn’t that big a deal, they had multiple groups before and will have in future, doesn’t really feel like any extra hassle they say.
It’s been fine. No problems. I’ve had more trouble trying to explain to my extended family why I’m no longer posting on instagram. Those I never had in WhatsApp either back in the day, so they “stayed in touch” by watching my pictures I suppose. But I just consistently tell people they can reach me always via signal or plain old sms.
I guess the biggest thing to be scared about would be fomo for most, but I don’t really care enough, I’ve got so much going on already that it’s more of a blessing that I don’t have to be involved in every conversation or meme sharing or whatever.
It really gets so easy after simply switching. Just do it and that’s that. The people worth anything come with you, it’s just another app and another group chat or personal chat. Most already have discord and the meta messenger whatever its name is these days anyway. I know zero people with only one messenger/chat app and unsplintered groups across them. It’s not a big chore, and if it is, there’s always sms.
I guess the biggest thing to be scared about would be fomo for most
I don’t mind missing out on some things, but I would mind missing out on literally all of the things. Everyone is on WhatsApp and trying to convince people to switch to a different app when, from their perspective, their current app has over 99% uptime, their kids, their family, their extended family, their friends, all are on WhatsApp. Its the same for me, its everyone. Its just a different situation in Europe.
WhatsApp is pretty much the first app anyone installs on their phone
Is this really the case?
Maybe it’s a regional thing. I’m in the northeast US, and nearly everyone I know uses Facebook Messenger as their main form of communication, even people who don’t touch Facebook at all. I hate Messenger for the same reasons that people hate WhatsApp, but I still have to use it because my entire social circle does. If I want to message someone outside Messenger without giving my phone number out, I use my Google Voice number.
I’ve only ever used WhatsApp to talk to work contacts overseas, and I’ve only ever used Signal to talk to paranoid drug dealers, which is a use case that’s mostly been replaced by Telegram now.
In my region in Europe, it really is. EVERYONE uses WhatsApp. I’m not sure the last time I saw someone use SMS, its all WhatsApp. iOS, Android, its all there.
Outside of North America, most other countries’ use WhatsApp as a choice for personal and business uses is WhatsApp. Rest are mostly dominated by Facebook messenger. Excluding China which has WeChat domestically.
How Meta was ever allowed to buy WhatsApp without triggering anti-trust laws is beyond me.
Many of my European and South American friends are having a hard time because that’s where all their families and friends back home are, and it’s hard to get them to use something new, especially the older folks.
How Meta was ever allowed to buy WhatsApp without triggering anti-trust laws is beyond me
It was still called Facebook when they bought it.
Yep. I know the details. I’m tech savvy enough, but I use what my contacts use, and I’m not leaving WhatsApp. Same goes for youtube. The content I consume is there. There is no suitable alternative until the content creators switch. It’s not really about the technology at all.
Just ditch WhatsApp. Don’t give in to social pressure to install malware on your phone
The problem is there’s no one on signal that I want to talk to. So “just ditch the app” isn’t actually helpful.
Just need to move everyone. Not that hard honestly, if you are around smart people
" It’s not that hard really all you have to do is be around people who already want to move over". Yeah thanks for that advice.
I have a very similar strategy to being rich, step one is to be rich already. Simplicity itself.
Why are you friend with stupid people?
Why are you being intentionally disingenuous?
I will say it again just so it’s stated.
People are not going to move to another service unless they can obviously see the benefit in moving to that service. People who are not technically inclined (that doesn’t mean stupid) are not going to see the benefit.Don’t be rude about people you don’t know anything about. Don’t insult their intelligence just because they’re not as interested in a very niche area of technology as you are.
spoiler
Why are you friend with stupid people?
Also note that if you are going to be rude about people you know nothing about, you had better check your grammar
What I said is that smart people can be convinced to move to another platform. Most of my friends are not technically inclined, but it was easy to make them use it, at least to chat with me.
What you did is change “smart people” with “people who already want to move”, which is not the same. You then said it’s not something you can choose (as you cannot choose to be rich). But I answered that you can actually choose your friends.
Never did I say people who are not interested in niche technologies are not smart. My statement can be rephrased in an equivalent statement “people who cannot be convinced to change are not smart”, and I stand to it.
There’s nobody on Signal, that’s the problem. If I want to miss out on all of my group conversations, work conversations, messages between myself and others, then yeah, I can switch. But if I want to receive any messages at all, I have to keep WhatsApp installed.
After Trump was elected and inaugurated, Signal has finally been gaining some steam here in the Netherlands.
It’s still an American company, so it’s not ideal. But it’s still significantly better better than letting a tech giant like Facebook have control over the most commonly used chat app.
WhatsApp needs to go and Signal is the most likely way in which we can achieve that. We can worry about the American elephant in the room later.
There is threema, a Swiss messenger that gained some popularity earlier since they had end to end encryption before whatsapp.
Unfortunately the source code is not open (even though they do get annual audits with public reports), and the client costs 3 EUR or something (once).
Yeah, but Threema has basically no momentum behind it at all at this point.
I’m putting my social capital behind the option that currently stands the most chance of beating out WhatsappThreema has a pretty big momentum in some countries.
Then by all means keep that momentum going.
I’m just looking at this from a Dutch perspective, where Signal is seeing by far the most growth.You can help making it stronger. That’s what I did in Germany: if people want to contact me, I usually give them my Threema ID first, everything else comes later.
But my goal is not to move to Threema, my goal is to move away from Whatsapp.
Signal fits the bill while expending far less social capital convincing people to use it.
Which?
Switzerland. ;-)
And Switzerlands records in terms of privacy sadly is far worse than most people think - even with the last attack being repelled.
Matrix (preferably on a non-matrix.org instance) currently is the preferable non US and privacy friendly way.
I don’t know - this hype about Matrix reminds me of XMPP which was similarly popular a decade ago. Today, nobody even remembers it anymore.
Pepperidge farm remembers, and so do I. Lots of people I know use XMPP (Cheogram, Dino, etc).
Which hype? Matrix as a protocol is used for a decade now, especially by various big governments (French, Luxembourg and German governmental messenger, various German states, German and Polish armed forces, German healthcare messenger, various smaller projects in Latin America), is bridgeable (I currently have it bridged to Whatsapp and Signal amongst others) but I really don’t see a hype - on the contrary I only see people predicting me the immediate apocalypse of Matrix for 5 years now, currently due to matrix.org (one of a hundred instances) introducing a premium account model for the most cost intensive (heavily media sharing)users. (See below for that).
They also offer Threema Libre on F-Droid for all us folks who degoogled their phone
Until Facebook buys them like they did with WhatsApp…?
That’s just the client, the server architecture is what really matters.
Thanks, yeah someone else said similar here.
FYI, while Threema front-end clients (apps) are open-source (and offer reproducible builds, which is surprisingly uncommon in open-source land), the server component, though supposedly audited, remains closed-source.
EDIT: for comparison, the Signal server code is mostly open source, but things like the spam filter are closed.
Thanks.
And I didn’t know Signal had spam filters. It makes sense to not make that open source.
In my circle of 20 there has only been one instance of spam over several years. 3 of us got the same message.
Signal is based in America but it’s a non profit organization, not a company. Important difference
But being based in the United States it is still subject to American laws, and that comes with the risk of potential American spying and embargoes. Software from any American entity (be it coorporation or non-profit) comes with that risk.
Sadly many still don’t want to switch. My most active chats are in signal now but the large majority of chats are still on whatsapp
If you leave WhatsApp, your chats will usually follow.
Not all of them.
I have a non-official chat group with some colleagues, and a chat group for the neighbourhood that are not likely moving just because I am refusing to use Whatsapp. It would just result in me missing out on those chat groups.
Currently I just have both installed, and that is also how I try to convince people to install and try out Signal.
America is not a monolith. Signal’s developers are very much aware of the risks of operating there and probably already have several escape plans given recent developments. I also think five-eyes probably has access but getting it might be computationally expensive.
The exit plan from WhatsApp is quite simple. Start by installing Signal and setting it up – it takes only a couple of minutes. Then, resume any WhatsApp conversations on Signal if that person is already a Signal user. If they are not, then switch to regular text messaging and gently suggest to that person to switch over to Signal.
Sadly for me, this doesn’t really work for some relatives as
- They live abroad and the cost of sending text messages abroad is not insignificant
- Some are so tech un-savvy that even installing a new app by themselves is too much.
All I can do for those relatives is to leave WhatsApp installed but take away basically every permission I can, including running in the background.
They live abroad and the cost of sending text messages abroad is not insignificant
Signal is free just like whats app. For text, calls, and video. So that isn’t a problem.
I too have friends and family in different countries, one of which is crazy about whatsapp. I simply tell them this is how we are going to do things now, and walk them through it. It is not hard. If they can’t do it, well then we don’t need to communicate this way. Whatsapp is not an option. It is that simple.
Signal is not capable of SMS and quite a lot of people still use it.
yes, i know SMS isn’t secure at all. but if the option is “keep in touch with close family” or “don’t keep in touch” they will probably choose the former if they want to keep that.
I would rather SMS than use WhatsApp. But even then if my family is far away, why am texting them at all very often? With the time zone differences I’ll call or email, or nothing. It’s weird how people got along just fine with letters that took weeks and suddenly we now need instant communication for some reason?
we used to be fine with candles and stinky lanterns filled with perfectly good kerosene too. who tf needs electricity? 🤨
on the topic of family connection, I can’t speak to your family experience. only my own. and our family group chat is pretty damn active.
Did you get everyone to settle on the same thing, like Signal? We are spread out over about 8 countries, and with all the different phone numbers and plans, we use various methods, with several of us on Signal. Some on whatsapp, some on messenger. So we are not coordinated enough for a group chat. Which is fine, I dont really need to know everything all the time, we catch up when can, or get into small video chats occasionally. Luckily we do tend to physically see each other somewhat frequently.
no we are all on different platforms. half are on android and half are on apple which is irritating. so sadly the sms is our best tool to hit everyone at the same time with any urgency.
sms is not even an option for us; international texting costs a lot. Some people don’t even use a phone, they rely on internet connected devices only. Trying to coordinate all of this gets complicated fast.
How is that weird? You can be fine with suboptimal stuff, and recognize it’s suboptimal. Some people like their relatives and wished they could talk together more readily. Letters were just the fastest (while economical) method of doing that for a while.
deleted by creator
How did they get WhatsApp installed? Is a FaceTime or other video option available? Never give up, never surrender
I was with them helping them out. For reasons I won’t discuss here I won’t be able to visit them anymore, so that avenue is gone 😞.
deleted by creator
Signal has been a good option because you can get “normal” people to use it, which hasn’t been true for many of the alternatives (except Telegram, but that’s a mess).
The problem is that it was easier to get people to move to Telegram since it had an abundance of features compared to WhatsApp which was compelling for the average person that doesn’t care about encryption. Signal doesn’t have any of these features that make it enticing for the person.
Signal used to be the best answer to this conundrum, since it would use its own internal protocols if it could or fall back to SMS if it couldn’t, unfortunately they decided to drop SMS support a few years ago, citing users that sent sensitive information not realizing they were using SMS (that always felt kinda flimsy). I really disliked this change, because it raised the difficulty of adoption, from just getting people to replace their default app with Signal to making them manage multiple apps.
Now though, you basically need to advocate socially for the change you want to see in the world. Anecdotally, I started using Signal when they still supported SMS to talk with 1 friend group, and eventually convinced most of my closest family groups to also use it, many after SMS support was dropped. Apart from 1 tech illiterate elderly couple and 1 extended family member, I haven’t received any personal (non-company related) text messages in like 5 months.
The sad truth is that the majority of people are treating WhatsApp exactly as a social network. It is there to send memes and stickers. See what others are up to without having to interact. Then mindlessly scroll through reels. Ocassionally purchase something via chat with a corporate bot.
If you quickly uninstall it because you don’t know anyone using it it sounds like you’re part of the problem. If someone you know installs it to try it out that’s one less person they see as well. Personally I got the vast majority of my friend group to move to it years ago by just saying like “hey Facebook sucks we should move to signal”. If you don’t want to do that should at least leave it installed it’s not like it’s taking up much space
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Wish more of my contact list would switch over to Signal. It’s nearly the same. I don’t see why it’s so hard for some people to just start using Signal instead of WhatsApp.
Oh well.
Because people are beyond stupid. “i dont want to download another app” - while having an app for almost every other store and bullshit game and whatever
I think what they really mean is “I don’t want another account”.
Hell I’ve been getting rid of accounts lately. Feels good.
It’s super cathartic, I agree. Feels extra good when it’s big tech and fascist-owned as well.
My dad won’t switch from Facebook messenger so now we have to talk via unencrypted sms
groups/channels?
I tried switching my family over, but being unable to install it on a second device or tablet was a deal breaker.
“But why, everyone is on WhatsApp”, and also a lot of businesses. “Privacy? I’ve got nothing to hide, what are they gonna do eith my info?”
Humans are too stupid to switch from convenience to slightly less convenience even if they get privacy for free. Any amount of discomfort is too much and changing an app is basically death.
They see no value in it. They don’t see that privacy is proactive measure that can protect you.
On Facebook, especially in my family, accounts get lost and hacked. One fine day, it might be someone with more influence in the family who’s attacker might make off with stolen bank information or passwords.
but “that’ll never happen”, right?
How do we know signal isn’t also run by a techbro who just wants our data?
I don’t think that the founders are bad people. If you look at their history of work, they have done enormous amounts of work in the computer security sector. The founder, however, did run a cloud based WPA cracking service.
Meredith Whitaker, who is the president, used to work at Google doing research for “issues related to net neutrality measurement, privacy, security, and the social consequences of artificial intelligence”.
In 2018 she then staged walkouts at Google over concerns of sexual misconduct and citizen surveillance.
The people on Signal’s board seem to be trustworthy people with a pretty airtight background. You have to worry more about the mobile operating system compromising you than do you about Signal.
Does it really matter who made it if you can see the source code? You don’t have to trust them.
That’s kind of a core tenet of libre/open software, innit? Independently verifiable software that you can change at your pleasure.
Can you though? Can I build the apk myself and use their services?
Yes, you can use their exact build environment straight from GitHub. You can also use Molly.im which is another app that i think is a fork? Im still investigating it.
Ya it’d be better if it didn’t require a phone number but it’s a solid start as it’s build up a user base over the past decade. Matrix is good but I know far less people that use it and it’ll be a long time of growing with nerdy/geeky communities before it starts getting more mainstream users
For now anyways lol
What does this mean
When you’ve been around a while, you begin to notice certain trends.
This particular trend being the one where the young, bright, ethical start-up turns into the sort of monster they originally rallied against, ensh*ttifying their product and spouting all the same reasons for it.
Signal is relatively young, bright and ethical. The cynic says “for now”.
That’s pretty much the only advantage of getting old.
That’s a risk, and a reason I’d like to see something federated succeed in this space. Unfortunately neither Matrix nor XMPP has managed to achieve quite the level of UX necessary for mainstream adoption, nor have the average person’s tech skills and comfort level improved.
Signal’s status as a well-funded nonprofit gives me hope that the current situation is reasonably stable.
Several XMPP clients look perfectly fine
I’m sure there are several I would consider fine for me.
I’m skeptical that they can be fine for someone who doesn’t know what federation means, isn’t especially upset that a handful of megacorporations control most human communication, and already finds the fact that I’m asking them to use anything different from what they’re used to annoying. XMPP has more things for the end user to think about than Signal does even if a client is very polished.
Signal is very actively and directly working to pioneer a new financial model for long term software business stability that does not rely on surveillance capitalism. Your experience with young companies enshittifying into monsters is the natural cycle for the surveillance economy, and if Signal does eventually go that way it will be a profound disappointment, but I expect the foundation would rather die first. Check out this interview from last year with the president of the Signal Foundation for more depth on that.
Nah, that would be Matrix, XMPP, DeltaChat or SimpleX
Jami*
Matrix isn’t necessarily p2p
Oh yes that too
signal requires a phone number and won’t even allow you to send sms to those that aren’t on signal.
its better, but still not great.
It used to function as a fallback SMS/MMS messenger (like how iMessage does) but when Google started moving to convert Android from SMS/MMS to RCS Signal made the hard decision to cut the fallback functionality rather than follow Google’s new framework.
I personally hope once the dust settles Signal designs a RCS engine and restores the fallback functionality.
Yeah killing the sms function was basically a deal breaker for me, no matter how much I tried I could only get three people to use Signal, the rest were all sms. When the sms feature was removed 2 of the 3 dropped Signal completely, so now the only person I know who still uses it is my mom and even she still flips back and forth between Signal and Google messages when texting me.
I still have Signal on my phone and suggest it people when they ask how to contact me, but everyone just wants to text my phone number.
If you need to send sms to someone not on signal, why not just send them an sms
if they need my phone number to have an account anyway, they can offer both.
i dont need more apps that do the same thing. i need less.
It’s arguably a very bad idea for a secure messenger to also provide an SMS interface, since those are basically cleartext
exactly. so I’m wondering what the purpose is for its need.
(edit: apologies- the phone number. needing the phone number.)
What? You use a secure messenger to send secure messages. It doesn’t make sense for a secure messenger to offer sending insecure messages (SMS).
Edit: oh, you’re probably referring to why it requires a phone number. This seems to be due to abuse/spam prevention, as otherwise creating new accounts to spam people with is basically free.
using the phone number is still a pretty unnecessary risk, imho.
there’s no real need for it any longer.
Do you have a better approach to prevent spam in mind? Without a barrier of entry it becomes a serious issue.
A truly ethical replacement would not need a phone number
And it would have as much spam as email.
removed by mod
Matrix still has it’s problems. All the meta data is still saved on every server permanently.
There is still space to improve from there.
I don’t use Signal because they don’t release the app in F-Droid. Signal devs refuse to release the app outside of Google Play Store, which is very evil.
You can use Molly from F-Droid. They even have a full FOSS version that you can set up a self hosted notification socket for, to avoid Google Firebase.
You can download the APK once from the website, after that it updates automatically. https://signal.org/android/apk/
I know I can. But the hostility of Signal devs to open source and F-Droid makes me uncomfortable. Why use an app with such hostility?
removed by mod
I use obtainium to install it and it works flawlessly. The reason they don’t publish it elsewhere is due to licences and push notifications iirc
