311–320 of 489 posts
Maybe there's a niche for Valve/Steam to step into here. They already have your data, and many people use Discord for gaming related chat.
Basically there’s no viable alternative.
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There is a week long registration lock protected by a PIN. Your contact list is protected by that PIN as well. They cannot access your chats. All your contacts will get a notification that the contact has changed when they go to talk to your phone number or get a message from your number. https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059792-Si...
This is good and means no one can impersonate you using your phone number, but doesn't solve the recurring costs issue, you still need to buy a new number when someone registers yours, and every financial transaction puts you at more privacy risk. And is terrible UX, imagine having to add your contacts new numbers every other week.
Not only that, but its a unique identifier people generally have already had and generally have already shared and historically been OK with sharing with people they want to talk to. That's a part of the reason why Signal originally chose that way of finding contacts, people were already connected in that way. It makes on boarding people massively easier and greatly reduces the friction of people actually using it. A messaging platform is pretty useless if I can't easily find my friends on it.
> And is terrible UX, imagine having to add your contacts new numbers every other week
Practically nobody is getting a new phone number every other week. And once again, if you are the kind of person getting a new phone number every other week, I'd agree Signal probably isn't the platform for you.
If you don't have a phone number or your number changes all the time, I agree Signal isn't the choice for you. If you already have a phone number, are OK with what having a phone number means in terms of privacy, and that phone number is pretty stable, then Signal isn't a bad choice to use to message on.
It does mean theoretically some large organization (like a government with a warrant) can potentially see "John Doe has this phone number, this phone number is related to Signal, therefore John Doe possibly uses Signal", but personally I'm not too worried about that tiny bit of information leakage. Besides, with enough effort one could probably ID that looking at internet traffic patterns unless you're really that paranoid about controlling your network routing. Especially when that means I'm able to actually convince family to use the platform, as they're used to just looking up people by phone numbers and don't want to have to deal with managing yet another unique identifier on yet another platform. If they had to register another account and manage yet another identity, they wouldn't use it, and thus I'd be stuck just talking SMS with them which results in worse privacy outcomes for our conversations.
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I am not sure I understand what you’re saying. If meta can read those messages, then they’re most definitely not e2e encrypted. Given the historical record, you would be a fool to assume that any service run by a public company isn’t fully tapped by US intelligence agencies. They’ve been tapping anything and everything they can get their hands on, why stop at whatsapp? Let me flip it around: what proof do you actuall…
You didn't actually flip it around at all. They're stating they doubt Meta would ever allow full e2ee, which is not evidence but simply speculation. AND They asked for a source/evidence to prove their hunch is more than speculative.
The original post I replied to simply asked for proof, without also stating they doubt meta would ever allow e2ee.
My post is more directed at other readers who might take the absence of a smoking gun as an assumption of safety.
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I would love to know why it's considered a feature for you. I remember messing with bouncers and reading the backlog from a 3rd party page. Bots that would ping other members when they come online. It was cumbersome.
Saving logs is gross, chats should be ephemeral. In any case there's HistServ and IRCv3 /chathistory nowadays, so if you really want it you can have it. That all the minute garbage everyone posts is preserved forever in an unfiltered state I think is a root cause of the mental degradation that results from using Discord: kids don't have anywhere to 'post into the void' anymore. Preserving past events and relationship…
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> A very sad truth is people HATE decentralization. no, people hate friction. it just so happens that most/all decentralized things have more friction than centralized ones. 99% of people do not give 1 shit in either direction of centralized vs. decentralized. they just want an app that is easy and "just works".
True, but I haven't found any good decentralized options for almost anything that don't have enough friction to scare the average user away. I'm talking about decentralized options that are actually decentralized, not "potentially decentralized in theory but no one uses them in a decentralized way". I do see a future where we crack the code to a smooth flow that does allow for decentralized networks, but it does suck…
I think we're so used to email we forget how well it works.
A polished ui and a couple of fav discord features onto the product milestone plan and I think matrix adoption would start to really pick up.
Everyone talking about this seems to completely forget WHY everyone's using Discord: It's fun . Discord has animated (custom) emoji, loops videos properly, silly bots, and fantastic voice chat with screen/game streaming to a HUGE amount of simultaneous users. The end user can pick and choose who they want to watch on-the-fly while remaining in the same voice channel. The entire concept of a business using Discord for…
They dont just not care that it's centralized, that's the only option they would ever entertain. A very sad truth is people HATE decentralization.