Enshitification in action. During 2024, Telegram declared war on rooted Android alongside WhatsApp and Viber. This means you can't log in to your account if you have root access or if you don't have Google services.
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
They still tie it to your ID since you need the phone number.
And we just trust them not to share your social map to NSA which they totally don't do. Trust me bro
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.
Data is about as good as it is current though and many people are reducing their exposure to these parasites
A person can now pretty easily go without logging into any of these apps with a few adjustments.
Hence why signal relationship maps will be even more valuable going forward. Hence my theory about signal...
I'm way more concerned about the privacy of what I say than who I say it to.
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.
At the very least XMPP and Simplex, which are easier to host and lighter.
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.
I am very unfamiliar with jmp.chat and don't use notifications, but from what I've heard - Conversations (with UnifiedPush notifications) isn't that bad.
As for Simplex - a problem indeed, you effectively can't have an account shared between devices, but I just have identical profiles on my phone and computer. Also, people have complained about it consuming battery quickly (they switch to checking for notification every set interval to save it).
But yeah - I think both are worth trying to see if maybe one of them fits you! They're both super easy to host.
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.
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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?
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.
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
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.
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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.
It's hard to have faith that a US-based company will actually protect your privacy.
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.
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.
Matrix does have stickers
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.
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
A good alternative is a federated, selfhosted solution hosted in a jurisdiction unfriendly to yours.
If you want to self-host chat, Conduit (implementation of a Matrix server) is really nice. Much better than the official Matrix implementation (Synapse).
Yes!! I hosted it, indeed much lighter on resources! Broke encrypted rooms a few times, but overall was fine. However, it lacks deletion of old media and messages, so I broke it while trying to delete big media one by one (it broke displaying of ALL media). And when I reinstalled, a reinstall just didn't launch. So... While it is 100% on me, feels like it's still not the optimal solution if you're constrained on disk space.
in a jurisdiction unfriendly to yours
Doesn't need to be unfriendly, just needs to not kow-tow to your jurisdiction.
Stickers are pointless if I have no one to send them to. So I stay in telegram.
Signal didn't work for some back in 2021/2020 and wasn't supported on old devices, now I'm stuck with Telegram.
At least I'm not part of FB's social graph and have some friends that now use something other than WhatsApp
Who didn't it work for? I switched to Signal in about 2016 or so, and haven't had a problem with it. Admittedly I'm a software developer, and typically use high-end devices, so my knowledge is severely lacking.
There was a surge of signups when WhatsApp changed its ToS to allow businesses to record/save conversations. Signal had issues with signing up. At that time it also didn't support LG G4 phones anymore.
I used it on lower-end devices around that time, but not bottom-of-the-barrel (Motorola smartphones). I had a Moto x4 then Moto G Power, and Signal worked fine on them. When Signal stopped working for SMS, I stopped using it, but I think I got my SO on board, so I'm back to using it for messaging.
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