Your communications can’t be compromised if you don’t communicate lol
Having friends is bad OPSEC!
Supreme privacy. Two can only keep a secret if one of them is dead.
I have two contacts
all the ones I chat to are on Signal but i went through this years ago, every time a contact sent me a txt message i sent a link to Signal and said see you there.
Both are dead?
Maybe all your contacts also value their privacy and therefore have not set signal to allow them to be discovered by their phone number
If that’s the case, then i would be more happier to get their usernames atleast. But the situation is way worse than that. They are deeply into whatsapp.
Do they have a need to communicate with you?
If so, you can just not install WhatsApp. Smartphones allow them to install multiple communicating apps, so your friends could remember to use signal when talking to you.
Actually, deletion of whatsapp and instagram drastically decreased my friend circle. Now i have more time for myself. I don’t think they have a reason to communicate with me. Anyway, am not installing whatsapp anymore.
I have notifications on when someone joins and maybe 75% of the time after I see the notification their account is “deleted” because they changed the privacy settings.
It’s not the end of the world but I do wish more people wouldn’t automatically pick the maximum privacy setting so that we could actually, yknow use it
Not picking the max privacy setting defeats the point of using it for privacy.
Classic catch 22!
Not really, it’s still encrypted. If you’re not a political dissident and just using Signal to chat with friends then it is helpful to make yourself available to said friends.
i’d say default to maximum and then opt in to less and less privacy
Guilty
I have a handful of friends and family that did actually switch, but I still have a few stubborn friends on Discord that do t see the point. Just waiting for Discord to fuck up badly enough…
I have 1 friend who I talk to exclusively over discord DMs.
The server went down for about 6 hours when we were chatting and he made a signal account.
Then he deleted it after the outage 😭
Discord not even letting me to creare an account. The OTP never get generated. And i believe that’s for good.
Many open-source developers also effectively using discord as a communication medium.
Discord is already a haven for groomers, zoosadists, and more. Not sure what levels of “fucking up” they’d need to do, to get normies to bail.
For as long as they type a message, hit send, and the other person receives, they’ll keep on using it no matter what Users are stubborn to change, they only really do when they can’t do the basic thing
They dont know about any of that stuff and they don’t wander in the public spaces of discord. I think forcing the ID on all users will do the trick. They just haven’t enforced it yet.
they don’t wander in the public spaces of discord
Which is very wise.
I use Discord for work, and I use it only to communicate with specific people about specific things. Absolutely no need to go exploring whatever drek inhabits the rest of the service.
It really, reaally depends what public spaces you look for, personally, i didn’t meet many strange people because i just keep myself away from those kind of spaces, though sometime you meet the wanky sheep but that’s normal like on every other social and here on lemmy too
None of the things you said actually affect normal users. They don’t see them or interact with them. So they literally do not matter at fucking all.
To a normal person if something isn’t functionally punching them in the face actively right that second and causing them real physical pain and suffering.
It might as well not exist. No amounts of explanation, theoretically this or that, bad news or corruption. Makes anyone actually give two shits.
Those of us who actually care about things not actively hurting us in the moment. Are factually the out liers.
So one’s friends become zoosadists - whatever that is - if they’re chatting via discord?
The argument that there’s creeps using a platform is moot if you’re using it to communicate with your friends. Which is what people do. It’s so weird to me, like, the same can be said about Signal etc etc but nooooo, there it’s only the good ones chatting. Get outta here with this shit.
So one’s friends become zoosadists - whatever that is - if they’re chatting via discord?
I honestly have no idea how you deduced that this was what I was saying.
How do I put this, the fact that a platform may be used by unsavory characters in some specific capacity and context does not affect normal people who use it to communicate with friends - which is what chat apps were designed to do. People use discord to talk to their friends while playing games. They use WhatsApp, signal, telegram and so on to text with friends. At least that’s the primary usage. Now if one were to venture out into the wild and start engaging with strange animal fuckers in obscure channels etc, that is something that doesn’t play into the average user experience.
I got all my friends to switch to signal!
I’m still working on that, but progress is happening
I just don’t have any friends
At least i got 3 people to install Signal just for me.
I got family, 2 friends and thats it.
And thats all you need. I also have family, 2 good friends and the rest are acquaintances
I started when it was still called TextSecure, I had precisely 1 contact (just my nerdy friend from uni) for the first 3 years. I then convinced my partner to install it, had 2 contacts for the next few years.
When it became Signal, a few more jumped on. Once I had kids; I bullied my family onto it, by refusing to send photos any other way.
I have 62 contacts now, the bulk of my digital communication is through either Signal, phone, email or Lemmy. There is a little SMS/RCS.
It has been a 15 year journey so far, for me. You will get there.
What if I’m in my 50s and i don’t have half that number of contacts anywhere. Will I still get there.
And if those 30ish contacts find me on signal, where am I supposed to go and hide next.
I’m sure some genius has made a texting protocol that requires installing Linux and can only be utilized by console with sudo access.
You can finally get some peace and quiet.
Except from fucking Phil. That guy is the worst.
I’ve 36 contacts. I started 3 years ago. In a country where people stare at me for solid 3-5 seconds before they utter a word when I tell them I don’t ise whatsapp. Love it.
We’ll get there.
OG here too. I remember when they first supported voice calls. It was a separate app called redphone.
I’m actually surprised by how easily I was able to get my whole family and several friends on there, it’s my main messaging platform now. The only others are sms and steam chat.
Same here, it turned out family and friends wanted to stay in touch! Not a real surprise, but for some reason I kept overthinking and delaying the process… Once I just asked, all was done within like 20 mins. People made their accounts, I made the groups.
All the more motivation to encourage your friends to get on signal. I’ve had a discussion this week with someone, on fedi, who just can’t conceive of getting off Meta products, like WhatSapp, because it has so much usage in Europe. Our work isn’t done; not yet.
That person doesn’t need to leave WhatsApp completely right away. They can just talk to some people on Signal and others on WhatsApp.
It’s very hard to convince people to switch to privacy foucused platforms nowadays.
It’s just hard to convince people to try alternatives at all. Once they’ve dug deep into something they want to use, they won’t budge.
Generally that’s not been my experience. Person to Person it’s been pretty easy for the most part. I can think of one exception from the past decade, one of those “I just can’t start using another app” sorts. YMMV. Persistence furthers.
When I switched to Signal I enforced it hard. Refused to talk to anyone on another platform. If they texted me, I’d responed, but always add “I’d prefer if we discussed this over Signal.”
I had more success than I’d anticipated. About 90% of my family and 80% of my friends moved over.
My best piece of advice for this is to start new group chats - people want to be in the group chats, and if they believe Signal is where it’s all happening, they’ll join.
It was way easier to get converts when it still supported SMS/MMS
I’m on the receiving end of this from a friend and I didn’t even think twice about it. I think we’re all in a place now where being asked to install yet another app is pretty commonplace. Plus phone app stores make it relatively painless to do.
Nothing more private than that.
I saw my mom’s Signal today… Only me 😅
I have friends who refuse to install Signal despite having 10+ friends who I know use it. Big ups to ur mom
My mother in law actually surprised me by asking if the family group chat could switch to signal. I wasnt going to bother her about it because i assumed shed hate it since shes bad with technology. It was a pleasant surprise.
Why do people use signal? It has one centralized server and phone number registration. There are many better alternatives.
Which ones are you thinking of? Out of the options I am aware of, Signal seems to be the most secure, most reliable, and most privacy respecting messaging app in this category.
I use deltachat/arcanechat. It uses the mailchat protocol. There’s also tox, simplex, matrix, xmpp(conversations) these can do e2e, you can self host it or use a public server, everything distributed through app stores can be compromised. Every app were you rely on a central server can be shutdown. You also don’t know how the server software works of for example “signal”, what data they collect. Although messages are encrypted you can still log metadata like when where iplocation, with who?
The problem i guess with thr alternatives is bad service in terms of audio and video chat. The benefit of ms teams for example is their huge cdn. it just works nearly all over the world. Whatsapp/discord is used by so many that it’s difficult to stay in contact otherwise.
I’ve talked to a deltachat dev about this, and the signal protocol is simply technically superior to autocrypt (used by deltachat, etc.). It gives you many more guarantees about things like forward secrecy. There is standardization work to bring these benefits to autocrypt, but it will probably be a while. Signal also has the benefit of having a familiar setup for non-techy people, so it is easier to get people to use in my experience.
Interesting. Ease of use is one thing but requiring a phone number or email to setup an account is in my opinion annoying.
That’s really insightful!
I use Signal, but still wouldn’t mind adding more people to ArcaneChat because frankly, it’s more fun. The “apps” functionality and the fact that it works over email protocol is like, fascinating to me. It feels almost like the good old days of Yahoo Messenger, but encrypted! Yay!
I think it’d still be fine to use for casual use. If OPSEC is ridiculously important, there’s always Signal.
Have to admit, I also kinda hate seeing Signal show up in normiestream news more often lately. 😬
Session, simplex, deltachat
Used to recommend XMPP (lol) but even with whatever encryption the servers still know and control too much. Like who you are chatting with (entire contact book) and when, plus attachments most of the time. And there was also the jabber <dot> ru incident… Don’t feel like pulling up the article rn but basically it got MITMed by one of the ISPs (counting the hosting provider as ISP), with a new valid TLS certificate and all.
Tox supermacy! What looser needs a backlog, pffff.
Signal people have already explained why they refuse federation.
Basically, looking at history of federated messaging protocols (SMS and email), they are permanently frozen in time, and haven’t had security improvements for decades.
Signal team considers this tradeoff unacceptable, as highly targeted individuals rely on Signal to always keep it’s security model up-to-date against the most capable adversaries.
It used to be an SMS client too, to help get people on board. Now they expect you to either memorize which people use which protocols, or just use SMS.
It’s not that difficult to remember which people use which messaging apps. I use Signal, Line, Whatsapp, Matrix, Telegram, heck even Instagram DMs with different people. I try to push people to Signal whenever I can though.
Yes it absolutely is! I just use Signal and SMS, and the Signal users seem to be dwindling.
Stop using SMS.
“I shall never again get my car serviced here, for you refuse to upgrade messaging protocols!”
I always found SMS hard to use as it is annoyingly difficult to send and receive SMS messages with a computer. Basically every other messenger works on both phones and computers. (I really dislike using a phone when I’m sitting at a computer; a device with a keyboard, larger screen(s), and the ability to easily use multiple programs at once.)
Don’t use SMS. As it is unencrypted, the ISP have complete access over it.
“And that’s why I won’t be getting dental work here anymore!”
There’s a CLI which is nice. I use it to communicate with my self-hosted personal assistant, while I’m on the go.
Official CLI or a third party client?
third party https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli
Cool!
I’ve been using Telegram for such notifications just because is actually seems to support them. This seems like it will do what I need!
By “self-hosted personal assistant” you mean LLM?
No.
You mean a secretary who lives at your house?
The hay day of PDAs must have been really confusing for you.
I’m not sure what public displays of affection have to do with anything.
I am sure they talk about this, or smth similiar https://www.home-assistant.io/
I was not alive for this
