I use the apps my friends use but it gets tiring to keep up with so many.
- Have friends
- Talk to them.
What kind of a take is this? What are you trying to say? “don’t use messaging”? Amish take? Genuinely trying to understand
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.
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
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…
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
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.
Whatsapp for irl friends, Discord for online friends and gaming, email for professional communication. Not too complicated
Thanks apple!
Guessing you weren’t around when MSN, AIM, IRC, ICQ, Yahoo! Messages and Skype were at the height of their popularity.
Beeper handles most of these
Beeper doesn’t seem to exist yet
There’s a waitlist, they’re churning through it
Add SimpleX and Conversations-i2p
Yep SimpleX works great. Although every time I read the name I think of herpes.
Hahaha, SimpleX on Android is fine, the Desktop client is kinda incompatible with anything (no flatpak, the ubuntu version is kinda broken, no repo, their sync requires a random firewall port to be open)
Interesting. For my desktop, I just installed a binary from the AUR and it works wonderfully.
Yeah I avoid installing stuff to my system but I looked into RPM .spec files and that should be possible too. Flatpak would be the way to go though.
Personally, I do the opposite. I try to avoid flatpaks and the like. And the AUR enables that really well
Welcome to security I guess
Security is a compromise between convenience and safety.
However, simply using flatpaks isn’t inherently more secure than using a binary or compiling from source. But it can make it easier to be secure for people that don’t want to manage their own sandboxes.
It’s also easier for devs so they only have to make one version of their app which in theory should work on all systems. But in practice I find it doesn’t always work that way
Do not have Instagram and FB Messenger. Discord and WhatsApp are sandboxed, permission restricted and firewalled.
Signal is a fucking desert despite converting so many contacts. Nobody uses it in the past few years.
i use aliucord on my phone, it has plugins, the old ui, and no telemetry
I do not want to risk an unnecessary ban, and I use an old official version anyway. Discord gives a lot of “freedom” as far as information and insight into internet social activity goes.
Somebody please tell me what’s wrong with just texting? Why did half the world decide SMS 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?
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.
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
MMS is still 0.37€ for me right now (SMS is free though). Completely unacceptable.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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!
Am I too old that one of these should’ve been Skype?
I abandoned my chat to make a new one in Discord. Despite them complaining about Skype daily for years, suddenly they loved Skype.
Humans are silly. Either way, it’s been Skype, Snapchat, and regular text for half a decade now.
I literally had to bring all my group kicking and screaming onto discord literally within the year it launched. Same story, non stop bitching about Skype but all of a sudden nobody wanted to try discord. I straight up had to send a message to all of them saying I’m uninstalling and dropping my discord link if they wanted to play. Over the course of a month they all switched over, couldn’t be happier.
I didn’t known Skype still existed and i thought I was getting old.
Sorry dude.
/sad old man groans.
And other countries don’t understand why US users stick to txt/mms… Its convenient and built into the phone so everyone has it.
Matrix and bridges
XMPP & Gateways
Only if you tell your contacts about it, and explain to them what a bridge does
Why?
Take Signal to Matrix for example. They use different encryption protocols, which means a message sent from one end has to be decrypted, and then re-encrypted with the protocol of the recipient before they can actually receive it.
So basically, your encryption is not very e2e anymore, and the fact that someone can set this up, effectively giving encryption keys to a third party without their contacts being able to do anything about it is pretty fucked.
Oh, and different TOS between different services also come into play.
So if you do this, at least tell your contacts about it, so they can make an informed decision about whether or not that’s okay for them.
Just self host the bridges. I mean if you trust your phone more than your server, this won’t help.
Do whatever you want, but again, make sure your contacts can make an informed decision about it.
If I own the bridge, nobody but me is accessing the message.
I bet none of my contacts made an informed decision about which chat app they are using. I don’t think that this really bothers one of them. Most of them do not know, what the difference between Insta-pms and Whatsapp even is, as far as security and privacy are concerned. And from my point of view I don’t know it detailed enough too. Making an informed decision about a closed source software and as a non technical person is not as easy as you may think. At least from my point of view.
You’re hitting the nail directly on the head.
Not knowing what’s going on being a bad thing is precisely my whole point
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.
Element has bridges to some of the services
I’ma just use my smart phone to, make a call. Or send a letter in the mail. I’m not about to do this lol.
Email or text. Otherwise fuck off
Email encrypted with PGP keys?
Text over Internet protocol like XMPP or Matrix?
Right? Right?So the two least secure online communication methods possible?
Let’s find out, I’ll email a text to the pentagon
