291–300 of 382 posts
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No, you can change the number associated with your Telegram account.
I was talking about Signal. Sorry I didn't make that clear. The phone number is your identity. Changing it means reregistering with a different number. [Edit] And I think it's essentially the same with WhatsApp, only they now make it a less manual process.
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Even if you didn't use Jabber, the #1 reason I recommended Google Talk was that it was very, very lightweight at a time when MSN Messenger and friends were adding stickers and other teenager/young-adult friendly* features. Today, ironically your choices for relatively straightforward messaging on the PC/Mac are: iMessage (Mac only), Skype for Business (the consumer client is too distracting for words), Whatsapp Web,…
> I have to wonder what the product managers were thinking. That billions of people were using WeChat and WhatsApp, and they wanted a piece of that? I'm guessing that's the motivation. As for the enterprise use case, I'm not really sure why nobody cares. Every company I've worked for has had their own internal system for IM-like functionality, some better than others. Microsoft has one included with Outlook whose nam…
Still easier to ignore on a chat than if it entered the inbox or if they call you in the middle of a meeting?
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Even if you didn't use Jabber, the #1 reason I recommended Google Talk was that it was very, very lightweight at a time when MSN Messenger and friends were adding stickers and other teenager/young-adult friendly* features. Today, ironically your choices for relatively straightforward messaging on the PC/Mac are: iMessage (Mac only), Skype for Business (the consumer client is too distracting for words), Whatsapp Web,…
I'm working on a lightweight native client for all major messengers: https://eul.im It's only 90 KB (!) Right now there's an old barely usable alpha out, but a new release is coming up next week.
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I'm working on a lightweight native client for all major messengers: https://eul.im It's only 90 KB (!) Right now there's an old barely usable alpha out, but a new release is coming up next week.
Not native, not 90KB. The first thing it does is downloading an embedded web browser. 90KB the installer. Not native either. libpurple is native.
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You only need the sim card active to activate your signal with that number. After that you don't have to be connected to a cell network at all.
But I still need to keep the SIM card active or I could never switch phones (or reinstall the phone OS) without losing my Signal identity. I cannot ever let go of the phone number I used to activate Signal. In practice, that means I need to keep paying for a phone tariff I may no longer want.
It is true though that you do need to maintain a phone number. That is one of the trade-offs they made to allow it to actually be usable. I have not seen a better solution for encrypted communication yet.
Shower thoughts had me thinking just the other day how I wished we could have a new Pidgin like system. I have a hard time figuring out which friends use which platform and where I can get replies. I want to keep in touch with friends now that we all live in different places, but it's hard when everyone lives in a different chat app that you only have 2 contacts in. It was awesome when everyone just used one or two things.
The fallback to shitty text messaging is the only guaranteed medium for almost all people on one platform.
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I'm amused that IRC is the only one of those you listed that is still alive and doing well.
It's alive, but I don't know about 'doing well'. It survives among some special interest communities, but the usage is tiny compared to any of the major platforms now. You won't find your uncle on it.
Bug or feature?
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Even if you didn't use Jabber, the #1 reason I recommended Google Talk was that it was very, very lightweight at a time when MSN Messenger and friends were adding stickers and other teenager/young-adult friendly* features. Today, ironically your choices for relatively straightforward messaging on the PC/Mac are: iMessage (Mac only), Skype for Business (the consumer client is too distracting for words), Whatsapp Web,…
Discord, is great, works well with groups up to 40,000 and can work as a simple IM messenger, though you still have everything from the group message features as in Slack.
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> And then we have XMPP which doesn't support things like video or voice calling The Jingle extension is about a decade old and it's what Google based its support on. They even played ball for a while and released a good quality open libjingle, then decided that fighting spam from the other open XMPP networks is not worth their time and killed the whole openness concept - despite being an orders of magnitude simpler…
And this is what happened back in the day. AOL was forced to add interoperability with competitors. But our government today is unwilling to step in front of corporations on behalf of the people.