Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
So many choices, so much discussion. Looking for the "Wisdom of the Crowd" from the HN community. Other options in the comments would be welcome
Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company.
What use is switching to some messenger that no one you know uses?
Obviously you can always fall back on SMS and e-mail, probably, but that is a path to social isolation in many cases.
So, it’s not exactly the same as having two ISPs to pick from but to pretend that your choice is completely free and unconstrained is also a dangerous lie to tell yourself and others.
To solve this … well, I don’t know. Probably regulation? Benevolent tech giants that for some reason decide to push open, federated messengers?
It was also pretty easy to get my family using Signal because it uses your existing address book. The need to send a Jami address is a huge hurdle for the non-technical.
We have to switch to decentralized open source solutions. I have tested Jami and the video conferencing functionality works great on Android.
It may take a long time and huge effort to switch, but people are starting to do it.
And a reasonable answer is "your assumption is wrong, I don't plan to switch at all". I have no doubt that some people will switch, what I'd like to know if that movement is niche or mainstream.
But then I'm off the opinion petitions should collect both for-and-against responses; government petitions should be required to do so.
I'm sorry, but that is a different question, and you're welcome to ask it. This type of thing is a bloody epidemic on the internet, where people will ask a question; "Do I use Atom or VS Code?" and millions of idiots will pile on saying "Just use Emacs". Aaargh! Just stick to the confines of the question! Too many discussions have gotten derailed on stack exchange, reddit, microsoft answers...nowhere is safe.
These kinds of sermonising replies would still be OK if the author first spent some time answering the question on its own merit and then talked about alternatives. Otherwise, it's preachy and irritating.
If you're not interested in switching, then this thread is not for you. A Hacker News poll is not scientific research.
... is it ? I only got whatsapp last year and most of the people I know from real life aren't on it. In a big french city with a 50 thousand-students university.
Back in the day, all the people in the US I knew used AOL Instant Messenger, but if I wanted to talk to anyone in the UK I had to use MSN Messenger. A more modern example: If you have family in China, you have to use WeChat.
This sucks, by the way. No doubt about that. But I doubt that individuals can do anything in that regard.
Probably regulation. Or a benevolent tech company that decides to push some sort of open messenger protocol (with good enough properties) that anyone can join and where anyone can make clients for. You know, kinda like e-mail.
Excluding company ownership, what is the crucial difference between all IM listed?
There's LITTLE DIFFERENCE, they all serve the same purpose, feature parity is pretty much there.
When you add company ownership to the mix, WhatsApp is owned by fucking Facebook. Let that sear in your mind.
Last year I even had to register on FB to not be out of the loop concerning a sport club I got in.
You might have good arguments for your white-hot searing hatred of this company, but I will confess, it makes your position look much worse when you represent it with hotly charged emotional statements instead of reasoning.
For example: I find it trivial to understand why someone would call a Facebook service "Critical Infrastructure", thinking about how we don't control how families and communities choose to meet up.
Your childs little league sport uses facebook, your aunt and uncles have organized the family into a whatsapp channel, your President incites riots on Twitter... we don't get to choose which networks are the critical ones, and sometimes, we make the binary choice of "Be apart of society" or "Don't".
Just my 2c, it doesn't seem that hard to understand why he would call these things critical, when you actually take a few moments to think it through honestly.
The crucial difference is that in my life everyone is on WhatsApp, and no one is on any of the other IMs. That is the difference.
And I don't use the word everyone here lightly, I mean it (99,9%) literally. My family, my parents, my friends, my colleagues, my 91 year old grandmother, my potential clients, my actual clients, the support line for the webshop I order from, the support line for my supermarket, etc... Everyone.
I can't speak for other countries, but in the Netherlands WhatsApp is undeniably a part of your social infrastructure.
It doesn't matter if any of those other IMs have feature parity, better security or stricter privacy. There's just no one to message.
There is no way to socially untangle yourself from Whatsapp in the Netherlands, unless one wishes to live as the modern version of a hermit.
It is in Brazil too, without a shadow of a doubt.
I can give you some scenarios:
- Practically every school (elementary school) in Germany uses WhatsApp for communication among Parents and Teachers. If you don't have WhatsApp, you have go to the school and read the official announcements in the wall. Lot of important information there, for example Teacher short-notice absence, protocol from meetings, etc.
- The favorite communication channel of my university is via Whatsapp. There are lot of tools to consolidate and do the customer relationship via WhatsApp.
- Back in the normal days, every single airbnb host that i contacted, were using WhatsApp
So to make it clearer, the main difference between all IM listed are:
- the user base itself (two billion users for WhatsApp[1])
- The number of 3rd part tools offering integration with that tools (zendesk, salesforce, etc).
References:
[1]: https://www.messengerpeople.com/global-messenger-usage-stati...
I wouldn't say this is on purpose but they are unaware of how WhatsApp is used everywhere else.
Is the phone company allowed to share your contacts?
I guess what I'm saying is that the network effect is just too damn strong (for me at least).
How do you know? Have you asked them?
Many of my family and close friends did install a new messaging app when I asked them. How do you think WhatsApp became so popular in the first place?
Take a look at https://communick.com. You can sign up for a 14-day trial and get to invite 10 people to your plan.
WhatsApp is free on carriers in many countries (including large portions of Asia and South America), contrasting with other messaging platforms which use a standard data plan. It delivers messages reliably, group messages just work, and it works properly for mixed content messages. And data is (relatively) cheap in most countries where WhatsApp isn't free.
People can contact me on signal but I mostly use WhatsApp for group chats and I'm not so important that everyone will install a newaapp just to include me in a group chat.
Even my 14 year old got all her friends on Signal (without my direct influence) because they are very aware of instagram/FB addiction and want to stay away from it.
That still leaves 12 more to switch but it could happen.
What's more, several cell phone operators' plans include unlimited WhatsApp, but only a few GB of other data... meaning when your data limits are reached you can still use WhatsApp for the rest of the month, but not i.e. Signal or Telegram. That makes is rather hard to convince people to switch.
So yeah, pretty damn close to critical infrastructure. I'm still going to delete my account and see what happens, but unlike the siblings here I can't disagree with parent, at least for Brazil.
[Edit] When I delete my account I'm going to lose old conversations, but that doesn't bother me anymore because I already recently lost them once when I switched from Android to iOS... WhatsApp has no way of keeping your history in that case. And otherwise there's really no friction to deleting an account, since you can always recreate it.
It's too late to go back. People are already used to the trade-offs, convenience rules above all. People may be "sort of concerned" about privacy, but they shrug it off. If privacy was high-value, any privacy-conscious competitor would've taken the market by storm.
Besides, who says "the nerds" are trustworthy anyway? They keep arguing among each other about which operating system or programming language is best, and why should we take their advice when software security vulnerabilities keep being discovered?
Not disagreeing with your point - it's become too easy to just randomly click "agree" on any TOS and trade away your privacy/security for convenience - but don't make it an "us vs them" type of thing. To me, this is purely corporate interest being prioritized ahead of public needs because most politicians either have no spine or answer to lobbyists more than the common person.
Um, the original WhatsApp company was pretty much run by nerds, I thought, who made a product with UX so good they organically built a user base so large that FaceBook paid $16 billion for the company?
The only thing that surprises me is how long this change took. I expected them to do this when they removed the subscription.
Network effects amplify the marginal impact on the individual, because they lead to a monopoly with no true competition. Sure, you can leave whatsapp for signal, but you can’t talk to that community group on WhatsApp from signal. From an individual’s point of view the market power is an absolute monopoly.
The only solution to these problems is organising to the level of a mass boycott, or regulatory intervention. The former is impossible because too many people don’t care about the company’s behaviour (not because they’re ignorant, they just don’t care) and the latter is slow and a very hard and unfun pursuit for campaigners.
Nothing we say to non nerds will be of sufficient magnitude on an individual level. It’d have to be collective action.
Personally I’m far more worried about Facebook undermining democracy right now. That’s sufficient reason to shut them down.
There's nothing in their way to expect such a thing, except the lobbyists.
Sounds like a recipe for disaster and the perfect way to stifle innovation
Forcing a specific standard is problematic, but it would be reasonable to ask any communication service to provide a fully documented and public API with features and access equal to the features and access of the official application.
Random nerds make integrations to whatever application/protocol is in vogue, business still gets to have complete freedom in where their take their API and thus their product.
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I would even go as far as to say that every web-service should be machine-consumable in that fashion, but that's beyond the point.
If users don't want that, they should be free not to have that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsbury_Commitment?wprov=sft...
"the promise of mail delivery [helped] grow the nation and economy instead of serving only existing communities."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Service_Act?wprov=sfti1
Also, private mail exists and it's definitely useful.
Digital messages are usually built on top of the internet (which would have similar problems) and every service can be used across the entire network.
If the choice is between being tracked, which results in many things being free (as in beer) with otherwise almost no practical visible consequences for most people (different ads?), or having to pay for each and every service but no tracking, I think you would face a huge backlash if you forced the latter.
A solution could be to have free access if you accept tracking and pay otherwise, but I believe this is illegal under GDPR.
However, I think that public services (paid for by taxes) should be open and accessible. That is, the government should mandate certain properties ("it should be open") and not certain implementations ("it should use this specific protocol / app").
Another commenter gave the example of Brazil schools sending parents important information via WhatsApp.
Now I'm not against the schools doing that if it's one of multiple options and if the parents have an actual choice. I think the government should mandate that at least one open choice be made available, without necessarily detailing said choice.
In my view this wouldn't stifle innovation. If you come up with some new communication app that's better than anything else, if it's open and many people pick it up, there's no reason for the schools not to use it instead of the older / inferior option. This would also allow schools to choose one among several open solutions according to their particular needs.
It took Congress to mandate open standards and to spell out that healthcare institutions must offer a public APIs to patients. We are only now starting to be able to download health records from hospitals as a result of this despite it being technically possible for decades. In fact there are still many patients that are required to request stacks of DVDs containing their health records, and this is their only option.
Obviously this is more a commentary on how shitty healthcare in the US can be, but also a good example IMO of how sometimes government intervention in technical standards requirements can greatly benefit consumers.
Why would you want a small, self-interested, unaccountable group of private investors to mandate how technology works?
Sounds like a recipe for disaster and the perfect way to stifle innovation
Depending on the particulars of your government, perhaps it looks more appealing now.
Imagine if Hollywood or TV studios had any saying over Digital TV standards. Streaming would never exist and we would be used to a "pay-per-view" model forever, with mandatory and built-in DRM.
This is not about enforcing how technology works. It just ensuring that no monopoly can occur. Common standards don't stifle innovation, closed ones do.
If your analogy was something about governmental bodies was worse than private entities when pushing for a standard network standard, then you would have a point. But unless I am deeply wrong, TCP/IP, GSM, LTE, DVB, even FM radio and PAL were standards that only became dominant after governmental bodies sanctioned as standards and no one misses AppleTalk or Novell's IDP because of "government meddling".
Even still, the argument is not for killing private protocols or stopping private companies to innovate and develop new technologies. It's "just" that these innovations should be made on top of open standards instead of displacing them. Don't forget that Google Talk and even Facebook's messenger started on top of XMPP. They closed purely for business reasons, not technical ones. Had the FCC told them "do whatever you want with your network and your client, but anyone speaking XMPP should be able to communicate with your users", we wouldn't be in this mess.
WhatsApp is already DOA in my circle of friends, it might come back but the odds aren’t great.
Getting out of the EU would be a massive blow to any established social media company that depends on network effects. It doesn't matter as much for smaller companies that are still growing (eg. early Facebook still managed to grow by only offering services to college students).
The only, weak, solution would be to force the EU ISPs, on an European level, to block FB. Blocking on itself will not be easy (technically speaking) and good luck to have a consensus on that among our countries.
I completely fail to understand why many US companies, operating on US grounds care about GDPR at all. I would not and, please, sue me. Even the ones that block access from EU are overreacting.
Convenience > Privacy, which is an interesting conundrum.
This makes privacy a feature more than a USP (unique selling proposition). I predict that some "privacy" focused products and search engines will need to pivot to something more than just "we don't steal your data."
It's never too late. Spread the message and show people alternatives. I do.
Eventually abandoning WhatsApp will slowly get easier as alternatives propagate, and using two messengers really isn’t a problem now.
In the late 80s and 90s, we had influential technologists that sold what became the Panopticon as a liberating force that would unleash creativity and usher in a new era of freedom. Most now work for one of the FANGs. The rest made a face saving effort via EFF.
> If privacy was high-value, any privacy-conscious competitor would've taken the market by storm.
Which VCs would fund them? VCs, even our gracious hosts YCombinator, are gate keepers of who & what gets funding.
Has YCombinator, with genuine educated and well informed geeks at the helm, ever supported a decentralized proposal?
Consumers can only choose from what is on the menu.
And "privacy conscious" competitors were not on the menu. Or maybe I did miss these. This is possible, so can you point out which VC funded "privacy conscious" startups failed against competing venture funded centralized systems?
To this day, non-geeks are not aware that it is possible for them to have their social apps while insuring their privacy.
The founders of WhatsApp has failed us by selling for FU money. I was happy paying them a fee in the beginning.
Then authorities have failed us by aproving the merger.
In my circles WhatsApp usage was pervasive and I was one of those who really pushed for it.
Soon after it became obvious that Facebook was still Facebook even with WhatsApp on board we started pushing for Telegram (remember this was probably before Signal existed in its current form and long before Matrix became mainstream.)
It took two years or so calendar time, a few hours work I think - mostly advocacy - and included moving people from early teenage to late eighties, but was mostly painless and definitely worth it because of usability alone, even if the most important point was to keep our social graps out of the hands of future Cambridge Analyticas and whoever else Facebook wants to sell it to. (And I've hopefully learned not to underestimate grannies..!)
Today I'd probably pushed for Matrix, but as mentioned above that was not an option then.
Signal is also really nice despite one or a few big security problems (remotely exploit in the desktop client being the big one for me). Also it is US centric with all the problems that comes with it, it prioritizes security above everything and UX actually suffers from it and it isn¨t open, so as far as I can see we are locked in should they turn bad.
You can keep the unencrypted DB files.
There are several third-party tools that allow to convert the history from Android to iOS. I recently switched and was able to keep all of my history.
isn't this illegal? Portugal had such a problem, but i don't think anything happened since this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15905843
Everybody uses Whatsapp. It is now so entrenched into society that it turned to be part of its popular culture. When people say "I'm part of a group of old car enthusiasts", they meant they are part of a Whatsapp group in which they discuss old cars.
Countless online services and apps were replaced by Whatsapp over the years, from the top of my head: all IMs, customer service apps, e-commerce (specially for SMBs), email and collaboration in general. I can't remember the last time I received a proposal or contract to be signed outside Whatsapp. My attorney asks me to send him all sorts of documentation, copies of IDs and legal evidence via Whatsapp because email is not as easy to use as the IM.
Well, it's lunch time. I got to order my Burguer King meal via their Whatsapp order taking bot. How convenient.
https://www.ordering.co/whatsapp-ordering
EDIT: They do have an example that you can try out, around the middle of the page
At least for bills and govt services I wonder, who approves something like that?
Where we are (EU) schools have been told not to touch WhatsApp, so official school-parent communication goes via other channels.
However parents still end up creating WhatsApp groups for each class to exchange messages and chase lost bits of homework and so on.
Feels like it's almost like like a virus ... <sigh>
Yes, that one is another good example.
My kids' school has 3 different learning management systems (not integrated, BTW) to which students need to submit their homework/assignments. Well, at least in theory.
In practice, parents take photos of homework and send them to teachers via Whatsapp completely ignoring a formal system maintained for that purpose. Poor teachers have to save the time to upload files from their phones/computers to the system later and keep things organized from school's internal perspective.
I thought about proposing to school's IT that they changed the process, allowing parents to email files to a certain inbox, which an app would collect the files later and push them into the system automatically. I ended up not going ahead with the proposal because I already knew their reaction to me: "Whatsapp makes the process simpler".
this is the best description I've read so far.
Honestly in that rare instance sheds you need to chat with an Intercom website, would much rather do it in WhatsAppWeb or via cell
From the business side.
Big companies use bots and ticketing systems based on the WhatsApp API.
Smaller stores can handle with WhatsApp for phone or Web.
For them, their phone is their first computer and they never really used e-mail.
Some of them can't recall their e-mail addresses or less their e-mail passwords.
This happens even if Android is the most popular phone and requires a GMail account to be properly set up.
They just create a new GMail account when they get a new phone or somtimes just keep using the GMail account from the previous owner instead.
Some places might also try to use a more clever bot where you write down what you want and the bot gives a canned response if it thinks it understands what you meant (often just looking at keywords). These can be frustrating to use, just like those voice call bots that use voice recognition.
Reason is that it is also an interface for SMS, and SMS in Brazil is obscenely crazy expensive, some operators might charge 1 BRL per message or stuff like that (for context: 1 BRL is the price of a cup of coffee or of a bottle of water), using iMessage and having it to switch to SMS without you noticing can rack bills that are easily bigger than your wages.
Of course not everyone knows that and it isn’t the default so I can see how this is a deterrent in practice.
I have used drfone software on computer (mac) to transfer whatsapp data from android to iphone. It is a solid software with clear instructions.
This is a huge issue which I've had to come to grips with as well. I use both Telegram and WhatsApp (among other things) and I can't believe WhatsApp and Messenger, despite being supported by a FAANG such as FB, fall short on features - including the one you mentioned - whereas Telegram, a much smaller firm has been able to constantly provide useful features at a reasonable rate (not so fast and not so slow, so that users have time to adapt to changes).
Right now I cannot use Telegram that much because my network is all on WhatsApp and Messenger, but I do miss the good features such as being able to transfer all chats to other devices and use a desktop client without having to authorize it every single time (WhatsApp sucks at this...), literally send/receive any file format and being able to send messages to yourself - which acted as a private __cloud__. I think the fact that Telegram is moving towards ads could actually be a good signal that their main revenue is going to depend on ads, and not so much on selling users' data, but we shall see.
Messenger has that feature too. Actually for both Messenger and Telegram it's much easier to provide it, because they don't encrypt the message, they just store them unencrypted. So they don't have anything special to do to give access to them from any device.
I've deleted my account twice and each time I exported all my data to HTML (without uploading to Google). It's possible.
Being a parent, WhatsApp is the norm. And it's pretty impossible to change the entire society. so sadly for anything about my kids I use WhatsApp.
Is it common for people to reach their limits? I understand it may happen by accident when you turn off wifi then forget to re-enable, but normally one takes care of their data quota or their plans and usage is such that they never or rarely use it completely, right?
I imagine one also has the option in both prepaid and postpaid plans to get more data for the rest of the month if it ever happens that they need more. It'd just be more expensive since it's out of package.
At least now I have unlimited data via a prepaid plan so I can freely tether when cable internet goes down weekly.
It's also the cheapest. Because its free with WiFi, and cost less than US$1.00 per day with a data plan. Compare that to phone calls that cost about US$ 0.15 per minute or SMS that cost US$ 0.06. It may not seem much, but when you factor the local minimum wage in urban areas: $1.87/hour or US$ 0.03/minute the difference becomes significant.
Perhaps the closest alternative here would be Telegram. It has niche users like government, NGOs, political organizations and group chats for people with similar interests (like Facebook groups are used in some countries).
I guess, WhatsApp has become like our tropicalized version of WeChat.
Its used to chat with friends, family, group chats (leaving a group chat unannounced is a big faux pas). Almost every class gets a WhatsApp group for coordinating coursework.
Most stores and restaurants, big and small, accept orders via Whatsapp and that way one can avoid the third party app delivery fees. It is also used to send bank transfer confirmations, and gps location pins to coordinate deliveries because our addressing system is not that good.
I even did most my last loan application via WhatsApp. And also discovered last year that the only way to contact one bank about an ACH transfer was via WhatsApp or by visiting a branch.
So basically, it's the most used and most affordable main way to reliably reach anyone or any company. From the largest bank, to the smallest mom and pop store. From my company's founder to the newest intern.
The only thing I still get by plain SMS is multi factor authentication tokens or the ocassional spam message.
Pretty much correct in some countries.
My family (not in Brazil, but also not in the same country as me) all have Whatsapp. So I have it to keep in contact with them. They have it because everyone there has it. It's circular, it's the "network effect" but it's true. I can't entirely switch unless they switch too, and they can't switch unless their friends and co-workers switch. etc.
Personally I'm probably a bit odd here in that I don't mind facebook having my info. So they may show me a personalised ad - big deal.
WhatsApp is "critical" now only now due to its network effects, but you can transition away to something else.
Right now I have maybe a dozen friends and family members on my matrix server. I helped them set up the app, configured their communick accounts, made a few video calls to ensure it was working, etc. Current step is to help my wife to do the same with her friends. Slowly but steadily, we are moving our communication network away from WhatsApp and into Matrix.
Each one that we move makes WhatsApp less "critical" and makes us more free from monopolistic assholes. We don't need the Government to control any of that, in fact I believe that waiting for the government to do anything is not going to achieve anything.
Seriously, though. See my other responses. Switching does not need to be an atomic operation, also learn about Matrix bridges.
> Where is the "Don't switch" option? Because as much as I hate that Facebook bought them, they're part of what I would call "critical social infrastructure."
No such thing as "critical social infrastructure." Could you live without whatsapp? Yes. Then by definition it is not critical.
> Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company.
Not at all. Some areas in the US don't have choice of what ISP they can use, but you have many good choices for messaging apps.
I am growing tiresome of people complaining (on HN, of all places) about how evil facebook and google are but will not go as far as cancelling facebook or using duckduckgo for search, or protonmail for email.
Folks, if you are not happy, you have choices and they are free and very convenient. The services you complain about using for free are not the problem, you're just lazy.
EDIT - you folks in the replies are basically proving my point. Instead of taking ownership over the freedom of choice that you have, you would rather make excuses to justify lack of initiative. That's not a healthy or happy frame of mind to box yourself in, and it gives too much of your emotional influence to the platforms. Like you folks are seriously comparing a messaging app to ISPs and heating in london...really? Give me a break, snowflake.
Can I live without heating in London? Yes I wouldn't die without it. But without heating it's extremely uncomfortable. I'd say it is critical for me because "dying/not dying" is not the criteria for deciding.
Your ISP analogy is again flawed while the OPs' is reasonably relevant. A social communication app has a critical part to being relevant to use - the social part. It's a chicken and egg problem because if people don't use Signal or Telegram or wall, the app serves no useful purpose. The mere existence of a choice does not mean that all choices are equally useful or even relevant.
This argument of "you're lazy" is (ironically) incredibly lazy and often results in software that is unreasonably hard to use - again, an analogy that i hope folks here would understand. Whatsapp works, is simple to use and has sufficient users to be critical infrastructure. Using "laziness" is a cop out. If something isn't broken, don't fix it.
But that is all the more reason to get rid of it. Of course this makes life complicated. But if we don't make these hard choices and 'sacrifices', it will never stop. They will keep eroding away at our privacy and freedom. It will only become harder the longer we wait.
This kind of things will keep happening though as long as we allow monopolies and closed platforms. We should really be more careful with accepting these companies into our lives.
EDIT: got some answers re SMS. Fine, though that doesn't explain why there is so much overlap/redundancy with social media applications. At a glance, it appears I could do the very same things (groups, multimedia) messaging people on facebook without having to install an app, and if people are on whatsapp they're almost 100% on facebook.
Apparently the "critical" nature of this is the facility of sending high rates of pictures and videos to others. I suspect mere FOMO owing to group-chat being localized there is enough to keep some people from cutting the cord, not the ability to communicate to multiple people in itself. People really are addicted to each other.
This Privacy policy change whill allow Facebook, who bought WhatsApp, to extract all these data for their own purpose, before it was not the case.
whatsapp also had the advantage of being simple to use requiring only your phone number and it worked on pretty much any phone you had from symbian feature phones to the latest iphone helping it to gain widespread traction among people.
It means I can freely share my WhatsApp number with my bank, my boss, the delivery person, the plumber, the clerk from the nearby cafeteria, clients, the driver of the tow truck, or my teachers, anyone.
But there is no way I'll share my Facebook or Intagram name/id with themn. That's more private and usually only done for friends or acquaintances.
You can get a contract with a different ISP.
That's what this is about: not doing without messaging completely, but switching to a different messaging service.
My family switched to Signal, and we're quite happy there. I still have Whatsapp because the schools of my children use it.
Really? That seems a depressingly low bar for what you consider "critical". If WhatsApp would disappear tomorrow, I think my social infrastructure would not suffer at all. I still have a smartphone with hundreds of other apps, including iMessage, SMS, and so on..
Besides that, I only consider real human interaction as critical.
> Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company.
Sounds kind of depressing again. Not sure where you live, but most countries in the world have more than one ISP. I have switched ISP often in my lifetime. Never was it an issue, nor a massive burden and it has not caused me to go offline at all.
Leaving WhatsApp is nothing at all like cutting off your internet connection.
It is just one out of literally dozens of available text messaging apps, and it is owned by one of the least ethical companies that exists today.
It baffles me people are still saying this.
You can only message people that are using the SAME messaging app as you. I can't just up and switch apps and expect my 30+ friends and relatives and housemates and coworkers to switch with me!
No, Matrix supports bridging with about two dozen protocols,¹ many of which support multiple clients (at least 7: IRC, RSS, Email, SMS, Mastodon, libpurple —actually a library supporting multiple protocols including IRC and XMPP— and Twitter) — some of which have dozens if not hundreds of clients.
¹IRC, Slack, RSS, Gitter, Discord, RocketChat, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, Email, SMS, Mastodon, libpurple, GroupMe, Skype, WeChat, Tox, Mumble, Twitter, Mattermost, Keybase (Edit: this one was discontinued), Google Hangouts, Telegram, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Signal — https://matrix.org/bridges/
What XMPP address format can I use to talk to a Matrix user ID? ... and vice versa...
You can't switch unless you can convince literally everyone you know (I'm in UK) to switch.
At least for the UK, this is not at all the case. It’s perfectly feasible to socialise and do business without going anywhere near WhatsApp.
I have to strongly disagree based on personal evidence that ‘you cannot function socially in society without WhatsApp’.
People's requirements and experiences differ greatly. WhatsApp may be essential to you, but it's not essential to everyone.
If this is a poll about what I intend to do? Nothing, facebook has me by the balls and will for years to come.
Maybe certain small groups or individuals will be willing to switch with me, but it's not like I'm uninstalling WhatsApp any time soon.
I'll just link my comment from the other article about the Whatsapp changes:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25672109
Plus I'm sure they've linked all the data they can in their backend already. It's hard to believe the notice we all got this morning was really going to realistically change very much of anything.
Then I could communicate with people who are on another platform using that platform but keep using WhatsApp for people who haven't moved over. Hopefully over time there would be a complete migration.
If we do nothing then the problem only gets worse.
I considered just accepting it and moving on, but I've thought again and I'm trying to get as many contacts onto Signal as I can.
At least there will be another option and as much as I love matrix I think Signal is the best balance between user friendliness and privacy.
I made the mistake before of giving multiple options which just scares non-tech people off, so now I'm just pushing Signal.
I typically send normal SMS messages.
The impression that I get is that WhatsApp is not "a thing" in the US?
Not "going offline" since people are obviously looking for an alternative. More like switching your ISP because you don't like the company.
If I choose to stop using my ISP, I have no need to "go offline". I can simply switch ISPs and I still get the exact same internet. This is why we must not fall for this "critical social infrastructure" trap. No one company deserves our business. We can and should go elsewhere.
Messaging should be like the internet. If I don't like my messaging provider, I should be able to switch and still message everybody. Ideally, I would be able to bring my identifier with me. Luckily, SMS already provides this. I therefore recommend old-fashioned SMS/MMS for messaging. If you want something more "modern", I would recommend Matrix, as it is the only "modern" messaging system that wants to allow people to switch providers while still messaging the same people.
But does it really do so in practice? If I'm using Element/Matrix and a colleague is using WhatsApp, or Signal, or Telegram, or Briar. Can they reliably send me messages? Can I reliably send them messages?
I've been told it's possible, but more than one person I know has tried and failed. Is it common? Reliable? Possible?
Or theoretical, and unachievable in practice?
Have you done it?
Matrix is not the provider. Matrix is the protocol/idea. Element is both an app and a service.
What is common, reliable, and achievable in practice: I decide I no longer like New Vector (who run the matrix.org home server). I switch to Purism's matrix server. I no longer am doing business with New Vector, yet I can still chat with everybody that is using New Vector's matrix service.
I know that Matrix isn't the provider, that's why I mentioned Element/Matrix. I know that you can communicate between services that are all running on top of Matrix. That's why I specifically asked about other services. As I say, your comment seemed to imply it was possible, but most of the information I have suggests it isn't.
After re-reading my comment, I can see how one would think that. I apologize for the confusion. I was actually trying to draw a distinction be between messaging systems that are provider agnostic and those that aren't. SMS and Matrix both allow multiple competing providers to interoperate. WhatsApp does not. That is why, I believe that we must not consider Whatsapp "critical infrastructure". No one company should be "critical".
I've heard that they are sufficiently unreliable as to be unusable, that was was some time ago, and things may have changed.
To be clear, I send messages from my Matrix client to my Matrix server, software running on that server bridges it to WhatsApp/Signal as appropriate, same for incoming messages. Photos work as well.
I think WhatsApp relies on a data connection to your phone, and the bridge will disconnect whenever that drops. Having set this all up, I'm a pretty big convert to Matrix - just need to get the world on board. I'd love to have an SMS bridge as well, see how far I can go.
That would be great since I have no idea at all.
It's been ~6 weeks since I set it up and it's been working since the first time without any modifications, so I honestly forget some of what I did. The general flow is: configure the bridges (config.yaml), integrate them with Synapse (registration.yaml), add your Matrix user, then configure the bridge users.
I don't think you realize it's basically a privilege to be able to change your ISP. I have two options and have switched last month - it took three months of figuring out who should fix broken fiber (look at me, I have FTTH, another privilege).
so if you say you can 'simply switch' your ISP, you're in a lucky place.
When I switch from WhatsApp to GroupMe, I have an entirely different set of conversations. They are totally separate systems.
Also, if you were willing to switch to a satellite or LTE carrier, would you be able to switch? If you did switch, you still have "the internet".
This process was turbocharged by COVID19
Most unemoloyed people with no steady income turned to last-mile delivery of all kinds of random goods and services... All done via whatsapp
Its frictionless. Like a website chatbot. Except its free and you can do it on the move.
I dont think it will take off here becuase businesses here have built web infrastructure for e-commerce.
Whatsapp is to ecommerce what smartphones where to connectivity.
3rd world countries skipped fixed wires and laptops and went straight to smartphones over air
This is the same process.
I remember when my dad told me his cousin from Venezuela suggested an app to him that allowed him to make free calls to anyone who also has it. I told him that was probably not right and he might have downloaded malware on his Android... Turns out he was right and the app took Brazil by storm
On top of that, media, voice clips and cross-platform compatibility.
SMS was unreliable, at least back when it was used. It was common for someone to receive it hours later or at least many minutes later, when it was too late. Informing someone you just got the message they told you about in-person a while back was a common occurrence. You also don't know when a person received your message, so you would opt to call them anyways if they take too long to reply with something even if they were just busy. Basically, the 2 checkmarks on each message is the killer feature.
Spam is also a problem with SMS.
Email is something that never really took off in mobile devices. I suppose everyone saw it as the same thing as SMS, with the same issues. Perhaps worse, since an email client needed to poll the server for new messages. SMS is something people did since before smartphones. Dumbphones didn't commonly have real support for email. Also, email on a mobile device meant you had to setup the mail client, and you didn't have to setup anything with SMS, just give people your number.
Whatsapp: free (besides internet usage - but some providers offered unlimited/extended whatsapp data), audio messages, send photos/videos/audios (not from audio message)/documents, can do video and audio calls from the same screen, without moving away from the app
There's just no competitor with same parity of features (with the same quality) and easiness to use.
Telegram has calls, but they just don't work for me: either my parents can't hear me properly, or there's a HUGE delay in the audio call, I keep hearing the reconnection beeps...
I'm just off an audio call to my parents on Telegram, had to drop off and use whatsapp because it was unusable
Messaging apps, for 99% of the people, are only supposed to deliver text and media from A to B. It's not hard in 2021 to develop such an app, even with E2E encryption and 2FA, even for a CS graduate. I'm appalled by the scarcity of real alternatives to WhatsApp, considering that a messaging app is a piece of software with low technological barriers.
The solution seems quite clear to me. Force messaging apps to expose a public API, so that messages can easily be delivered regardless of the client used on both ends - XMPP used to provide exactly that, but both Google and Facebook decided to use it as a starting point and then gradually deviate from it with their own closed implementations.
If one platform decides to bully its users with "let me read your messages so I can send you better ads or leave the platform", users would simply leave that platform without losing their contacts.
Adding another app — my vote goes to Signal - and making a lot of noise on WhatsApp is one option. If I recall correctly, WhatsApp has statuses. Changing yours to “Keeping WhatsApp for business transactions only — find me on Signal for private chat” is one idea. The people on this board have the power to move their friends away from terrible software. Use it.
Speaking from experience, I have a hard time remembering which specific platform is preferred by specific contacts. It's a minor annoyance, but it's always present.
How many messenger apps do you run, and how many is too many?
For me, the limit is 2. Note that currently I am forced to keep 5 different apps to keep in touch with my contacts.
Hopefully the reason this is at the top is not this sentence.
This hallucinatory idea is exactly what Facebook PR, a.k.a. "damage control", wants people to believe.
You have no contract with Facebook. You pay them nothing. There is no legal recourse whatsoever. You cannot enforce "your end of the bargain" because Facebook undertakes no obligations to you.
Say what you want about the quality of your internet or cellular provider's service, etc., or how much you hate a company, but the fact is they have to fulfill their contractual obligations and provide service, they cannot just do whatever they want, whenever they want, as Facebook can.
If the internet/cellular provider does not deliver, then there is no Facebook. Whereas Facebook could disappear if their advertisers stop paying and the internet would still be here, because people would still be paying for internet access, and internet users would still use the internet to do all the same things they do now, and more.
Practically speaking, you may treat a tech company like a common carrier, like a telephone/internet/cellular provider. After all to the user it may seem no different. It is accessed through a "phone" and it seems to work like the service they pay for through an ISP or cellular provider.
But the minute you say this is like a "contract" you are submitting to pure delusion. You have no contract with Facebook as a user and you pay nothing. You're a product not a customer. Facebook has essentially zero exposure to liability from user complaints and that is why you are reading so many complaints about them, e.g., on HN. The best a user can do is rant into the aether and pound sand. There is no contract to enforce!
Then there is the absurdity of pretending that access to one company's computers is equivalent to access to the entire internet. This is like saying cancelling your subscription to AOL is like cancelling your account with your ISP. Today, no one is naive enough to equate AOL with the internet, as people once did. But Facebook believes people are naive enough to equate "Facebook" with "the internet". No doubt the AOL phenomena is a running joke at Facebook. The more things "change" the more they stay the same.
Do whatever you want, but let's refrain from propagating illusions that tech companies want people to believe.
See Also: Weechat in china, LINE in Japan.
Living in the US I considering myself lucky that I'm not locked into a singular platform for communcation, payments, services, etc like many others.
The OP is literally a poll of other services. In any case, it would be to cancel with your ISP to go to another ISP.
The privacy, security, and governance story is not great though. If you care about such things, I think Signal wins hands down. And the UX is fine, just not quite as good as Telegram in my view.
(A third option not in your poll that might be worth evaluating is Wickr. I haven't used it personally, but I've seen it come up in these sorts of discussions.)
First time I'm meeting my virtual Doppelganger, best part is, it's on HN !
For example:
- With my mom and grandmom: WhatsApp
- Group of friends from jiu-jitsu: WhatsApp
- Work Colleagues and friends working with Network Security: Signal
- Notifications from services that I run like weather station, waves forecast, how full my gym is right now, some other batch services that I have: Telegram
There is no reason to be radical here. We have options, and that's great!
Imagine you build it with a team of 5 software devs for each of linux, mac, windows, android, ios, web. You build it in Europe paying a generous salary of $80k. You need 1 server per million users (as whatsapp did pre-acquisition), hosted on say AWS. If you get 10% of the world to use it, the total running costs are 1.2 cents per user per year.
That can totally be paid for by sending each user 1 sponsored chat message per decade. That's a pretty acceptable level of advertising I'd say.
It's incompatible with VC's demanding hockey-stick revenue growth though...
Optimistic and dangerous. You will need at least a visionary person like Moxy willing to dedicate his/her life to the project. You need a master mind to get all the security architecture right. BTW You will need an operation team and multiple servers to make sure that everything runs stable. Just look the costs for running COVID-19 apps. Development and operation. Million of Euros. You can expect similar costs to run a service able to compete with WhatsApp.
People are right, it doesn't solve the issue with Whatsapp, but it would mitigate some of the barrier caused by the network effect. I'm also sceptical of walled gardens, something usable in this domain would make this less of a problem when some drama rises over Telesignix, switching clients is a lot less of an ask than switching everything.
Suddenly multi-billion dollar chat apps with big network effects are mere service providers... And since Google has failed so many times at producing a popular chat app, I'm surprised they haven't gone down this route...
It was nice when I used it back in like 2014 because if WhatsApp went down I could just keep talking to the same person via Telegram (assuming they had both) and it'd all be in 1 joined conversation.
I think the newer services are less interested in integrating or have weird and unique features that are harder to implement.
I agree though, it would be nice to be able to have Matrix, Discord, Telegram, Signal all on one program and with all their established features.
A lot of people use WhatsApp for a lot of reasons. If security was foremost on your mind, you'd probably have already migrated away from it. On the other handd, plenty of people are using WhatsApp right now to talk to their grandmothers, and switching to Telegram is not an obviously bad choice. :)
OP listed some apps like Discord that suggest he's not laser focused on privacy and security, and perhaps is mostly just wanting to to steer clear of large corporations in general and Facebook in particular. Telegram checks those boxes.
To make it visible to the members, My gym had a progress bar, being update as soon anybody entered or left the gym.
This information was available in their website. So I was scrapping this data and getting alerted (via telegram bot[1]) when the gym was operating under 50% the capacity and therefore avoiding wasting my time.
Reference:
Signal (by design, probably) has no chat sync or backup. That's a dealbreaker in my book.
Edit: looks like chat history transfer has been a feature since June 2020: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/9/21280664/signal-chat-trans...
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...
Additionally, they've introduced an optional PIN which you can use to recover profile, contacts and settings when switching devices - without the need to setup sync yourself.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059792-Si...
Telegram's a down-right bad IM experience compared to WhatsApp despite Facebook's forced integration: You see ads and the chats aren't encrypted.
This is essentially the Google model. Your search queries and browsing history (and Android and Chrome) are essential to targeted ads shown on every website "the webmasters choose to enable them on".
What? Google uses all your info for creepy personalized ads. Telegram is showing the same ads to everyone in a channel. And it isn't in 1:1 chats cuz they're supposed to be non-intrusive and gives a feeling of privacy.
Who is the 'maintainer'? Telegram is the only entity here.
https://gizmodo.com/the-dangers-of-techs-privacy-promises-18...
How? Google has all the whatsapp chats via the drive backups which 98% of users enable. fake E2EE
Telegram has an open API, alternative clients and free cloud storage.
They explain very well why they didn't want to give misleading e2ee claims like whatsapp https://telegra.ph/Why-Isnt-Telegram-End-to-End-Encrypted-by...
It is open source.
In addition 100% of Telegram traffic is encrypted over the wire (like this website, your bank, etc). The only difference with secret chats is that they're end to end encrypted.
Signal is a very bad user experience if you use several devices (phone, tablet, home computer, work computer). Continuing a chat on a different device doesn't work nearly as well as on Telegram where it's flawless.
I'd say forcing me to type on a shitty tiny on-screen keyboard (or use a _browser_ while still keeping the network on my phone running) is such a terrible experience that literally everything else wins in comparison to this.
I think you do realise that WhatsApp uses E2E and there's no way to do it any more securely unless the messages always go through your phone; and so, I believe you have already made a choice to use insecure services because "convenience", but in the context of current discussion (privacy and security), WhatsApp comes out superior despite Facebook's involvement. And that's saying something.
Which discusses how Telegram was banned in many countries for refusing cooperation while WhatsApp suspiciously was never banned, which could mean that WhatsApp gives governments everything they demand.
WhatsApp had perfectly usable encrypted backup - which took up space on your Google backup. And then, all of a sudden, it wasn't encrypted and didn't take up space. But you don't have access to it yourself - only Google does (and WhatsApp if it is recovering). This is a perfect way to provide all the data to various governments for 99.9% of users, without killing the E2E encryption.
WhatsApp backup in iCloud is not encrypted.
Anyways, something like 6 months after launch a Russian guy found that they were seeding their secret chat keys with entropy from the server, meaning the server could trivially MITM any secret chat. Pretty embarrassing.
Iirc it got quite little publicity since most of the discussion was in Russian, and the disclosure was in a forum post in an obscure forum.
You aren’t going to find any cryptographers anywhere who’d be willing to repeat your “They didn’t backdoor it” lie.
If it looks like a backdoor, swims like a backdoor, quacks like a backdoor, then it probably is a backdoor.
FiloSottile described it as “The most backdoor-looking bug I’ve ever seen” https://twitter.com/filosottile/status/987376021589692416?s=...
Do you have any recent bugs? Or 'backdoors'? All their official apps are open source and reproducible. Must be easy to find bugs for security researchers. They even offer much larger bounties compared to other apps.
Anything? I want to believe people saying bad crypto, but it looks like there's no actual proof.
Here's something that says it is good, published more recently.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180727070936/https://www.susan...
https://kryptera.se/assets/uploads/2015/12/Telegram-cryptana...
> Or 'backdoors'?
You might argue that their deliberate decision to not encrypt most chats is exactly that, more of a front door really.
Telegram is a bad actor.
Many Telegram users are away of it's quirks and how it operates differently to other IMs. Any tool will do damage in the hands of a bad workman.
A good way to infer Telegram is reliable is how many despotic tyrants and corrupt countries ban it.
That's false. Encrypted messages aren't searchable by third-parties. End-to-end encrypted messages are searchable by only the communicating parties regardless of where they're stored.
There's also the issue of mirroring by third-parties, but then we're talking about data in transit versus at rest, your backup methods, and so forth. (And I don't have time to get into that this morning.)
Telegram is used a lot in developing countries which are using phones made 3-7 years ago. Or phones that are made recently but with old chips and tech. Maintaining a search index across literally millions or billions (some groups are really really big) messages isn't something your phone can reasonably do.
I do wish telegram was e2ee for IMs, but for groups and super groups and channels I don't particularly care.
Of course there are people who are much more popular than me, so it might be possible and I am not aware of it. :)
https://t.me/durovschat Has 9500 members
https://t.me/swhkdemocracy Has 6000 members
https://t.me/linux_group Has 6000 members
https://t.me/PublicTestGroup Has 18000 members
There is no limit to joining these chats. These design decisions Telegram has picked has allowed the app to be quasi social media, rather than just IM. You can't index these and maintain chat history locally. You'd need way more bandwidth and energy and computational power than the average cellphone has.
Pretty much what I said.
No, this only tells you that it's used en mass in those countries.
E.g. Whatsapp has now taken the place of telegram in Iran but it's still not banned. Despite literally everyone using it.
Whatsapp didn't win many users, even when Telegram was banned in Russia for months.
Telegram even worked in Belarus despite the whole internet shutting down there. [3]
[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/19/whatsapp-blocked-in-brazil...
[2] - https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/17/10386776/brazil-whatsapp...
[3] - https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-08-21/telegr...
That's probably true, but a significant proportion of users are not, and do not realize that their chats are not encrypted. It's no surprise either, given that security is one of the core things that Telegram markets itself on -- unfairly so, in my opinion.
Source: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1560501/1/Abu-Salma%20...
This isn't just misleading but actually plain wrong.
Unless you want to tell my your internet banking is unencrypted too ;-)
Edit: as seen downthread there a number of ways to make this more or less correct, but as it stand, and particularly with the "at all" at the end of one of the claims it is just plain wrong.
> Telegram can see most of your messages.
This part is technically correct however. Telegram says they taken steps to prevent rouge admins from seing it and to prevent themselves from being able to produce copies for governments, however there's no way for us to know if it was true then, if it is true now, if it is true in the future or at any point in between so worthless if you don't trust them.
If this is a problem for you generally I recommend stop using email, stop sending letters etc and rely only on Signal or Matrix.
For many of us however this is acceptable: we send letters or even post cards fully unencrypted fully aware that they might be read.
We send mails fully aware that it can be read at any server from we send it to the one the recipient download it from.
But for some reason the same level of security is deeply problematic when Telegram is mentioned.
Besides, here is what I replied to:
> As a reminder, Telegram groups are not encrypted at all[...]
(emphasis mine)
This is very possible to misunderstand for someone who isn't aware and the result might easily be that they stay in their abusive relationship with WhatsApp because of such FUD.
As can probably be seen from my comment history I'm no stranger to criticizing Telegram but we should stick to the facts.
Facts matter.
Let me use an example:
Would you want to ride the absolutely bulletproof and soundproof taxi that has one disadvantage: that it is well known that the drivers make notes about who you are and who you visit and sell that data to companies like Cambridge Analytica?
Or would you take another more ordinary taxi that might not be armoured and soundproof and might or might not log your visits - but at least no one has caught them red handed?
The answer depends on who you are I guess: [edit: if your main fear is that someone might be listening to your conversations and you don't care if the known shady taxi company logs who you visit, go with armoured, bulletproof taxi. I admit] there are times when E2E is a massive difference but for me this is mostly about preventing future Cambridge Analytica situations.
there are times when bulletproof is important and in such cases you absolutely should go for it.
But most of the time and most places it is just a giant waste.
Refer this video from computerphile for more details. Start watching from 5:24. https://youtu.be/Q0_lcKrUdWg
Not really comparable to WhatsApp and Facebook controlled by the same Zuck.
In the past I might have said to people try telegram or signal, but now with the momentum of this whatsapp policy change I am pushing signal so I don't dilute the efforts.
You could add XMPP there as well, but it really doesn't matter. What does matter is for us to start pushing for openness and start evangelizing/helping others to adopt anything that puts us back in control of our communication.
This is the one thing to fix, and the one opportunity that we are getting now to do this right.
- Element's client is not "nice": we can fix it. We can not fix closedness.
- Not everyone is using it: we can fix it. We can not fix privacy abuse from Facebook.
- It's work to run/manage a server: find a hosting provider (cough https://communick.com cough).
I'm thinking it might be time to accept that 'we', hackers/nerds/technically inclined individuals/early adopters, start 'selling' and providing these services for our families and friends.
Assuming you are involved with communick: I like the idea of, but I am not sold on moving my communications etc to some random llc. Especially with as little information as there is on the website, I'm having trouble trusting that. I would not send my friend and family there tbh.
Regarding trust. You don't have to trust me. That is one of the best things regarding end-to-end encryption. To be completely honest, the main issues now is (1) bus factor (I am mostly working alone on it, but I do have people that can take over this in case something happens to me) and (2) I am bootstrapped and not working full-time yet. Alas, both of these issues are the type that resolve themselves by having paying customers.
There is no place you can go to open an issue that says "Facebook is exploiting user data even on applications that are supposed (promised, even) to be private.". Even if it were, ALL of Facebook's history is filled with privacy violations.
"Move fast and break things" should NEVER be a motto of a company that deals with the lives and social interactions of 2+ billion people.
“Bugs are tolerated as they are the price worth paying for a rapidly evolving code base, but you gotta fix ‘em” wouldn’t fit so neatly on a poster.
Ironic in a thread beseeching forgiveness for Element’s incompleteness.
These the type of bugs that should never be accepted and are hard to repair. Element client failing to ring on a call is a nuisance. I can call the person back. My teenage cousins who are growing so socially inept I worry they won't survive for a day outside of their homes without a cellphone? The arguments I had with my wife over her Instagram habit and the fact that she does not see how that relates to her insecurities/anxieties? That will be a lot more work to fix.
The idea is to verify the new login on ANOTHER session, if available. This is required for reading encrypted messages. When you see this message a notification will show up on all of your other Element devices asking you to verify that new session (using a QR code or a bunch of emojis). You can also select "This wasn't me - your account may be compromised", which gives you a hint what to do next (change passwords, etc).
My best guess here is that you have some old sessions lingering around, which you should remove from your account once logged in. However you do need your Security Phrase or Security Key to recover your account, which creates a new verified session and then you can read your old encrypted messages, too.
> "Help us improve Element", which doesn't accept a no and keeps asking again and again.
Can't reproduce this, sorry.
> When you see this message a notification will show up on all of your other Element devices asking you to verify that new session
I have two element devices, both PCs at different locations. And both using the web version of Element. Am I supposed to verify the other device while logged in at both PCs at different locations?
EDIT: And this is the "help us improve element" message that always pops up, no matter how many times I decline: https://ibb.co/WKkDHDd
We can, but part of the selling point of Matrix is choice and I've found that not only is Element not "nice", but it actually has different goals as a client (it seems more Slack-esque in focus, than WhatsApp-esque to me).
What we need if the aim is to advocate for an alternative to WhatsApp is to find something that solves the same problems. There's a few options on Matrix.org[0]: Nio[1] seems very nice but it's iOS only and still alpha, but I've been using FluffyChat[2] and I've found it good sofar. Much much nicer than Element at least.
No, we can't. Because the time aspect matters, and if you want people to switch now, the client has to be polished now, not "when it's done". And right now, it's a mess.
It does not have to an all-or-nothing proposition. Do it in stages.
Try this: first get yourself to use it with a few friends. See for yourself what use cases work well and what use cases don't. Bonus points if you collect this feedback and give to the team. Bring your close contacts to use it and try to make your default app, but don't beat yourself or swear it off when you can.
Upon new release, try the use cases that were failing and see what progress has been made.
Best case, you end up realizing that the new system is not as bad as you thought and you are ready to jump out of a shitty locked-in network. Worst case you spent some time learning about a free system and you are more informed and able to help those that know of no alternative and think that being spied on and manipulated is just a given.
This "we" is nonexistent. It will never reach mainstream usage with its current bad UI/UX, and people have not fixed it. I don't think it will ever reach feature parity.
Really? It just happened to spring into existence? No people working on it? No alternative clients?
> It will never reach mainstream usage.
Quit the defeatist BS, please. Linux is never going to be a mainstream desktop OS, yet many people have been using for decades already and are free from proprietary systems. No "feature parity"? Give it time and understand that freedom comes at a price. Do not sell yourself for convenience.
I've finally had the opportunity to try it during Christmas, when I finally managed to convince a friend to try it, and I was very pleasantly surprised to the degree of polish it had both on Ubuntu and Android !
The alternative is getting a burner SIM-card. Though, that will become harder once more prepaid providers require your ID.
Or if you did mean Colombia, why would the average HNer have friends there?
I know their infra codebase pretty well as I've worked on it for projects unrelated to Signal/Open Whisper Systems. Unfortunately their public Github is usually ~3 months behind their running infra and often released much later than the equivalent functionality in the clients hits the public.
It is: https://mobile.twitter.com/moxie/status/1281353119369097217
> Our goal with PINs is to enable non-phone # based addressing. Since that will mean your Signal contacts can't live in your address book anymore, they're Signal's responsibility. Every other messenger does this by storing them in plaintext, but that's not private, so we built SVR.
It's been a few months since I worked with their codebase but at the time it relied on Intel SGX for the contact storage Enclave, which is now considered compromised[0]. Additionally, if you wanted to run your own, the requirements to get licensed to use the Enclave are non-trivial.
Opinions are my own, I represent no one, etc, etc.
[0]https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/hacke...
That does not make sense. There is no relation between 'using phone number as id' and 'storing contact list on servers'. E-mail and same other communication protocols also do not use phone numbers and do not store contact list on servers.
I'm not an advocate for Signal, but I totally get this approach.
You can verify this yourself with AppWarden [2].
There are efforts implementing mtproto servers that are compatible with the Telegram codebase like telegramd [1] or madelineproto [2] in case you want to host your own server.
But, if decentralization is your main focus (interpreting your statement); you probably want to switch to a Matrix-based client anyways.
Definitely a better alternative to WhatsApp in any case.
On Telegram, login on a new device and you can see your all messages automatically. On Signal, you seems to need to perform it manually, and your history will lost forever if you phone are lost or broken.
I think the first kind of "backup" is what most people would expect, because it is convenient. But to provide this convenience, it can't be full E2E, so Telegram supports secret chat when you need max security if you are willing to sacrifice convenience.
People find other reasons for this (“they made their own crypto”, “marketing says secure but it isn’t by default”) but the core of the argument is that Pavel Durov is Russian and he’s not trusted. If it had been Elon Musk who had created it- I have little doubt that it would be the hottest thing on the market.
Maybe an open-source protocol, like how e-mail works, could be a solution for this problem. That you can choose your messaging apps and that they can interfere with each other, like email clients.
I think that the mindset of the majority of the people is the source of this problem. Most of the people I speak to don't care about their privacy. They say that they have nothing to hide and that's a valid statement. The problem is that we don't get to choose. If someone wants to share all of their personal information it's their choice, but to not share your personal information seems almost impossible. Social standards expect that you have WhatsApp and LinkedIn and such.
Viber, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Threema and Discord are all built on the same paradigm: accounts tied to a single service and thus the inertia of network effect makes vendor lock-in a real problem when acquisitions happen or Terms of Service change.
Signal is in theory the "best" of these 5 options in the short-term, but it being open source is utterly irrelevant when you consider the network effect lock-in of a single-service model.
In fact, Telegram is probably a "more open" option given the portability its API provides. Openness vs privacy/security are entirely different concerns in isolation, but I believe openness is most important for providing a model upon which privacy can be sustained in the longer term.
Of course Matrix is the only truly long-term sustainable option of these. Encouraging users to move to any of the others will only lead to this discussion re-occurring down the line. And being ultimately more difficult as platform-switching fatigue intensifies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8
Its been a year and I'm still not sure if I agree with him - which is the sign of a very juicy talk!
Couple that with the highly conspicuous skipping over of XMPP (much more comparable, only the briefest of mentions, no mention of things like OMEMO), and ignoring of Matrix (the most comparable, and not a single mention). Overall it's a pretty ridiculous talk in this context.
He goes on to describe some challenges for federated protocols in their solutions to censorship, availability & control. On censorship, the challenges are real and it's QUITE EASY to reason about possible solutions. Many of which already exist or are in development. It's clear he hasn't spent much time thinking about this. On availability, his entire argument is "Yahoo mail exists"; his discussion here is just straight-up disingenuous. Finally, on control, he segues into unrelated areas around XMPP extensibility and seems to think extensions have no value without ubiquity (though fails to expand on his reasons for this conclusion). I'd agree XMPP's XEPs are highly flawed architecturally, but again... there's newer protocols, we've learned and evolved this already.
Leaving aside that the bulk of the middle of the talk is exclusively selling new features ("new techniques") of Signal that have no direct connection to the talk's stated topic ("distributed and decentralized technology"), there are a few salient points he made that I'd agree with:
1. Federated & decentralised protocols are by their nature harder to do, and harder/slower to change. This is true, but is by no means an absolute; it's a trade-off against other benefits.
2. E2E encrypted email is too hard and probably not worth doing. Yes, PGP is highly flawed, and in general layering encryption on top of a 60-year-old protocol is hard. (Though as above, his insistence on focusing only on email for comparison rather than Signal's direct viable competitors is telling).
3. Signal's E2E/crypto-specific innovations are cool, and current federated state-of-the-art is behind on many of them.
I agree with this, but I’m starting to worry if that time will ever come. I thought messaging apps had basically all the features they’d ever need years ago. But I was wrong. I use voice messages in signal and WhatsApp daily now. If it were up to me, we would have made a federation protocol years ago and these features would have to have been figured out through endless meetings in a standards process.
Take Matrix for example. I had heard of it but hadn’t really looked into it until now. There’s no official client, so you have to find your own. That’s already a barrier of entry for someone like my mom. Then I look led through their list of client apps, and it’s the usual issues with free client apps. They don’t look great, and the reviews claim they’re rough around the edges. Even my eyes glaze over at the thought of having to try out 3-4 different clients to find the one I like.
I’d the goal is to move our communication infrastructure to use more open standards we have be realistic. And right now from what I can see, Matrix is still a solution for and by technical people. Asking my parents to move to it isn’t realistic at the moment.
For all intents and purposes, Element is the official client. It used to be called Riot, but was recently renamed.
Honestly, I think they should have just called it "Matrix". I'm guessing they didn't do that because they want to promote the concept of multiple clients without any single "official" client, but it would really simplify things.
As of now, I have to tell people "Use Matrix, but you need this app called Element to get on to it". It's confusing for a lot of people.
It is but I've found the email analogy helpful: prefixing your explanation with "it's like email" tends to open even non-technical people's mind to the idea of multiple clients + a unified protocol.
- Riot/RiotX/Element is like Slack on Matrix
- FluffyChat is like WhatsApp on Matrix
From a purely technical perspective. However, how organization is structured and who is in it matters:
I am in the camp that there are alot of things we try to solve (and sacrifice things like usability) at a technical level that we should be solving at a social level.
I agree in theory but unfortunately I think we need both. I have little confidence in either on it's own. And I've been burned too much by vendor lock-in in the past to ever advocate for ANY service that isn't federated (I use many non-federated services but out of necessity, I would never sell others on them).
I should add that successful & popular federated online messaging services are something we've had since the 1960s so I have yet to see any compelling reason to be perpetuating the walled-garden approach beyond a preference for a totalitarian approach to ecosystem control.
Touche, but if they were there before why aren't they "here" in popular adoption? I think, although it is perfectly technically feasible in a vacuum it is not in real life.
Because it requires that all your common contacts (friends, family) use it. The question isn't whether you can do but whether you can be easier to use and offer more feature then the competition. Most people don't care. You need to be competitive.
From a technical perceptive you will have to spend more, make less, and have decreased usability for privacy, and federation. So picking any one is already shooting your self in the foot. Pick two and you aren't going anywhere.
Simplified argument but Signal picks to minimum they feel they need to do to see change they want. And I am big fan of this method. I am tired of projects with good intentions not getting adoption.
HN is likely not the best forum for this argument, but I'd have two answers to this:
1. Email is popularly adopted. It's difficult to add improvements because it's a federated protocol from the 60s, but it is still popular.
2. The reason we haven't had popular adoption since is because: (a) email was publicly developed, whereas most newer tech is private; the market favours easy (cheap) over better (hard, expensive) and federated is harder to do (with worthwhile benefits); and (b) the major downside of centralisation -vs- federated is vendor lock-in, which is bad for users but good for shareholders.
Long term, I would hope that if Signal gets large enough market-share and stabilizes they would make the signal protocol federated.
It was highly successful and used by ordinary folks all over.
Also they don't advertise it, but it's actually still running... just no new features, no compatibility with Hangouts/etc. and of course they disabled federation.
Likewise, never used WhatsApp, and communicate with close friends and family via Signal. Once Matrix matures and robustly supports voice/video and group calls, I’ll look towards using that more actively and nudging folks towards that. For the moment, Jitsi is a good solution when needed.
(I happen to be on Discord too, but that’s mainly due to topical communities rather than social messaging. I would love for those to eventually move to Matrix too.)
However, while I use XMPP on a daily basis, we have one big issue: There is no good iOS client. So far I have tested ChatSecure, Monal and Siskin, which all support OMEMO end-2-end encryption, but none comes even close to the quality you would expect. ChatSecure seems to be the most mature, but its development seems to have stalled and it has issues like not resuming the connection when the server changes the certificate (pretty often with letsencrypt) until the user confirms the new certificate (if the certificate is valid doesn't matter).
So I think XMPP is the right solution to the problem (being federated and an IETF standard), but the eco system is in need of developers who are willing to bring quality to the clients for all platforms.
> So I think XMPP is the right solution to the problem (being federated and an IETF standard), but the eco system is in need of developers who are willing to bring quality to the clients for all platforms.
Tried Whatsapp once, hated it, never tried again. Viber is even worse.
Telegram has been what an IM program should be, for years now (it gave me the vibe of my much beloved Miranda IM almost 20 years ago). I'd love it if they added more link previews (9GAG and Instagram previews stopped working almost a year ago and the functionality was never recovered) and even more keyboard shortcuts for full navigation without a mouse -- but even without these it's the most solid IM experience I ever had.
Maybe they are not as encrypted or protected in general as Signal. Maybe (but what do we know about Signal, save for a lot of claims?). But the fact that several governments and corporations demanded them to give access to various keys or to shut down channels is a testament that Telegram isn't as amateur in encryption and protection as the overly nitpicky HN audience would have you believe.
Somebody could take over telegram and start a pretty similar service to facebook since most of the chats are not encrypted. So if Durov were not to lead his vision of 100% free Telegram it might get really bad. A service ran on savings of the founder as philantropic as he is is not sustainable. They will either pivot to ads, to profiling or something paid subscription any of which will probably not be received well.
You can see more here: https://fourweekmba.com/telegram-business-model/
Also, Durov has been strongly resistant both to censorship and takeover attempts so far. Which is more than I could say for your average SV startup.
I am siding with Telegram still. They have proven themselves many times over and I can only hope that this will continue.
The very continued existence of Viber is a living testament of the glacial pace with which the non-tech folk pick up on what's wrong with some of the popular tech.
I genuinely hate the UX of Viber but since moving back to the Philippines, I've been involved in this long lesson on how much tech orgs (at least in the US) don't pay attention to these parts of the world. It seems to me that lack of care and attention leads to the rise and dominance of companies like Viber, Grab, Lazada, and their ilk in markets like the Philippines.
In the end, these apps that you and I both despise are what works best for the consumers that use them most precisely because they just work (but not well).
This made it really easy for the Chinese gov to track people but in the end people value convenience more than potential surveillance state repercussions.
We as a programmers must learn to respect that and think in terms of what's convenient for our users -- and not what's a trendy tech or some such.
Maybe he was able to break encryption and hand the keys to the agencies but preferred to escape to avoid that. Or maybe it was something else.
To be fair, I don't care much if Telegram is well-encrypted. History has shown that state actors prefer to sabotage the roots of encryption algorithms and/or embed backdoors if the service isn't truly end-to-end encrypted. But as I said, that isn't my number one concern when using messengers.
Apart from that it integrates fairly well with other networks through bridges.[3]
It can be self hosted and it federates, which is a pro. Not too sure about audits and security, it has improved much, when I started using it (2019) they didn't have login throttling[4] and shortly after that were breached.[5] Much has improved since.
[1] https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is...
[2] https://matrix.org/docs/projects/server/dendrite
[3] https://matrix.org/bridges/
[4] https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/1452
[5] https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/83751/data-breach/matri...
Searching on an issue tracker for the word 'performance' is not a good source for claiming there are performance issues.
Synapse used to have scaling issues. Those are pretty much fixed.[1]
[1] https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/03/how-we-fixed-synapses-sca...
More details about my specific case are found here: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/8612 - and occasionally other performance issues pop up for other people too.
I'm sure this will eventually be fixed, and honestly the performance is probably good enough for most people, but Synapse is definitely not as performant yet as a homeserver should be.
Fluffy chat may be the best, but still needs lots of love.
I did find a native macOS Matrix client and quite honestly I'd love to be able to use a native client since all platforms really only have Electron apps. But the macOS client only gets me so far since I also want to use it on my phone.
To a certain degree I'd say this is apples vs oranges.
Before you shoot me down, let me explain. The reason I say that is because of the core focus of the different platforms.
Signal's priority-one use-case is clearly person-to-person IM and communication. The UI, setup-process and entire architecture is optimized for this one use-case, with all other use-cases being shoehorned in to fit whatever was built for that.
I'd say Matrix (for the moment disregarding a key feature, bridging) has as its primary use-case to be a discord/slack/IRC alternative, to handle "channels", long term group chats and basically persistent online collaboration workspaces.
Sure. Technically speaking, Matrix has a full support for E2E encrypted person-to-person IM and communications (even phone-calls and audio!), and you can use it for that. But this was clearly not the primary use-case Matrix was designed to solve.
Therefore IMO Matrix person-to-person chat has this slightly shoehorned-in feeling, so you may have a somewhat lesser user-experience when using Matrix to do these things than other platforms which had this as their primary goal.
Disclaimer: Happy Matrix-user, running own server, bridging both FB, WhatsApp and Signal into the matrix-verse.
I’m just saying that if you try to suggest Matrix as a “drop in” replacement for WhatsApp or other dedicated IM platforms, it may not immediately give you that “at home” feeling right now.
It’s much more capable, but different. For better and worse.
There are already Matrix mobile clients focusing on this use case, aiming at being a WhatsApp replacement. Examples are: Ditto Chat[1], Nio[2], and FluffyChat[3].
Before trying to solve the network-effect issue (i.e. all people using WhatsApp), we should make one of the mentioned clients at least as good as WhatsApp, or else users won't switch.
[2] https://nio.chat
But if you want to avoid a repeat of what's happening with WhatsApp, support decentralized alternatives. Go for solutions that are built on Matrix or XMPP, the primary contenders in this space. Both are open networks with plenty of open-source software, public servers, paid hosting (i.e. you are not the product) and self-hosted options.
Personally I'm in the XMPP camp, and working on https://snikket.org/ specifically as an alternative to WhatsApp and the other centralized services.
- Only Secret Chats are E2EE. Normal use is just subject to transport encryption. However, this is true for any platform with server-side chat history.
If the latter, well played.
- Tying back into the encryption point, in the event of a breach or an MITM, whoever intercepts or accesses WhatsApp messages will get encrypted dumps, while my Telegram messages are pretty much going to be in plaintext.
Only if you trust Facebook with their proprietary software.
And on Telegram you can easily export your history at any time and delete from the servers.
Isn't MTProto proprietary as well?
Also, the option to delete on a periodic basis is not an alternative to not having things stored in the first place. That said, there is no way you can verify that copies are not retained on the servers in either case (WhatsApp or Telegram) so there's not much to argue there.
Clients are open-source, so you can see the code for e2e encryption.
> That said, there is no way you can verify that copies are not retained on the servers in either case (WhatsApp or Telegram) so there's not much to argue there.
This is exactly true, so I actually prefer Matrix.
Cool. Unfortunately the cases where it's applicable are too limited for my liking.
> Matrix.
Matrix is great, I just wish I had more luck onboarding my network onto it. I really enjoy using Element.
This type of pressure on centralized systems is exactly why it is unethical as technologists to suggest people centralize the internet.
When you choose to send friends to centralized systems you are voting for the internet to have all the problems and advantages of dictatorships.
When you support open decentralized protocols you get the problems and advantages of a democracy.
Dictatorships can move fast and make sweeping changes. Look at China.
Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, iMessage are all examples of centralized walled gardens, aka dictatorships. They are all doomed to be co-opted into doing something you don't like at some point and you will have no recourse.
Meanwhile we have decentralized systems like like HTTP, SMTP, and Matrix. Yes they move slower, are more fragmented, need long periods of carefully discussed and rolled out protocol changes and many implementations and servers to all agree on those to function. Decentralized control is messy, and good UX takes longer to materialize, but that is how the internet was built, and how we kept it from being controlled by a single ISP/Browser like AOL.
If you want a modern e2e chat protocol that lets you use any client, server, operating system, or architecture you want and take your social graph with you when you change your mind on any of those things, where no one single entity can change the rules of the network for profit or other reasons... you are looking for Matrix.
Apple pressured Telegram to remove specific posts. There was no way to stop spamming the posts, so they removed the whole channel because it was a lot easier.
Care to elaborate? Haven't heard/read anything that points in that direction. Except for the "nearby people" feature but that its up to you to enable.
I agree its a downgrade in security. But I dont agree with it being a downgrade in privacy.
Another point is to compartmentalize information shared.
Id rather share my whole profile in parts to 100 different companies who all arent allowed to share it with each other, than all of it to one company.
No published source code or alternative implementations so it may take months of RE to notice if it is ever noticed at all.
If only a single party with no accountability controls your encryption keys with binaries they compiled from code they wrote that no one else can practically review with an undocumented protocol they can silently change or backdoor at any time, it is not end to end encryption. It is marketing.
I hate and refuse to use Telegram like all centralized chat services and feel it is hostile to freedom, privacy, and security but unlike Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage and others Telegram at -least- lets independent third parties like F-droid compile and distribute binaries offering accountability for their E2E claims.
Also in the comments on that "article" some people link against a cryptoanalysis of telegram, which can be found here: http://cs.au.dk/~jakjak/master-thesis.pdf
Someone else also mentions that telegram stores message logs on their server, if that's true it is definitely a big no no.
Seems like an okay compromise to me, but I'm no security expert.
a. It doesn't require a cellphone always on (most important point for me)
b. It's not run by Facebook, or any other FAANG
c. It's not based in the USA
d. It has a great UX.
I am also interested in Berty[3] and Iris[4], but those aren't really "ready" yet, despite being cool tech.
[3]: https://berty.tech/
The problem is that everybody's contacts are on Whatsapp. How do you make THEM switch?
I'll be the one friend that'll insist on SMS/email. I’ll even offer to use some other supposedly encrypted method like Keybase or Matrix. If that doesn't work as a fallback, then I guess we can agree to disagree, and someone else can play the middleperson for us. :)
I refuse to use Signal because it doesn't offer chat sync, or message preservation if I either lose or have to wipe my phone.
For Android devices, I've been using the SMS Backup & Restore app [1] since Android ~2.1 or so.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.riteshsahu...
Install Pidgin with signald ;)
I can state that it's a bit unrealistic to expect this kind of outcome.
That was my thought process evaluating alternatives this morning. Signal is apparently lauded by the privacy crowd, but I took one look at it and said "no way is Mum going to use this".
I went with Telegram because the usability was good, WhatsApp-like functionality, and I saw a few people I know already on it - non-techies in particular, which is vital if we're going to disrupt WhatsApp.
and now some of them are almost exclusively on telegram and some on whatsapp
and whats worse is,now there are some half-and-half conversations in both
and on top of that whatsapp rolled out business accounts and every mom and pop store has whatsapp and thats the only way you can communicate with them in real time
i dont think im gonna be switching out
Here in the UK WhatsApp and messenger are the only ones that most people I know are using.
When I tried Signal, I saw an empty list and had to add numbers / find people myself. Not much in the way of onboarding IMO. My complaints are likely met with "duh, that's how it works, idiot", I believe that's just how Signal is designed as it's a privacy-centric app.
I'm just looking for a non-Facebook WhatsApp alternative, rather than a complete focus on privacy and E2E messaging, so I don't think Signal is "bad" but it's not what I'm looking for. I just want Facebook out of my life and its grubby hands off my data.
There were some permissions settings that I didn't pay close attention to, but maybe you didn't allow the app to control your calls or see your contacts on setup?
That's not how it works; Signal directly gives you the list of contacts that are available, just like Whatsapp or Telegram.
The most likely is that you had an empty list because no-one in your contacts have it.
Let the exodus begin!
You won't get them to switch and I use both. I try to get people to switch to Signal for comms with me and the hope is that if more people install it then they'll use it to communicate with each other. The majority of my contacts have not installed it. I am not yet worried enough about the current state of whatsapp that I'm willing to forgo using it entirely.
Signal, at least, is a very easy install and will just locate your contacts by their phone numbers (like WhatsApp) so the technical barrier is very low.
Edit: Oh, I came in to this thread without seeing anything about this new privacy policy. My comment was about the state before that. I'm only looking at the change now.
If we do manage to migrate some/any of our friends away from the embedded plethora of contacts they have on WhatsApp, I really hope it's towards something like Matrix, or similar, that doesn't have that same problem.
I did however do what others are suggesting. I installed Signal, and told my close family and friends to install it to communicate with me - and to not use standard SMS anymore.
While I did get a bit of grief over it initially, we are all happily using Signal now, and more people I know are moving to it all the time.
It's also a great middle ground for iPhone and Android users to communicate.
- Telegram might be the easiest to use where you likely find the most people but I disagree with a lot of things done by/around telegram.
- Threema (now open source) is as far as I know the most privacy focused one and by far my favorite. I like the way they are doing many thinks and they have many small goodies (like you can give a small "thump up/down" to messages in 1-to-1 chats from the message received notification to indicate agreement/acceptance). Or the way they handle accounts (separate from phone number and license, you can give people your Threema id without giving them your phone, the "trust levels", etc.). Or that they have a clear&clean business model. There are also a bunch of aspects which are useful if used in a e.g. business context like account revoke-ability, in person QR code based key exchange, fixed chat history etc.
More specifically, I would say Element (the most popular Matrix client) is more of a "slack like" alternative, but most other mobile Matrix clients are much more WhatsApp-like.
One great advantage over WhatsApp is emoji reactions on messages like Slack does to avoid the dreaded “haha” taking up threads.
Signal seems to support all media I threw at it, and has an awesome MacOS desktop client.
Downsides were no web search for group icons (a great feature of WhatsApp) and live location sharing.
Overall I am happy to have nearly all of my conversations migrated to Signal over the preview few weeks.
Which one are you referring to? Signal Desktop is just an Electron application AFAICT.
I never blamed technology or any algorithms, people was evil before and still the same. I'm so glad, the folks here that I find brilliant, is having this conversation. Just keep the dialogue going, it is working. Change happens in small steps, one people, one family, one neighbourhood at a time.
As far as I can tell, the TL;DR of the change is that your WhatsApp identifier will be linked to your FB data, so that personalized advertisements can be displayed in WhatsApp. The only detail I find highly objectionable in the change, is FB collecting through WhatsApp "Other people’s phone numbers stored in address books." Why don't we focus on the objectionable parts of the change, rather than panicking that there was a change?
Moreover, a less popular HN story [2] mentions that "The new privacy policy also doesn’t apply in Europe due to stronger privacy legislation there." (I can confirm that on my side: I'm living in Europe and I haven't seen the dreaded popup yet.)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662215 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25668367
Also leaving in EU and just got the popup this morning, so it's definitely comming to Europe too.
> The move, the spokeswoman said, is part of a previously disclosed move to allow businesses to store and manage WhatsApp chats using Facebook's infrastructure. Users won't have to use WhatsApp to interact with the businesses and have the option of blocking the businesses. She said there will be no change in how WhatsApp shares provide[d] data with Facebook for non-business chats and account data.
https://tweakers.net/nieuws/176412/whatsapp-verplicht-datade...
Maybe it's time to try again, but all the docs seem to be written by people who assume the wrong things about their readers.
Edit: OK, I've added it.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-UlA4-tslROBDS9IqHal...
The servers also don't store messages once they been delivered. There is no way to get a low resolution while mobile and getting the higher resolution while on WiFi.
Signal does already have the method to disable media downloads while not on WiFi, but does not have a method to tell the sender to send lower fidelity content.
The only reason me and my circle of friends use Telegram is because one of us was using an Ubuntu Phone at some point, and that was the only acceptable messaging app he could use, so we all moved on. It requires a certain authority in your group, but people are likely to adapt to you if they care about you, even if your choices inconvenience them slightly.
Of course it's never going to be "all their contacts", but the only platform that actually has all my contacts on it is good old SMS anyway.
I just switched my family to it, because that was the last reason for me to use WhatsApp.
I'm sad not to se it as an option.
I guess Signal would be the best bet as an alternative because of where it is right now in terms of market share.
Also if they ever sell out, the server & clients are completely opensource. It wouldn't take much for someone else to fork the whole thing and run a competing service if we ever need to.
Anything not decentralized is going to get abused eventually. The US government could seize the client signing keys, release s backdoored client, and dump the SGX keys and gag order everything in the name of national security. We have seen similar play out in China. Even the mighty Apple gave up HSM keys and caved to CCP censorship demands. It is only a matter of time.
I fear they are well meaning but woefully naive.
We need censorship resistant standard protocols anyone can implement and help host so there is no SPOF.
Or the change could be smaller such as the non-profit changing focus and transferring one of it's products to another entity. e.g. Signal could hypothetically pivot to focus on crypto lib dev/maintenance and transfer the messaging service maintenance to another org.
With Telegram, I have been using it more recently and found it to be even effective in a work-setting for group chats, sharing files etc. Its basically a Slack and the fact that it is available on multiple platforms also has made it very appealing.
Some weak points (based on using element.io clients which has some features that aren't core matrix):
- Cross-session signing is not natural to set up for users, however this likely isn't much of an issue as most of these will just use it on their phone. However this can also be an issue if they want to switch device but lost their keys.
- e2e verification is a bit awkward. No great TOFU option which makes initial setup a bit awkward, you can do it but the UI doesn't encourage it. It would also be interesting to have the option to "share" your verification. So if friend X says they trust these keys for friend Y I can import Y without further verification.
- Occasionally new devices don't want to send messages to the remote user's session. So the user just gets a "Message encrypted" notification with no indication to me that I sent a message not encrypted to all of the user's sessions.
- Voice + Video is super basic for 1:1 calls. For >2 users it uses Jitsi which is fantastic but this different UX between the two is also confusing. I'm hoping that when Jitsi launches e2e encrypted calls it can just be used for everything.
- Visually the app is cluttered and not perfectly clear. For 1:1 calls "bubbles" such as used by most chat apps are super clear. Matrix uses a design better for many user chats but can be less clear. Especially replies look a bit odd in Element.
- URL previews are only supported on web and need to be turned on per-chat (if encrypted). This is for legitimate privacy reasons but is a sacrifice of UX.
Overall once you get it set up it just works and has all of the features that a user would expect. However I'm looking forward to a lot of the polish landing which will make it compelling on UX grounds alone, whereas now it just seems like the best compromise when you consider the privacy and decentralization features.
And there are several clients out there that are compatible, it doesn't lock you inside an "official" client.
So yeah, I don't like Facebook's malevolent dictatorship over WhatsApp, but there's zero chance I could - or even would bother to - convince all my friends and family to make the switch.
While Google is the main implementer of RCS servers and clients, a few larger carriers have done their own implementation of it, with no need for Google.
Client side, I believe Samsung had their own implementation for it? And Apple could make iMessage RCS compatible, they just have chosen not to at this point.
Edit: to add, RCS does support 1:1 encryption now, though I don't believe it's fully rolled out yet. https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/19/21574451/android-rcs-enc.... I'm really hoping this is the last step to get Apple on board with implementing it.
And that's why I think RCS shoot itself into the foot.
I understand that Google does want to accelerate RCS implementation, and some carriers have actively chose to use Jibe.
The main problem I think is that RCS is not differentiated from SMS, especially for those who have a carrier which didn't deployed it yet. In well-developed areas, it make full sense not to differentiate it. However, I don't think (and have some anecdotal evidence) that RCS was not designed to handle the (relatively) common case of an RCS user sending RCS to an "RCS" contact while that contact is offline. In certain areas, data connectivity is not cheap which means that the user explicitly controls mobile data connectivity and Google is amplifying the problem by actively prompting the user to use RCS even when the carrier does not support it. This leads into important messages not being received, which makes sense if RCS replaced another IP-based communication protocol but SMS is circuit-switched and does not rely on IP infrastructure, and more importantly SMS is much, much reliable relative to RCS (especially if it is not officially supported by the carrier).
I need to point out that I do not really disagree with RCS' intent - but Google aggressively trying to promote RCS outside of commited carriers is not just weird but can be dangerous.
Having RCS is still better than being in current situation where you're locked into Whatsapp/iMessage/Some proprietary solution from a carrier
A more practical solution might be not to switch from WhatsApp entirely, but to limit the amount of data it can get from you. Some ideas:
- trimming the contact list to the minimum; move most conctacts from the builtin phone address book (Google Contacts) to another store for contacts, which is not integrated with the system
- getting a separate phone just for WhatsApp; different account, different number, different contact list
- revoke most of the app permissions, use only the most essential features (basically text)
- post new _content_ elsewhere
- FB will probably try to track / intercept links in the app; setting Duck Duck Go as the default browser might help (purge browsing data often)
I'm not sure how far iOS 14 privacy features will go. It's their time to shine. If they do prevent WhatsApp and Facebook apps from doing shady stuff, it might be a time to switch.
But yeah, here whatsapp is the biggest one still and too many people are using it.
I like that they have published the server source code https://github.com/wireapp/wire-server
The "always on" encryption is great, and it's always been more stable, and had a more complete feature set than Signal, even at launch. Most importantly, migration between devices with Wire is super smooth.
It definitely should be in the poll.
It’s very convenient of the government to do this, but I do find it a bit dubious at time to mix provision of essential services with FBs marketing tracking. The same with government websites that use Google Analytics, I’m not always sure they should be mixed without thinking properly through the privacy considerations first.
Due to network effects, whatsapp still holds lion share. It is not a problem if it is optional tool that has to be used just for talking to friends. But, I am seeing it is being used for even communicating to school children by teachers and schools as almost official channel! In such cases, there does not exist much choice, at least in my country. People just refuse to use mail or call directly.
Combined with signal-cli (https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli.git) you can easily set up your own files & messaging upload. For instance, I've created an automatic upload to a Google Photos album for my family group chat and they love it !
2-3 People are using other contact options like Discord or SMS. Which is fine with me.
[0] Something like this https://github.com/fingersonfire/Whatsapp-Xtract , although I can't recall if it was that exact one.
I still use Matrix, but it's often frustrating with messages showing up late or out of order, and none of the clients feeling quite good enough yet. Especially if you use multiple accounts.
Every XMPP client I've used supports multiple accounts, but for Matrix I've only recently run into Quaternion which supports this, and I believe also Neochat (they both use libquotient), but they're still rough to use.
I wouldn't even consider options that aren't free software, and I'd also exclude signal because of them not putting their app on f-droid, not being properly decentralized, relying on a phone number, etc. (note that both email and phone number are optional for Matrix accounts)
I personally can't use signal. It's great that it's secure, but I can't tolerate frequent reliability issues when it comes to messaging. The first thing that comes to mind is group chat, and having messages show up in a different order on everyone's phones (discovered via screenshots), often with multiple-hour delays.
Check it out for yourself; set up a free personal account at this link:
I've been using Signal for some time; I preferred Wire, but gradually it became clear that Wire was only interested in corporate clients. One bonus compared to Signal is that you don't need to tie it to a phone number.
Personally I use Telegram because there's a distribution of it on F-Droid. If you do you should consider telling your friends to only use secret chats since only those are encrypted end-to-end. Signal has some nice features like not storing your in-app contacts on their servers and the "sealed sender" feature which largely hides who is talking to whom in a conversation.
As for the others I can't really comment on them. Maybe another option to consider is Briar[1] which works entirely peer-to-peer over Tor, Bluetooth or the LAN and defers sending until both devices are online at the same time (which might work for phones).
End-to-End encryption is something which cannot be enforced for all communications(contacts) with email.
I used telegram seriously, to connect to my team members, connect to friends in groups and message friends privately, before our government blocked it and people migrated to whatsapp.
Usability:
1-Whatsapp is only available on one phone (I know it's because of e2e encryption, but we'll get to that later) and only android/ios. Anything else needs to use web and connect to the main device, which limits the experience, if you use it heavily.
2-Whatsapp does not have edit, the web version cannot set ctrl-enter to send, any mistaken enter will send an incomplete message that cannot be edited.
3-You lose all your chats when you change your phone. Backup is still a solution, but not if you want to migrate from iphone to android (something I did) and do not trust an app that has 100 install to migrate your data.
4-You cannot use multiple phone numbers by one whatsapp on one phone.
5-If you add a person to a group, they cannot see past messages. (I know, another side-effect of e2e)
6-It has many minor bugs with bluetooth headsets. If you press the answer, it just disconnects from the headset, you should answer on phone screen.
7-Lacks many useful features for organization, like chat folders (I know, this is also recent in Telegram)
On the other hand, telegram is heavily customizable, has clients for all major platforms, can connect to many accounts at once, your data is not tied to your device.
About E2e encryption:
I don't mind that telegram does not have e2e. My private messages are not worth the effort for a large organization or government. As a citizen of a country where the government actively and strongly suppresses freedom of speech, e2e in groups is not useful. Any breached device or one informer in any group is enough for all messages to be breached. This is only needed in case the government does not have access to the (apparently infinite) list of security problems by whatsapp, which apparently they do (why they block Telegram and not whatsapp?)
In usability, I can go on and on with increasingly detailed differences between whatsapp and Telegram and everywhere Telegram wins hands down, except that by default, chats do not have e2e encryption and groups cannot have e2e at all.
I think companies are way too power full right now, and the ability to shift position, sometimes they are a platform and sometimes a publisher. Companies should not be allowed to "shift" depending on how asks the question. I think a normal human would be forced to answer (in court), if they said different answer to different people. But these companies get away with it.
Much of the conditions that has helped shape the current situation might shaping new efforts as well..
Support and client questions etc will probably be avoid as much as possible. Example do NOT explain why a BAN was issued, give as little chance to appeal as possible, and avoid all discussions about why something was done. Just say that they broke a rule, do not mention what rules or where in the text / video the "crime" was committed.
Appeal process is very expensive, and if a company gave reason for example when they did a BAN that would sometime cause the banned person to appeal. If they stated why, a person in USA could appeal using the common justice system and perhaps claim in-justice, or lying (I guess a person might have a chance if the company did not apply its rule consistently, or if they could prove a lie)
If they can avoid to given any reason for it, there is no way they will keep any rules well defined, it gives them much more power if the rules could be flexed a bit.
I think the "common justice system" with defender, accuser and judge would be much better. A court also has to keep record of decisions and reasons. But I think no company would do that, it would limit their control/power and probably be expensive as well.
I still think the companies have a bit too much power, and in a way wonder if they could be forced to solve "justice" better than now.
WhatsApp has been a more or less indie creation helped to cut cost of text messages to zero. Then it was acquired by FB and is now part of big tech. We all know what this means.
With signal as a notable exception, I doubt that there could ever be a different outcome for any commercial product.
Why is it, that we do not see more competition from non-profits? The tech world has changed so much, that the ideas of the open source/free software movement are not as applicable as they were when Stallman founded GNU. However, with Wikipedia we see a worldwide Top10 site being a non-profit.
So, where are all the Google/Twitter/Facebook competitors funded by contributions of its users? Given how hard and expensive it is to really compete in that space, is the goal unrealistic? Or is it that there are some (hidden) incentives in the game which contradicts that goal? (Other than monetary incentives for the founders)
- Great user-driver sticker ecosystem. Creators can submit their sets to the store and earn pasive income; there's even an sticker creation app [2]
- modern, good UX and web-client with default E2E encryption.
- ability to login with an account rather than phone number exclusively.
- chat extras: photo albums, event calendars etc. especially great for group chats.
- original quality photo sharing.
It's a bit bloated being a full service suite and all but underneath it all it's a really good messenging experience!
1 - https://line.me/
But just explaining the concept of clients in 2021 is an undertaking.
Luckily I don't have any friends on WhatsApp, so the transition will be easier. Let's see if my family cares enough about messaging me that they'll download Signal.
This 100%. So many responses talk about the "network effect", but realistically it only needs that one key person in everyone's phone book who refuses to use WhatsApp in order to move entire swathes of people to install Signal at least as a secondary app. Be that one person!
I think something similar could be achieved client side only by reverse engineering each app's api and maintaining compatibility at every update.
Matrix is close but it's not very user friendly (and I think it requires you to host your own server).
Signal, for example, seems to be designed to store messages only on a single active device, which is normally a mobile device. Lose access to your device, perhaps to theft, maybe to accidental damage or hardware failure, and you lose all your messages.
I'm all for privacy, but security matters too, and that includes being able to keep safe copies of my own data on my own terms. With things like emails, or even mobile SMS messages, there are tools widely available to do this, and I can export my data and have it encrypted locally and then stored safely off-site. Too many new messaging systems seem to be fighting against this for various reasons, and I don't think it's a healthy trend.
Signal has also pretty horrible management, I remember one day outage for many house because admins in US just went sleep, so Signal is all nice if you dont care about reliability and can get through bad UX, for instance very well hidden option for force sending SMS to Signal contact through long tap Send button, there is now ay to find this during using the app
Also pgp doesn't support any of signal's key ratcheting or deniability. And the web of trust leaks information publicly about who your contacts are! (And its vulnerable to Sybil attacks.)
Don't get be wrong, I love email and think its great. But it doesn't hold a candle to Signal when it comes to secure communication.
> Everyone I talk to uses Signal; even my siblings, who are not technologists and who I do not talk to about this stuff, use Signal (sometimes to my annoyance, since iMessage works just fine when we're figuring out what each of us is bringing to dinner). But for the purposes of this post, almost literally any secure messenger is better than email.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22371316
Hopefully the fact that even tptacek can admit that convenience actually plays a role when deciding what messaging platform to use for everyday stuff can help certain people here lower their shoulders somewhat ;-)
You've correctly identified all the problems and what should be done ... are you going to work on it?
If not, why not? Perhaps the answer to that will tell you why, as far as we know, nobody is working on it.
Sure as heckfire none of the big telecoms providers are going to bother.
If anything, this is a task for non-profit orgs like the IEEE, IETF, EFF, etc. to be working on and funding.
Also, I can't seem to find anything about a messenger named Zom, do you mean Zoom? If so, is Zoom really something people use for the same use case as Whatsapp?
As ColinWright notes elsewhere, a search for ["zom" messaging] finds it.
Which of these support that?
For example, on Signal, I got a message from someone I hadn’t messaged for a long, long time asking me to re-send my message because they saw a “bad message” error. I have no idea what that was about.
However everybody around me use WhatsApp, including the people using Telegram. I use Telegram with 3 or 4 friends, WhatsApp with everybody else even if I see a constant flow of contacts installing Telegram (the app sends a notification.) The only viable migration path is that enough people start using both until a tipping point when most of their conversations happen on Telegram. Same for any other platform. An abrupt switch is impossible unless WhatsApp start charging money or is banned by law.
The next popular platform is Telegram, but it is used mainly to share and access pirated movies and apps from shady channels than for everyday communication.
I know the reflex answer is "they won't do it because iPhone exclusivity sells iPhones" but suspect that's increasingly only true in the US.
People here are describing how phones there are increasingly WhatsApp-running platforms, and Apple would be wise to prevent that while it can. Might also offer them an upsell route for their other cross-platform services.
I decided to go for Telegram (although I use Signal as well).
So far, I managed to convert... 17 people. Out of approximately 1200. It is a lost case. WhatsApp is practically everywhere.
Damn.
End-to-end encryption came despite Facebook. Its founder left when it was clear that Facebook planned to leverage WhatsApp userbase into other Facebook properties despite promises of the contrary.
Now they are actually executing on it. The only action that can have any effect on Facebook is if they start losing users over this.
I simply don't trust a single one of the messaging apps that they won't immediately upload my entire address book to their servers so they can have a more complete social graph.
I've tried Telegram at one point but it was a huge pain to use if you didn't let it access your contacts (or maybe it didn't work at all... my memory's fuzzy on which messaging apps were which.) Whatsapp was similarly awful as well.
Privacy -> Contacts -> App Name
https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/272067/ (scroll down)
--
The real problem is that other people have me as their contacts, and don't mind sharing with FB or whatever other companies.
Telegram won't let you just add contacts locally within the app (ie. stored privately within the Telegram app.) WhatsApp I think had a similarly bad experience. You try to tap "Add contact" and it just tries to access your device contacts again. No thanks.
I want my chat apps to have their own database of contacts, with basic CRUD for adding/removing them, which stays in that app. I don't need them getting a dump of the hundreds of contacts I have on my phone so that they can upload all of it to their servers and "suggest" friends (and likely, sell the data.)
Hosting my contact information on their servers and using invite codes/etc would work fine too (especially if it's pseudonymous.) But no, you can't get a dump of my whole contact database just so I can keep track of who I talk to.
I like a lot Telegram, even if I'm a little bit sad that they don't do more to push end to end encryption. One can have a look at cryptpad to see that cloud storage and e2e is possible.
But still, so far, for so long, there never was any proof of any deceptive behavior of the telegram team.
Not a single private message leaked to a gov, company or anyone. So I kind of trust them for the moment.
Telegram is no E2E-Messenger. I know you can enable it per chat, but that's so solution. And groups are always not encrypted. Also they use some non-standard encryption. Why?
Signal needs my phone number. I dislike that idea.
I use Discord for anything unimportant. I prefer to not use it though. For voice I still prefer TeamSpeak, because of the end to end encryption and self hosting.
I don't know or don't use the others.
I eventaully switched to iMessage.
I’ve turned off contact access. I can’t see the names behind the numbers. Will fb still see the numbers of the new contacts I message?
And Telegram because more of my friends use it.
At least with telegram, I can use it, turn off contact access in WhatsApp, and not give fb my address book.
Please also mention if there are any client/servers FLOSS
People have just switched messengers in the past fine; ICQ -> MSN -> google chat / fb messenger (and I probably forgot a few). I agree that Whatsapp has become more "critical infrastructure" than messengers were, but don't give up right away because it seems impossible
Those are the only alternatives with enough penetration to rival WhatsApp (that I know of).
I know that they are not secure, but neither is WhatsApp.
Once RCS gets established though, text messaging may be a reasonable alternative. (As long as telcos don't try to use stupid pricing)
Android now has some compatibility with iMessage, and SMS is standard and supported on most mobile devices, even really old phones.
Why lock-in to WA or any of these options in the poll?
I'd understand if it were vendor-neutral and decentralized, but I don't see that.
Surprising to see Matrix 3rd despite being added after half an hour. Will check it out.
Having said that, I think its ideal use cases at the current time are probably less of a general messaging solution with friends, and more for specific scenarios where off-internet and security is maybe most salient.
As long as I can be far away from the Facebook world, I’m happy.
And same would go for tiktok as it too also grabs your contacts.
This is a slippery slope.
I know it’s a really elementary question when the rest of you are looking at this from a high-level (great discussion btw) but I’m never ever going to convince anyone to use anything but iOS messenger if they need two apps.
About 10% of contacts moved to Signal. I lost touch with the rest and Signal was in many ways worse than WhatsApp for everyday communication.
I ended up using WhatsApp again. For me, it's too popular to leave.
So until that happens, what messaging app would you recommend switching to?
Also signal needs group video chats..
I've never used WhatsApp so I don't know what is so special that so many people seem to use it.
Other, than this, Threema looks promising.
Microsoft in my opinion is a far more respectable company compared to Facebook.
With the new options they are single provider, centralized, and locked in. Matrix is an exception in some categories.
It's kinda sad how the technology landscape shifted.
> BBMe is available for Android™, iOS, Windows®, and macOS devices.
So, no Linux, by the looks of it. Or browser.
But I've put it on the list ... thanks.
Because WhatsApp's moat/lock-in-effect is that ~2 bln people use it whilst the second largest listed here, Telegram, has around ~400M.
By this comparison, on average, by removing WA and limiting one's social circle to Telegram, chances are, that you cut ties with 4/5 of your contacts.
People that cared to chat with me installed Signal on their phones but still use whatsapp for their other contacts.
In fact I've dumped WhatsApp in favor of Conversations several years ago, when Facebook bought WhatsApp.
(I'm pretty sure that Facebook already helped themselves with all of WhatsApp's data back then, and this recent development is only ass-covering...)
And xxxx/XMPP isn't on the list because when I last looked (which was some time ago) everything was unusable for muggles, same with Matrix. Responses to this poll have convinced me that the landscape has changed, although most of the suggestions are still inappropriate for someone who just want to use something, without having to understand everything about the underlying protocols.
So, back to XMPP, or Matrix. Which client would you use/recommend?
BTW, I use it with my mom. And even though I was the one that set up her XMPP account at https://jabber.lqdn.fr/my/create.php , as you can see it's quite straightforward to do ! (And other servers might have an even easier, more mobile friendly version by now, IIRC Conversations itself is suggesting one ?)
As for Matrix, see this other comment of mine :
It is encrypted, uses email under the hood, and they have a large amount of funding as I understand it. The independence and cross-provider nature of this option means whatever email provider you use, they get very limited data about you and your contacts.
There won't be money in it for them. But it would even further improve their privacy-first market(ing) position.
And they would have the leverage to really achieve it.
Remembering which contact is in which app is a pain. Now explain that to your non-tech friends.
It'll be really sad if a bunch of people leave WhatsApp, which actually had good encryption, for services that don't even try to protect users.
I really like line because their desktop app is extremely good, very fast and doesn't consume a lot of resources (it's not an electron app :))
I'm watching Slack closely since the sale to Salesforce, and will switch those groups to Telegram or Signal if I see cause for concern.
But be careful with them. I have lost message with them. One client show the message, the other wont. And a scary room update process. I always scare of losing message with their Element client.
One thing that I am considering is keeping WhatsApp around without leaving any of my groups, but making very strong efforts to only send new messages through my new service.
I have iMessage, Whatsapp, Telegram on my phone. Each one is used to reach a certain group of people. I also have Signal, but nobody is on there and I never use it.
By the way, bare e-mail is usually enough if you omit bloated signatures and quotations and just send short messages that way. There even is a Telegram clone which actually is an e-mail client.
For this cycle of tech walled gardens are de rigueur. Maybe next decade it'll all revert to interoperability again. I'm not holding my breath though.
I just installed signal on my wife's phone and she doesn't have anyone using signal as well.
How can we build the network effect when the network effect is so strong for WhatsApp!
Don't get me wrong - I love IRC, and have used it as my primary social network for years. And after spending a full decade trying to switch people over to open protocols, I've found the hard way that the network effect trumps all.
I just don't see the average Whatsapp user ever switching to IRC.
The participants of this thread are not the average Whatsapp user - they're self-identified "hackers".
I have all of them installed, different people use different ones, I don't care really.
It has syncing, a web client and optional one-to-one encrypted chats.
It also uses Microsoft accounts, which many already have because of Windows integration.
I'm not a willing participant in WhatsApp, it's what my boss and coworkers use.
Whatsapp's value to me was negligible (that isn't to say I wasn't using it quite a lot; it's value was just low).
So I'm removing it and not replacing it.
Most of my WhatsApp use has been to stay in touch with friends / families. Planning trips is almost impossible without WhatsApp for me and my groups.
All my friends splittered around Telegram, Signal, Threema, Riot etc.
I wish we could finally find one system to use again.
Of course, I don't think I (personally and directly) know anyone who uses an iPhone ...
So providing those options wouldn't help me, although it's otherwise interesting to note that you'd vote "none".
But I appreciate (and am sympathetic towards) your stance.
Whatsapp became a standard non-carrier app to communicate globally. People do not even know any of these apps. Removing whatsapp from the phone means disconnecting from many remote friends and family members.
If you need anonymous, then none of the above really work either.
I'll wait for a distributed E2E IM or death from old age, whichever comes first.
> I've had that response several times, but XMPP is not a messaging app. It's like asking for an email client and being told "Use the internet", or "Use TCP".
> Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the response, but it's not answering the question I'm asking.
> What app running on top of XMPP would you suggest?
I also installed the android client and it wanted permission for the camera, files and I think the microphone. I didn't grant it any of them and it then refused to work. So it got uninstalled.
A messaging app has to be able to work without any permission except for network access and maybe the contact book.
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
Best software product of the past decade.
It would also be helpful if you could provide brief reasons as to why one would choose one of those as opposed to, say, Signal or blabber/XMPP, for example.
Thanks.
WhatsApp is bad. They are owned by a data collection company notorious for gross privacy violations. Both the client apps and the server are completely closed source, which means either could be spying on you without any way to know. They do claim to implement the secure Signal Protocol, but how do you verify end to end encryption without seeing source code, anyway?
Telegram is a perfectly adequate choice. The user experience is similar to WhatsApp. It does practice some dark patterns - end to end encryption is only available in "secret chats" and calls, which means all other messages you send are readable by anyone with a warrant - and has had some high-profile exploits over the years, but the current iteration of its cryptographic protocol has been proved secure [1] (disclaimer: the paper claiming so came out within the last month, and I haven't found any discussion or review). All of the client apps are open source. The server is not, but if the clients are properly encrypting messages, that shouldn't be a security concern (To my knowledge. I am not a cryptographer).
Discord is community-oriented. It's primarily based around "guilds" (commonly referred to as servers) that function similar to Slack workspaces. A robust role-based permission systems has made it pretty much the de facto standard for large communities wanting a real-time discussion platform (think subreddits, Discourse forums, etc). They have some top-of-the-line engineers who sometimes publish cool blog posts about their ridiculously performant clients [2]. Nonetheless, nothing is encrypted, they aren't open-source, and they have an unclear monetization model [3].
Signal is designed, intentionally or not, as a SMS replacement. It's build around one on one and small group messages. Their encryption is strong, independently verified, and enabled by default (Signal falls back to SMS for others who don't use it). Think iMessage, but open-source and secure. You'll see HN complain about its UI from time to time, but really, it's quite good. It's also extremely easy to convince friends and family to switch to.
Matrix aims to be to real time chat what email is for asynchronous communication. Rather than a service, it's a standard, which means you'll see swaths of clients strewn about GitHub and other websites, the most feature complete of which is Element [4]. In practice (or for the time being), Matrix is just better IRC. VoIP and video calls are somewhat hodge-poged into the spec, but do work well, and encryption by default has been rolling out over the past year. Direct messaging, group chats, and communities are also all supported, although the latter suffers from the IRC-like limitation of only one "channel" per server.
I know nothing about Threema or Viber, sorry.
[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.03141
[2]: https://blog.discord.com/why-discord-is-switching-from-go-to...
[3]: https://cadence.moe/blog/2020-06-06-why-you-shouldnt-trust-d...
[4]: https://element.io/
[0]: https://chatsecure.org/blog/chatsecure-conversations-zom/
Is this a typo for Zoom?
Search: https://duckduckgo.com/?q="zom"+messaging
Result: https://zom.im/zomenglish.html
What IRC app would you recommend?
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the response, but it's not answering the question I'm asking.
What app running on top of XMPP would you suggest?
XMPP has a wide and diverse ecosystem. I am working on curating a suite of XMPP software (a server you can self-host, and an app for each major platform) to produce a single tightly integrated "XMPP package": https://snikket.org/ (and https://snikket.org/about/goals/ for an idea of current progress).
- Unlimited storage that doesn't expire
- Complete API access. There are many alternative Telegram clients because of this, and the official clients are opensource, too.
- Native clients for all the major platforms (macOS even has two official native clients), including a web client. All clients work without needing to link up with a phone. There are unofficial clients for the terminal and Emacs, as well.
- Excellent bot API that gives you the ability to easily write your own bots, and has enabled a rich ecosystem of bots. E.g., https://t.me/InLaTeXbot, https://t.me/MusicsHunterbot, https://t.me/GmailBot, https://t.me/libsan_bot, https://t.me/scihubot, https://t.me/to_kindle_bot, https://t.me/music, https://t.me/youtube, https://t.me/imdb, https://t.me/minroobot, ... . Check out https://github.com/SpEcHiDe/UniBorg for a self-hostable bot that is just superb.
- Good support (best I've seen) for sending text, images, audio, links, etc.
- The above combined with support for one-to-many "channels" has enabled a very rich ecosystem of personal microblogs (ala Tumblr) alongside official news channels. (As this needs networks effects, the ecosystem might not be strong in English. I only follow https://t.me/techmemenews and https://t.me/tldrnewsletter in English, which are bridges to some non-Telegram newsletters I have built myself.) There are also a lot of channels that "liberate" "information", such as https://t.me/HeadSpaceChannel .
- Those channels are also great for private note-taking.
- Ability to selectively export data to HTML (good for human viewing) or JSON. There once was an unofficial terminal app that exported to sqlite, but the maintainer gave up after this feature was added to the official clients. Nonetheless, exporting data via the API is still an option.
- Multiaccount support
- An open and free-as-in-beer ecosystem for (potentially animated) stickers, which has resulted in some really creative stickers, and where one can find stickers for most niche interests.
- Multi-device usage (Signal only works on a single phone)
- Seamless device switching, courtesy of not having E2E on by default. One also doesn't lose history.
- A lot of small quality-of-life features, such as: Video profile avatars; Granular settings for notifications, storage, privacy, ...; Ability to group chats into folders; Ability to group files (including photos and videos) into a single post; Animated emojis; Ability to pin chats to the top; "Instant view" that lets you read a cleaned version of articles in Telegram itself; Rich link previews; Scheduled message posts; ...
- E2E chats are available when you want them, and you can even set a self-destruct on your posts.
- You can fully use Telegram without revealing your phone number to anyone.
- Great support for groups and their administration, and you can always use bots if you want some niche feature.
- Group voice chats
- Acceptable search through everything in your history. (I am not up to speed on what the competition offers.)
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/matrix-one-chat-protocol-to-r...
Idk if that was just a market trick or if it was real.
In Telegram you don't get censored. But it lacks the essential blocking people feature.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25668547
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25669657
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25668659
Edit: if you would like to avoid constant switching in the future, you have to think long-term and consider a distributed network, not another walled garden.
Edit: Matrix solves all problems I refer to.
The point isn't to not give Facebook more data; it is to not give anyone more data. Which is the case with Signal, but not with say Discord or Zoom.
Telegram uses homebrew crypto and for some reason doesn't have E2EE enabled by default.
Like IRC or Jabber?