this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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Nothing new here. E2E is only available in one on one chats and is disabled by default. Dont use Telegram if privacy is your main concern.
At least it has an open-source client. Very few messaging platforms can say that, and fewer have a decent UX.
It's not perfect, but it's got a good combination of features and multi-platform availability. None of the other messaging apps support all of my devices except Matrix, and ~~Matrix doesn't have stickers~~
Edit: Signal doesn't support all my devices but maybe someday! The network effect is also big. None of my family and friends are on Signal, but most have Telegram. A few have Matrix.
Also Signal is a US-based company.
Edit 2: Matrix does have stickers, i guess I'm switching
Signal
Yeah, the glaring problem of having to share your phone number is gone too:
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/6712070553754-Phone-Number-Privacy-and-Usernames
The NSA already has your social map from Apple, Google, Facebook/whatsapp, plus a hundred other sources you've given access to your contacts in the past decade.
Even if you've never used any of those, or given any app access to your contacts, 99% of your contacts have.
I'm not getting you.
There's correspondence, there's metadata, and there's phone-ID relationship.
Signal still protects #1 and #2 better than #3. And the way it works, infrastructure load is much bigger than for most other messaging platforms. So it makes total sense they limit registration somehow .
I'm not sure I remember by now what I've read about Signal protocol, but I think the fact of who messages whom they don't have, so it's not just trust.
~~Anyway, if you've read about 90s' mixmaster servers for mail, while Signal developers don't approve of alternative clients, there are libraries and it's possible to make some kind of a mixmaster bot. ~~
I've left this, because it's funny as a good illustration of why they don't want alternative clients, among other things - because I've described a voluntary MITM.
That they do, but your contacts doesn't have to get it anymore.
A self-hosted matrix stack built from source with matrix clients built from source with e2ee implemented that you yourself have the competence to verify the encryption and safety of would be the only secure communication I know of if you don't want to trust a third party.
Doesn't XMPP tend to use always-active sockets? I looked into switching my number to a VOIP service and considered jmp.chat, but I heard people complain about phone battery life. I'm going to test it out soon, but if I go that route, I may consider hosting my own XMPP server if it can handle both my phone (i.e. answer calls on my computer instead of phone) and regular IM.
And Simplex is awesome, but my issue is having the same account on multiple devices. I want to be able to see and respond to messages on my work laptop, personal laptop, personal desktop, and phone, and it seems Simplex only has basic support for it. I'm still playing with it, and I may end up switching to it, but for now, the experience isn't very user-friendly.
Yup. I got my SO to try out Signal as an alternative to SMS, so hopefully that works. If we can consistently use it, I'm going to nudge my other contacts (mostly my family members) to switch as well, because it's certainly better than SMS. Signal is the most popular SMS alternative AFAICT, so it's the safe choice.
That said, I installed Simplex on both my phones and connected them, and my kids had a blast sending messages to each other. I'm going to keep playing with it and probably host my own collection of nodes, but so far, the implementation details bleed through and kind of tarnish the user experience. I'll keep messing with it though, and maybe we'll end up using it as an in-house chat or something as a kind of Discord alternative. Or maybe I'll host a Matrix node. We'll see.
I'm way more concerned about the privacy of what I say than who I say it to.
Guess I better stick with Facebook messenger then.
/s Does that even exist still?
They still don’t have backups on iOS which is a deal-breaker for me.
Why would you use iOS if you care about privacy?
Because it’s far better for privacy than any Google-Play-Services-ridden version of Android, and sometimes in life you don’t want to have to deal with custom ROMs anymore.
But also that’s an exceptionally dumb question, because the implication is that privacy can’t matter to people who don’t go to the same precise lengths someone else does.
Honestly, my problems with Apple go beyond just the privacy issues.
Fair enough, Apple has some pretty fucking terrible anti-consumer behavior. Privacy is just one of the few things they do well.
I couldnt find a working Ubuntu touch app last i tried to use it
Ubuntu touch is dead. Are there at least native browsers for it?
Is it? I still get regular updates. Yes there are a few, i use Morph
https://www.ubuntu-touch.io/
For some reason, I thought Ubuntu touch was EOL. Probably because I tried it on a Redmi 5 and it was an unofficial 2018 build. Is the Morph browser still supported? I checked the Github page and the last changes were 3 years ago.
After Signal's lie about dropping SMS support because of "engineering costs", I really can't believe anything else they say.
Plus the app experience sucks, it's no better than SMS.
Wasn't another explanation people mistakenly sending SMS and getting fucked when they meant to send a Signal message?
That's not true, but even so, the whole point is to be an alternative to SMS. It provides that experience, so I'm happy.
Are you talking about the signal from five years ago or something?
A platform that values my privacy? Or stickers? Tough choice, I guess, except Signal has both.
Doesn't have unlimited storage though. It's really nice being able to jump to any of the 15,000+ images shared with a single person dating back to like 2015 within a couple seconds. I know that's a privacy concern but nothing comes close to telegram's searchability and the unlimited storage.
It's a messaging app, it's useless if there is nobody to message. I dont have any friends using signal yet.
Also it doesnt work on my phone (Ubuntu touch). There used to be a community app but it's not currently working.
I sincerely wish them success, but it's hard to have faith that a US-based company will actually protect your privacy. Not that Telegram does either. I dont know what information they do even collect.
You don't have to, though? 1) The E2EE Signal protocol is well-audited to be robust. 2) The app itself is FOSS, and there are a lot of eyes on it. 3) The server code is FOSS. Even if they're lying about what code they use, it doesn't matter because it's E2EE. 4) If you think Signal might be bait-and-switching by building from different source code, you'd be provably wrong. They have reproducible builds, so were they to actually try this, it would be like sending up a flare to the entire security community. 5) Literally every single time OWS has been subpoenaed, the only information they've been able to provide is extremely basic metadata like server connection times.
You have no idea what you're talking about, I'm sorry. There's functionally less "trust" here than any messaging application on the planet. The network effect remark is at least valid and can be debated (although I personally have zero friends who use Telegram and at least several who use Signal). This one is just so, so wrong that it's not even up for debate.
Thanks for the elaboration. I'm not familiar with how Signal works.
Educating yourself on topic is a good idea BEFORE you plan on arguing about it online.
Matrix does have stickers
Can you elaborate on your last sentence? Is the US more or less trustworthy than alternatives?
Less than some. The US gov has a history of forcing US-based corporations to disclose private data regardless of their policies or the law.
I can't give you a good alternative though. I'm sure the same thing happens in many countries
Doesn't need to be unfriendly, just needs to not kow-tow to your jurisdiction.
If you want to self-host chat, Conduit (implementation of a Matrix server) is really nice. Much better than the official Matrix implementation (Synapse).
I am enjoying SimpleX chat
I tried it, and it looks decent, but there wasn't a single person I know around.
I'm not surprised due to my involvement in the Monero community, at least some people I know from previous online chat rooms are there, but I don't know anybody directly in person like from my day-to-day life that uses it.
Problem I have with matrix is that, afaik, does not currently support temporal or self destructing messages. Which is a big no-no for privacy conscious usage.
Stickers are pointless if I have no one to send them to. So I stay in telegram.
Considering that there's no technical problem with enabling it for all one-on-one chats, this tells a lot.
Also no E2EE on desktops.
I hate TG's UX. It's atrocious. WhatsApp is the closest to something normal, but imperfect too.
Chromium is an open-source browser.
OK, more specifically - what matters is that TG's protocol is a big ugly target moving fast. So its official client with released sources is in practice the only one. There are things like libpurple plugin and some python TUI client and an emacs one, but they are all lagging behind. And I think they are all using official tdlib.
This tells something too, that their talk about possibility of alternative clients is of the same kind as their talk about privacy.
About the network effect - bring your family and friends to Signal one by one. Of course it won't happen overnight.