https://soatok.blog/2024/05/14/its-time-for-furries-to-stop-using-telegram/
Edit: Oh yeah, DON’T USE SIGNAL. Use Matrix instead, offers the benefits of signal without the drawbacks of lack of sync and phone number requirements and is decentralized. The fact that everyone is going gaga for signal as “the BEST messaging app” should be a big red flag in and of itself, because hype trains like this aren’t organic, just saying.
It’s time to eradicate any unencrypted, proprietary and maybe even central messaging service in general.
One step ahead of the curve; I never started using it in the first place.
I don’t really use it either, but I thought it would be relevant to post here since the pawb.social network uses it to communicate outages, so it might be best for us to try to move away from that to something else, maybe something a bit more open.
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I will literally never use signal until they change it so data is archivable in some form and syncable across devices. I won’t recommend people use it. I don’t care how secure it is. Security is important, but usability is where telegram has signal beat by miles. I’m not hiding nation state secrets. I’m horny posting and chatting with other weirdos that like to be animals on the internet.
Yeah I know this is a hot take but I don’t really like signal much either, but for me it’s mainly because it is a centralized protocol and they attempt to maintain exclusivity over it (Moxie used to go after third party clients because of this).
That’s why I feel matrix is a way better alternative. It still has the option of being secure with the E2E encryption and so long as you save your keys you can still retrieve older messages on other devices. It also has the ability to create public chats, same as Telegram, but with the addition of Spaces, which can group connected chats together (almost like a discord server, except you can also join each room individually).
Also matrix doesn’t require a phone number to sign up so it’s significantly better than Signal in that regard because signing up with email is much more convenient, and probably more secure than phone number sign-up since you can simply use temporary email services.
might I suggest using Matrix instead? End to end encrypted and fully open source (client and server), plus message history gets synced to new devices (assuming both your old and new clients support it, which nearly all do), and as a bonus it doesn’t store data on a centralized server.
Oh, and it supports sticker packs and custom emoji.
I use Signal a little. While it doesn’t sync full history you still get all new messages going forward which is good enough for me.
So I see Signal recommended instead, but one thing sticks out like a sore thumb. If it’s privacy-focused and it has a windows application, why the need for a phone to set it up?
Signal is a terrible recommendation for any basic chat user. The security is solid, but you give up sooooooo much to get there. The desktop apps are garbage as well, they don’t even sync chat history.
Why is it a terrible recommendation for a basic chat user? If by “basic chat” you mean SMS or iMessage, it is strictly superior
Sync, system support, hoops to jump through, potential loss of chat history, unreliability, lack of account based sign up (until recently?). So many reasons to not recommend it for people. To clarify though, SMS and iMessage are both so terrible I don’t consider them “options”. They’re defaults for people who have no interest in security or interoperability, which are both major important parts of a chat system imo.
Sync
Works fine for me.
System support
Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, Android, what more do you want?
Hoops to jump through
What hoops? I typed in my phone number and was good to go.
potential loss of chat history
You said that already. If the worst thing you can say about the messenger is that it doesn’t sync chat history to new devices, it’s probably a decent messenger.
unreliability
Genuinely what?
lack of account based sign up
Like I said, if were comparing it to messengers people are already using, like iMessage or RCM, this is a nonissue.
Sync: No it does not. Do not lie. They don’t support it, it will deliver the message to multiple endpoints, but that is not sync.
System support: The clients for desktop for signal are feature lacking trash. I want all platforms to be first class citizens and it’s VERY clear they are not.
Hoops: Bullshit bro. Bullshit. You might glance over all the steps but that doesn’t mean they’re not there.
Chat history: If I can say at all that it loses my fuckin chats, that’s a shit fucking chat application. I have plenty more trash to talk if ya need it though because that app is hot fucking garbage.
Unreliability: If you spent even a fraction of a minute googling it, you’d see that a lack of notification delivery and other bugs are extremely common. I’ve experienced them. It’s great you’ve had a happy go lucky time, but your experience isn’t the end all be all.
Lack of account based sign up: Literally a massive issue and you’re just dismissing it because it doesn’t affect you. Goodluck getting anyone to hop on board your software preference train with that kind of attitude.
I guess Telegram is better than Facebook Messenger but I’m not sure what else it had going for it.
Stickers.
A lot of Stickers.
Lax moderation policies allowing for many groups to do what they want without getting banned (for a while anyway).
Signal does not sync chats across devices or store chat history. Telegram has that going for it. 🤷♂️
I’ve been using Signal for years, and I can definitely say it’s not “garbage”. I’m not telling anyone else what to use, but there are far worse options out there for sure.
That is true, there are definitely much worse messaging platforms out there.
I’m mainly calling out signal because in terms of private messaging platforms they are one of the only ones yes but they are also pretty bad due to their centralized dependence (and the fact that they insist on staying centralized) the fact that they are insanely and (most likely) artificially overhyped doesn’t help at all, and if people want to choose a better one they should choose one that isn’t going to end up having the same problems.
Obviously many signal fanboys would argue that it just wouldn’t happen, that signal could never enshittify but they fail to understand that centralized services can be fundamentally restructured in ways much harder than if not impossible with decentralized ones. Also the fact that companies, even non-profits can be influenced by money and even go public. Overhyped centralized bullshit is not the solution, and it never has been.
I generally agree with you. I haven’t seen Signal getting much hype outside Soatok mentioning it the other day, but I could see it as it’s something close to Telegram and people always try to go to whatever is the next closest thing. That said, Matrix isn’t without it’s issues either. While I also prefer decentralized, open source, software, (one of the main reasons I’m here,) my experience with Matrix and XMPP hasn’t been great. Largely because nearly no one I know uses them.
I haven’t seen it hyped as much recently (at least not outside of alt-right spaces) but I do remember a time when people wouldn’t shut up about signal.
Matrix certainly does have it’s issues, biggest one being that you can lose your encryption keys and with it message history, though it’s still much better than what you get with signal where you lose message history if you lose that device or lose your account if you lose your phone number (emails are more portable and permanent than phone numbers but you also don’t need the email to log in again, last time I used signal you do need your phone number to log in).
XMPP seems very glitchy and unreliable, I also wasn’t really able to find very good clients on Most modern platforms, but I may not have been looking hard enough. I also didn’t find many rooms of interest on XMPP so lack of people using it is definitely real, though I found no shortage of rooms on Matrix.
Using them to talk to people you know can be hard if people you don’t know don’t use them, I know Matrix does have bridges but I haven’t tried setting those up and I’m not sure how well they’d work.
@crashdoom@pawb.social @natebluehooves@pawb.social Mentioning because this is relevant to our instances since we’re currently using Telegram here, we may want to consider alternatives like Matrix, or even just a simple RSS Feed for updates.
Whatever we choose it probably would be best to eventually move on from Telegram, even if not immediately, as user experience on Telegram will likely continue to get worse in the future.
Yeah, we just started hearing about this recently. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I have no problem with us moving the announcements channel somewhere else. My main complaint with matrix is that only a vocal minority uses it at the moment, and hosting yet another service before we have our house in order is a bad move anyways.
We use private groups on TG currently for the mod/admin live chats, and I personally can’t ever fully uninstall because it’s my primary point of contact with my parents who live out of state. I already got them to jump ship from SMS for higher quality picture uploads, but I don’t think they would care enough about this to change again.
Once I get our storage and infrastructure in general into a state where I don’t have to babysit it I will likely revisit running a matrix instance, but it won’t likely be our primary status channel. I feel we need to prioritize ease of access to get announcements in front of as many eyes as possible.
Also this is rich coming from me in the middle of an episode of insomnia, but please get some rest if it’s anywhere near as late as it is here!
(Posted under wrong comment, moved it here. Don’t lemmy at 3am folks.)
Benefit of Matrix is that it offers bridging chat to and from other chat applications. It eases transitioning to it as you can have all your chats in one place.
That’s pretty cool, but honestly our storage situation is a tire fire that needs fixing and I have too many other projects I am neglecting right now. Depression sucks >.>
Plus, honestly the last thing i need is another attempt to unify all my communications that ends up needing to be babysat. I only get a few hours of motivation per day, and running pawb.social commonly monopolizes that time.
Second bit i missed: not actually against an rss feed. May bother crash about it and see if we can just embed an rss feed into the status page proper. Maybe try to make a simple system to simulcast announcements to two places at once if we need to.
Maybe rss for announcements, and an official matrix channel for discussion? We currently use reactions on the announcements to gauge how everyone is handling our responses.
Having the announcements simulcast in multiple places is probably a good idea since it makes it more redundant in case one service isn’t working properly.
What do you think about soatok’s very vocal opinions regarding matrix? It was at the end of the article. They linked a wall of text of opinions about how they don’t trust the developers of matrix to build a safe platform.
I’m impartial about both platforms, and the way I see it is that Signal would be great if it was decentralized, and Matrix would be great if it used a different type of protocol, even though Matrix does use a fork of a protocol that Signal uses.
I’m not sure what the difference of the protocols Matrix and signal use so I have to look into that in my own time to really find out why one is better than the other like soatok claims haha
Edits: Formatting
I think criticism of matrix as a platform and protocol is valid and can help build a better decentralized ecosystem. We need to address the flaws in order to make it better.
I still think Matrix is probably the best way moving forward since its only real alternative is XMPP, which yeah, better than nothing but not great. Also relying on and ultimately hyping centralized solutions is relying on one guy to not love money more than “the dream”, and his reputation, which always ends up happening at some point in the end (every one of us are susceptible to it, just keep adding 0s). FYI whatsapp used to be just like signal, E2EE zero knowledge, over-hyped privacy messaging app, then they sold it to Facebook who backdoored it and made that not true anymore.
Pushing for a service that ultimately can and very likely will have the same fate, especially when this app is overhyped too just feels irresponsible at least in my opinion, especially since centralized messengers are the hardest to break away from.
I’m impartial about both platforms, and the way I see it is that Signal would be great if it was decentralized, and Matrix would be great if it used a different type of protocol, even though Matrix does use a fork of a protocol that Signal uses.
I think if signal were decentralized it would be awesome and possibly even better than signal in some ways, I also wouldn’t really have any issues with it being given as an alternative to Matrix or XMPP, since it wouldn’t have the same deep issues it has now. Though it isn’t and their developers’ attitude towards decentralization shows that it probably won’t be (someone could fork the open source parts and make it so but it wouldn’t be signal, that would be something else).
I’m not sure what the difference of the protocols Matrix and signal use so I have to look into that in my own time to really find out why one is better than the other like soatok claims haha
I’m not really sure either, I’ve heard that they use similar protocols underneath but I’ve also heard from others that they are drastically different. So hard to say.
I agree of addressing flaws for sure, makes for safer software!
I also prefer decentralized networks over centralize for obvious reasons and your point about signal possibly falling into the WhatsApp route is very valid as well since it has happened to companies before.
At this point it really comes down to personal preference, there are strong arguments for both sides, hard to choose! Hah, will definitely have to look into those protocols to get a clearer picture.
Yes Signal has issues, but it works well and in what it does is really private and really secure. Matrix is slow, not private and pretty messy
tbh signal is better than matrix because… of stability. matrix is VERY VERY unstable for me, and very glitchy
