Signal works quite well for me. I use it with most of my family members, though for some people I still have to resort to Whatsapp.
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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What has helped me convince my friends is to mention the features and not mention the privacy. Most people care about features and convenience but don't care at all about privacy. When I'm trying to convince my friends to switch to Signal, I usually say something along the lines of "it's like iMessage for Android" and give a small demonstration of the features.
You can say that shared photos are higher quality than SMS. That's how I got some of my friends to switch.
Unfortunately the main features aren't that good because the most important feature is to be able to communicate with others, and most people don't use signal yet. It's not really better than WhatsApp or messenger or iMessage or Google messages in any way, it's just got the privacy thing going for it.
I hope I'm wrong but that's why I haven't been able to switch.
Signal’s good, it just behaves largely like WhatsApp. I find Telegram a bit crappy.
Telegram is not secure, never was meant to be. Their employees can read your messages in 99% of use cases.
I'd consider Signal to be the gold standard of secure communications.
You can describe it to them like WhatsApp, except it's private, secure, not Facebook-owned, nonprofit so it can't be bought or sold, etc.
Here's the blog post that I share with my friends comparing Signal to iMessage and WhatsApp when they ask me about it.
It usually answers most of their questions.
Signal or Matrix are the only acceptable options I can think of off the top of my head.
I would not recommend Telegram or Whatsapp due to security concerns.
As a matrix user, I think it's a bit early for nontechnical crowds. Apparently big improvements are incoming though.
Whole family and all friends on Signal
Going to echo the choir and say signal. It’s honestly the best chat app I’ve used. I’d recommend it even if it wasn’t encrypted at rest.
It requires a phone number. I haven't got one. What else is there for people like me?
Matrix, SimpleX, XMPP
So, just the usual stuff. Cool.
Decent privacy focused messaging app isn't difficult. Signal and ~~Telegram~~ are the biggest ones.
Convincing people to join it is the hard part. There's no shortcut there.
Telegram is Russian spyware and has no security whatsoever by default.
Signal is good. Matrix is good.
*has no end-to-end encryption by default.
Also, they used to really suck at encryption back in the days, and haven't really earned my trust back.
... and no encryption of groups.
It's a huge Russian psy-op where they pretended Durov had to go into exile while he in reality cooperated with the regime.
I fully agree, but I would be extremely surprised if they didn't have transport encryption. Just no E2E, meaning that anyone who can get access to or impersonate the servers can read all your messages.
I love signal, but I would add to tell Android users NOT to let it replace their default text messaging app. They will have a Bad Time. Other than that, Signal’s great!
Don't think that's a thing since they dropped sms
Why not replace the default messaging app? Fossify has an open source messaging app, right?
To be clear, I didn’t say people shouldn’t replace the default messaging app, I said do use Signal to do it. Every time I’ve tried it’s a shit show.
Edit to add, since SMS was apparently dropped, it might be better. I take it nobody uses SMS anymore?
Signal is the way.
Matrix. Just use matrix.org unless you know of another server that would have you.
Matrix
KIK