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Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
241–250 of 972 posts
Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
#242Telegram is a great IM experience . The client is good, feature set is good, the stickers are amusing (if you're into that kind of thing), the feature set is complete and everything is polished. Telegram is, I think, going to be one of the easier sells if you're trying to convince non-technical users to switch from WhatsApp or FB Messenger. The privacy, security, and governance story is not great though. If you care…
> 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. 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...
Signal has had backup on Android for a long time. On iOS you can transfer from an old iPhone to a new one now. You scan an QR code on your old iPhone with your new iPhone to exchange a secret for transferring your messages to your new phone. I don't think you can do AndriodiOS. You can have sync between desktop, phone, and iPad. However you can not have messaged synced to two phones or an Android tablet yet.
Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
#243Where 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." Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company.
At this point the game has changed with social apps; I’m including messaging as “social.” It is easier than ever to rebuild the important parts of your social graph on Signal, Clubhouse, Snap, IG, whatever platform you need. I talk to the same friends via Twitter DM, WhatsApp, IG, signal, hangouts and iMessage. Open access to contact books and APIs have made this so easy. I can leave WhatsApp and my network will find…
That doesn't apply to me or anyone I know. I know a handful on signal and telegram but the vast majority are on WhatsApp with a smaller number on messenger.
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.
Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
#244I'm already switching to Telegram after losing my phone. It's been a month and I haven't yet recovered my original number, losing many contacts and messages in the process.
Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
#245Snapchat
Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
#246Telegram is a great IM experience . The client is good, feature set is good, the stickers are amusing (if you're into that kind of thing), the feature set is complete and everything is polished. Telegram is, I think, going to be one of the easier sells if you're trying to convince non-technical users to switch from WhatsApp or FB Messenger. The privacy, security, and governance story is not great though. If you care…
> 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. 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...
That's not entirely true: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...
Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
#247Been using Telegram for a long time. I don't trust it any more than I do with WhatsApp (therefore, Facebook), however it is well done and thought out, has a real desktop client with a real desktop UI toolkit and enough of my contacts are on it already, therefore it's the best compromise to me. I greatly dislike Signal's UI when I tried it out and I've read about some weird decisions lately (that "using a PIN? uploadi…
I'm facing the same problems. All the people in my (real life) social circle are using WhatsApp. All of my friends are calling me crazy that I don't have Instagram, so talking about alternative messaging apps is probably not going to work. I think this is true for most people in the western culture. I value my privacy, but the struggle is to big for me. Maybe an open-source protocol, like how e-mail works, could be a…
There already are IM protocols. The problem is that companies prefer to create walled gardens. Even if a protocol were to take off, what usually happens is that one company leverages the protocol to gain traction, spends enough resources to build a really great user experience, and once they’ve amassed a big enough percentage of users, they toss the protocol and use something proprietary. You’d need the protocol to have at least two popular clients so that the user base is split between them. That might prevent one from dropping support for the protocol.
Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
#248Where 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." Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company.
> Because as much as I hate that Facebook bought them, they're part of what I would call "critical social infrastructure." ... 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.
For some people it is yes. It varies by region though. Since not everyone is in a big French city with a fifty-thousand-student university, different messaging applications are popular in different areas.
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.
Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
#249Telegram is a great IM experience . The client is good, feature set is good, the stickers are amusing (if you're into that kind of thing), the feature set is complete and everything is polished. Telegram is, I think, going to be one of the easier sells if you're trying to convince non-technical users to switch from WhatsApp or FB Messenger. The privacy, security, and governance story is not great though. If you care…
if with Telegram "the privacy, security, and governance story is not great though", why would you migrate from WhatsApp to Telegram in first place? I personally have all 3 (Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram) and use all three with different groups and scenarios. For example: - With my mom and grandmom: WhatsApp - Group of friends from jiu-jitsu: WhatsApp - Work Colleagues and friends working with Network Security: Signal…
> if with Telegram "the privacy, security, and governance story is not great though", why would you migrate from WhatsApp to Telegram in first place?
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.
Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
#250Is Matrix a good alternative to Signal? I'm currently using Signal, but I'm not entirely satisfied. My major issues are that I don't like their stance on a couple of issues: third party clients are not allowed, mobile first and desktop is only synced, phone number required, and distribution only over the app stores. Also we frequently get "encryption errors" and everybody ignores them, this is worse than with SSH key…
> Is Matrix a good alternative to Signal?
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.