781–790 of 972 posts
XMPP.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the response, but it's not answering the question I'm asking.
What app running on top of XMPP would you suggest?
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Well, I don't know where parent is located, but here in Brazil they are pretty much right. Everybody has WhatsApp... it's assumed that if you have a phone you have WhatsApp. A lot of financial transactions are conducted by doing a bank transfer and then sending the receipt via WhatsApp. The schools send essential messages to parents via WhatsApp. During lockdowns, stores were taking delivery orders via WhatsApp. What…
> What's more, several cell phone operators' plans include unlimited WhatsApp, but only a few GB of other data... meaning when your data limits are reached you can still use WhatsApp for the rest of the month, but not i.e. Signal or Telegram. That makes is rather hard to convince people to switch. isn't this illegal? Portugal had such a problem, but i don't think anything happened since this: https://news.ycombinator…
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> 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 shoehorn…
As far as I know, the Matrix protocol shouldn't be limiting when it comes to one-to-one chats. There are already Matrix mobile clients focusing on this use case, aiming at being a WhatsApp replacement. Examples are: Ditto Chat[1], Nio[2], and FluffyChat[3]. Before trying to solve the network-effect issue (i.e. all people using WhatsApp), we should make one of the mentioned clients at least as good as WhatsApp, or els…
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If the GDPR is any indication, WhatsApp could just choose to stop offering its services in the EU.
That would seriously break the network effect and eventually kill them off. Skype, Yahoo Messenger, etc got popular because they where free and easy to use. However, the market is really fickle and network effects can kill stuff off really quickly. WhatsApp is already DOA in my circle of friends, it might come back but the odds aren’t great.
- Unlimited storage that doesn't expire
- Complete API access. There are many alternative Telegram clients because of this, and the official clients are opensource, too.
- Native clients for all the major platforms (macOS even has two official native clients), including a web client. All clients work without needing to link up with a phone. There are unofficial clients for the terminal and Emacs, as well.
- Excellent bot API that gives you the ability to easily write your own bots, and has enabled a rich ecosystem of bots. E.g., https://t.me/InLaTeXbot, https://t.me/MusicsHunterbot, https://t.me/GmailBot, https://t.me/libsan_bot, https://t.me/scihubot, https://t.me/to_kindle_bot, https://t.me/music, https://t.me/youtube, https://t.me/imdb, https://t.me/minroobot, ... . Check out https://github.com/SpEcHiDe/UniBorg for a self-hostable bot that is just superb.
- Good support (best I've seen) for sending text, images, audio, links, etc.
- The above combined with support for one-to-many "channels" has enabled a very rich ecosystem of personal microblogs (ala Tumblr) alongside official news channels. (As this needs networks effects, the ecosystem might not be strong in English. I only follow https://t.me/techmemenews and https://t.me/tldrnewsletter in English, which are bridges to some non-Telegram newsletters I have built myself.) There are also a lot of channels that "liberate" "information", such as https://t.me/HeadSpaceChannel .
- Those channels are also great for private note-taking.
- Ability to selectively export data to HTML (good for human viewing) or JSON. There once was an unofficial terminal app that exported to sqlite, but the maintainer gave up after this feature was added to the official clients. Nonetheless, exporting data via the API is still an option.
- Multiaccount support
- An open and free-as-in-beer ecosystem for (potentially animated) stickers, which has resulted in some really creative stickers, and where one can find stickers for most niche interests.
- Multi-device usage (Signal only works on a single phone)
- Seamless device switching, courtesy of not having E2E on by default. One also doesn't lose history.
- A lot of small quality-of-life features, such as: Video profile avatars; Granular settings for notifications, storage, privacy, ...; Ability to group chats into folders; Ability to group files (including photos and videos) into a single post; Animated emojis; Ability to pin chats to the top; "Instant view" that lets you read a cleaned version of articles in Telegram itself; Rich link previews; Scheduled message posts; ...
- E2E chats are available when you want them, and you can even set a self-destruct on your posts.
- You can fully use Telegram without revealing your phone number to anyone.
- Great support for groups and their administration, and you can always use bots if you want some niche feature.
- Group voice chats
- Acceptable search through everything in your history. (I am not up to speed on what the competition offers.)
From the listed alternatives, only Matrix is the one that actually solves the issue of not having to trust our communications to any single monopolistic entity. You could add XMPP there as well, but it really doesn't matter. What does matter is for us to start pushing for openness and start evangelizing/helping others to adopt anything that puts us back in control of our communication. This is the one thing to fix, a…
This "we" is nonexistent. It will never reach mainstream usage with its current bad UI/UX, and people have not fixed it. I don't think it will ever reach feature parity.
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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.
Whatsapp group messages are also not encrypted. I mean, it is, but with the server keys.
Is there any texting app that doesn't require access to your address book on iOS? I simply don't trust a single one of the messaging apps that they won't immediately upload my entire address book to their servers so they can have a more complete social graph. I've tried Telegram at one point but it was a huge pain to use if you didn't let it access your contacts (or maybe it didn't work at all... my memory's fuzzy on…
On iOS you can remove access to the contacts for individual apps. I did so for WhatsApp this morning. Privacy -> Contacts -> App Name https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/272067/ (scroll down) -- The real problem is that other people have me as their contacts, and don't mind sharing with FB or whatever other companies.
Telegram won't let you just add contacts locally within the app (ie. stored privately within the Telegram app.) WhatsApp I think had a similarly bad experience. You try to tap "Add contact" and it just tries to access your device contacts again. No thanks.
I want my chat apps to have their own database of contacts, with basic CRUD for adding/removing them, which stays in that app. I don't need them getting a dump of the hundreds of contacts I have on my phone so that they can upload all of it to their servers and "suggest" friends (and likely, sell the data.)
Hosting my contact information on their servers and using invite codes/etc would work fine too (especially if it's pseudonymous.) But no, you can't get a dump of my whole contact database just so I can keep track of who I talk to.