Moved to signal today, plenty of people in my contacts are following suit (was way easier than I thought). I've never had a facebook account, had WhatsApp before facebook bought them. I will also have to jailbreak or dump my oculus quest if they force me to sign up.
Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
481–490 of 972 posts
Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
#482What are you sharing that Facebook hasn't already mined?
Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a reminder, Telegram groups are not encrypted at all, and 1:1 chats are not encrypted by default, so while WhatsApp might see your contacts, Telegram can see most of your messages.
As a reminder encrypted messages aren't easily searchable -- this is a simple trade off and not some dark pattern default. 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.
> As a reminder encrypted messages aren't easily searchable
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.)
Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
#484NOTE: I don't know what Zom is so ignoring it in the below. 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 ir…
> 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
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.
Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
#485Couldn't we have an open-messaging standard so that different apps can send messages to each other? Similar to open banking in the UK (law). Of course, the big players won't want that, but the smaller ones could start it.
We had that, it was called IRC. Then it was XMPP.
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.
Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
#486I use Telegram long before it became sort of mainstream and I haven't regretted that decision for a minute, minus their outages that started happening once every few months lately and are worrying. 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 t…
I would like to second that you should avoid Viber if possible. It's clunky and incredibly slow and astonishingly frustrating
Yeah. It rode on the "free SMS" wave for way too long and people still use it because of that... nevermind that SMS-es are free in most of the world nowadays. :D Or the fact that literally every messenger is free and most have no ads (unlike Viber which does have ads).
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.
Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
#487Wire?
Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
#488Skype is also a familiar option for many non-technical folks.
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.
Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
#489Where 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.
> "Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company."
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.
Re: Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a reminder, Telegram groups are not encrypted at all, and 1:1 chats are not encrypted by default, so while WhatsApp might see your contacts, Telegram can see most of your messages.
> As a reminder, Telegram groups are not encrypted at all, and 1:1 chats are not encrypted by default 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. >…
Although they're client/server encrypted, I think contextually it was obvious that the person was talking about end-to-end encryption. "Encrypted chat" means end-to-end encrypted, if it's used to mean client/server encrypted then that's misleading.