this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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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?