I use the apps my friends use but it gets tiring to keep up with so many.
Yeah, there was a nice period when Pidgin could easily handle all the chats. Then providers siloed their apps 🫤
That was the time when all the apps were standard XMPP. It didn’t have proper encryption back then. WhatsApp is still XMPP nowadays, but excluding federation and non-standard implementation on Meta servers and so on
It didn’t have proper encryption back then.
OTR predates all the commercial platforms adopting XMPP, so that’s not exactly true.
Sure, but now you show me all the clients that supported OTR back then 😜 - or now, for that matter. Besides, OTR doesn’t work in multi user chats. OMEMO does, and support for it is still not exactly widespread…
Most popular clients supported OTR back then… Pidgin, Gajim, Adium, bitlbee, Psi, you name it.
And that’s at a time where absolutely no one did E2E, even SSL wasn’t a given.
Yes OTR* doesn’t do group chat, but now you’re just moving the goalpost.
*There has been a proposal in the works for years and years, but OMEMO stole a lot of it’s traction, and the last nail in the coffin was the arrest of Ola Bini in Ecuador as he was one of the main contributors.
You seem to not get that OMEMO is directly based on OTR.
Fun fact, iMessage is also XMPP based!
My brother in Christ do you know what fun means
Federated XMPP is fun yes, defederated XMPP is, indeed, not fun.
Also I’m no Christ’s brother, thanks. Beelzebub maybe.
So is WhatsApp, Zoom, Jitsi
Had no idea about Zoom!
It’s kind of crazy that all these services use it, and on the federated side of things, Signal killed it.
It also powers the communications / presence on many gaming avenues as well like Fortnite, League of Legends, & whatever Nintendo is using for notifications + online status (assuredly a lot more games).
XMPP is old, stable, & massively scalable for industrial applications – while maintaining decentralization + efficiency & allowing for extensibility like OMEMO encryption which is covering most folk’s chat use cases. Since the XMPP foundation don’t put budget into marketing & hype, a lot of folks weirdly assume it’s dead or not being used. It’s strange to me how folks seem more interested in RCS & Matrix despite their histories/ownership/flaws rather than embracing what is already good.
Yeah, XMPP is great and all, but the client side is a big old mess, everything is full of friction and missing support for feature xyz. Have you tried using XMPP on iOS?
Conversations compliance test has brought most clients into an acceptable base to where most basic chat/audio/video needs are met, so if you are comparing older legacy clients then the experience will be different. The XEP system means everything is optional & can be pitched by making a spec & seeing who uptakes the idea. It also means the bar to create your own server is absoluetly minimal since everything is an extension which means you could build one in a weekend which is great for those learning to code since the barrier to entry is extremely low if Conversations isn’t the goal.
IDGAF about Apple since you have to have a wad just to publish an application on their proprietary store & the EU didn’t do a good enough job so it’s expensive to open alternative stores like F-Droid while also being antagonistic towards sideloading as well as PWAs (not to mention needing to buy their overpriced hardware to build/release applications). Heck, you can’t even publish a GPL-or-similar-licensed app on their store. This is a giant slap in the face to free/ethical software developers & probably why the clients aren’t in a good state; if you aren’t trying to make money, why would you develop in an ecosystem that is entirely hostile for you to develop in?
Well said! I really miss having a huge roster on XMPP
We can start it up again. Time to nudge in the next Lemmy AMA to allow XMPP addresses alongside Matrix. You’d be surprised how little things like that can nudge adoption & pique curiosity.
You can bridge to all of the apps in the image from Matrix
I actually tried pidgin maybe 6 months ago just for kicks if it could handle whatsapp, signal and telegram, and whaddaya know, it could. It was ugly as hell, but it could be done.
For whatsapp, my experience with Pidgin was terrible. Stickers had to be downloaded as photos, group chats would only show up once someone sent a message, contacts would only show as the full international phone number, all existing chats were horizontal tabs, like a browser.
Yup indeed, it wasn’t a pleasant experience. Self-hosting Matrix with all its bridges is kinda nice tho (although a bit lacking).
Let’s just go back to IRC and XMPP. The modern “chat” landscape is dismal.
You can just use Matrix with bridges
You got a guide? I have not been able to setup the thing
Easiest way to get going: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
i really fucking hate discord.
Why does EVERYTHING have to be proprietary. Fucking capitalism.
Its pretty amazing for voice communication in gaming.
As a messenging app? Meh
dude discord has been one of the worst experiences for voip in gaming IME. I started using mumble SOLELY because discord was actually just disappointing. Though tbf maybe if i paid out the ass for nitro it’s better? I ain’t paying for that though.
Though yeah, for messaging, it’s dogshit, It’s a mess.
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this is honestly the only good thing about discord, the krisp noise reduction is actually kind of good. It only took them like 3 years to implement it on the linux client. And we’ve only had system wide noise filtering since the dawn of time.
Although since we’re on the topic, discord manages input/output in the single most inconceivably stupid manner possible.
On Linux I use an app called NoiseTorch that creates a virtual mic to cut out background noise in any application
i messed with noisetorch for a bit, it seemed interesting, and worked pretty well. Nothing beats push to talk though tbh.
i get much better call quality in telegram
Don’t like it - don’t use it. It’s a free (capitalist) country.
that’s the cool thing, i dont, but you know who does? You, and you know how i would need to contact you? Through discord! Uh oh!
I don’t use discord
I really wanted to keep faith in it after the ui overhaul recently - VoIP performance was SO much better on Xbox, latency specifically. But good GOD the mobile app is just a pile of garbage nowdays. I have so many friends stuck on that platform, I still end up sharing links there to Lemmy memes and like 60% of the time when I share to the app it permenantly sticks on the splash screen??? 🙄 notifications are fucked these days too, myself & my friend group regularly miss messages entirely, even with direct @ mentions?!
Worse, I dropped a crap review and complained that function has dropped horribly since the update and the devs INSTANTLY replied like “Have you tried pretending you’re a beta tester for us? Do you mind doing a buncha troubleshooting you definitely haven’t already done?” (They wanted me to reinstall the app… Smh)
Anyway - fuck discord. I’m planning to shift to Revolt, but if anyone has better suggestions I’d be happy to try some!
im genuinely surprised discord even tries testing things on the two test branches they have. Yes, you heard me correctly, they have TWO separate testing branches. Bugs literally should not exist on the stable branch.
also when it comes to voip, i’ve enjoyed mumble, it’s pretty solid, minimal, configurable (highly integrated into games already, it’s old af though so maybe not new games) and works pretty well. Revolt seems alright, but it’s plagued with bugs, and weird issues, plus it’s self hosting is just, jank.
We could use a self hosted discord replacement tbh.
Reject Discord, go back to Teamspeak
i would fuck with ts if they would release ts5 and have an actual feature release, until then mumble it is. Shit slaps, and is minimal.
Don’t have friends. Problem solved.
Spoken like a real android user. All my iPhone friends (and especially family) refuse to download any other app, they just complain that I physically can’t download iChat.
As an iPhone user, iChat is mid. I think it’s only in the Us that it is widely used.
Embrace the beauty of Signal now
Kind of ironic considering that with Matrix…
- Forward secrecy is kinda hosed
- they store metadata permanently on their servers by design
- A ton of stuff that would otherwise be invisible and signal is visible in your Matrix homeserver, including permanent history of all group membership
- Your data does not belong to you, and that’s how the server is built to treat it, e.g.
- GDPR deletion is nonexistent (it won’t delete your username or your messages, making it less effective than on Discord, let alone Signal)
… Etc.
Ironically, older federated messaging systems like XMPP might be better by coincidence. Message archiving was an optional addition and some servers, such as the popular Riseup one, do not implement it.
Yeah, fair. It can’t delete your messages to the extent a centralized system, and that’s an indication of the lack of centralized control? It’s a different threat model I think many find satisfying (though perhaps not most).
All those points are about how one server communicates with itself. Federation doesn’t factor into it
huh, yeah that’s fair i did not actually notice that :/
I don’t have time to respond to everything, so I’ll just respond to the first one- which is that it’s tankie copium. I don’t deny the Signal Foundation might be taking money from government groups- I believe it is. But looking at the groups its pretty clear what it is, Radio Free Asia, as in the Asia branch of Radio Free Europe. Aka, their goal is to make people living in US adversaries rebel. The US does not censor private communication, it would be very quickly found out if I sent a text to my friend and they couldn’t receive it, or I was sent to jail for the content of that speech.(That’s not to say its not spied on though.) However, in many(most?) US adversaries there is active censorship of opposition communication, the US generally(although not always) supports the opposition by nature of them being the opposition- this is why(if you believe the narrative that everything is a cabal of the powerful) US tech companies supported the Arab Spring. This is why Radio Free Europe broadcast in support of Dubček and the Prague Spring, why they also supported the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. All that is just to say the US can follow the narrative of being 100% power seeking while still supporting open communication platforms. (After all, the US government also either directly created or contributed to SHA-2, Tor, and Ghidra too) And, Signal is open source, read the code and network traffic yourself, they won’t remove encryption for US allies.
That doesn’t mean they’re immune to criticism, they may be able to explain it, but I personally probably wouldn’t donate to an organization that has the money to pay part time developers $450,000 according to their Form 990, but its not my money so not my place to judge how its spent.
I think most of your criticism makes sense.
The part about “not reading private messages” I think is mistaken, or rather, maybe amiss. I mean I don’t have evidence, so this is all conjecture. The sophistication of data surveillance and data gathering makes the content of the message rather meaningless in my view.
EDIT: Oh, I don’t think any adversaries of US, even if working together, make any meaningful threat towards it. It’s really hard to imagine, esp. considering the US has a bunch of successful coups & stuff under their belt.
I wasn’t saying the US doesn’t spy on private messages, I was saying Signal is open source so it would be hard to hide a back door. So I don’t see how any other E2E encrypted messages could be more secret then Signal. I guess obfuscating the messaging servers.
The sophistication of data surveillance and data gathering makes the content of the message rather meaningless in my view.
That’s a fair point but I don’t know if there’s any other good solution to that.
yeah i’m rethinking some stuff too, even in some utopia i think some information related to me might make life inconvenient, so the best way to protect that (e.g. not disclosing it digitally) maybe needs outta the box solutions.
related, does anyone even bother to look at physical mail for stuff? like if i put a cipher in a letter with no return address, using that pen ink that you can erase (which comes back if you put it in a freezer) and only i and my contact have the key to the cipher which we exchanged in-person; could anyone reasonably know it?
it seems digital stuff might be a carrot for surveillance people, maybe it can be made into a honeypot and physical or analog means can make a return.
I think finding novel ways to communicate with a specific person and not be monitored is easy. The difficulty is opening a new line of communication on an already monitored one, communicating to new people, and one of those new people not blabbing.
After all, if you play on a private Minecraft server and spell out text with dirt blocks, I don’t think anyone’s going to bother writing code to analyze your Minecraft network traffic.
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Just never interact with anyone. Christ, it’s not that hard people! (This comment doesn’t count.)
We’re all bots. You still haven’t interacted with a person.
I really miss how windows phone allowed other chat services to plug in to it, so that you could have a single chat app for all your contacts, but open the individual apps for advanced features.
Same went for Blackberry 10 and its Hub
Friends don’t make friends install chat apps (besides Signal)
Signal is the best, but no way I’m going to be able to get my wife, my friends, my parents and in-laws to use it.
Have you considered emotional blackmail?
No, I haven’t reached that point yet.
Do yo need a wife, friends, parents, or in-laws?
Can’t even get your wife on it? Damn…
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The comment implies Signal is peak chat when it’s flawed & other than maybe onboarding, isn’t superior to alternatives—with the phone number being a pro for onboarding is a con for privacy. It still requires you have an Android or iOS primary device (fueling that duopoly). They don’t want you installing it from a safer space like F-Droid. They still by default send notification metadata to Google & Apple (websocket support exists but drains a fair amount of battery & they refuse to support UnifiedPush). They still ship/use Apple emoji on Android & Linux. It’s still a centralized system you can’t self-host. They still have that missing part of the source code (where I would assume the feds planted something). It still isn’t a good space large chats. And the Electron desktop apps are far too bloated.
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Hi, could you touch on why F-Droid is less safe? Is it because they package (I think that’s the term?) stuff themselves?
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=IzpVI4zaso0
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=lAbgeJau3eE
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=FFz57zNR_M0
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=JiN37bn0OE8
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Yeah yeah we got it you have multiple friends quit bragging about it now
Just stop using the spyware ones?
That leaves you with element, signal and telegram?
Oh, where to begin. Telegram is wild. It may not be spyware in the traditional sense, but they’ve already handed over data to the Indian government, left a telephone number scraping vulnerability open for the Iranian government, and gotten caught with “the most backdoor looking bug” with their unwisely handmade encryption algorithm.
Telegram’s backend is proprietary software and they (very similarly to Discord for example) can just decide to read your chats whenever they want. It’s even worse then WhatsApp in this sense (at least as long as you trust Facebook that they actually encrypt your chats, again, there is no way to know if it’s proprietary software).
And yet no one was able to crack it.
Okay just element and signal then?
In the meme, yeah. There are others though:
Telegram and signal are both central points of failure. Signal can be used with other servers, but the server address is hard coded in the app, so you have to deploy your own app. Matrix servers can keep a channel going even if the channel’s home server goes down. The more home servers there are, the more mirrors of public channels there will be.
Your options are RCS, Signal, or Lemmy mentions. Or losing contact with me I guess but I’m irresistible
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“I only talk to other nerds” basically
Nah everyone has RCS these days except people with old phones and iPhones, and even the iPhones are going to be rcs compatible soon
What is RCS?
It’s a messaging standard, it’s pretty much SMS + Internet features. Developed like a decade ago and apple he been trying to dumpster it since then.
RCS, Signal, or Lemmy
I wish. But I don’t know a single person that uses any of those.
Most of my friends use Signal. Honestly hadn’t heard of RCS till now. Either my phone only supports SMS or I’m too technologically incompetent to enable RCS.
So… proprietary data collecting thing owned by Google, service that requires phone number to sign up, or service that does not even pretend to be E2EE and (worse) routes chat traffic through multiple potentially-adversary-controlled servers on its way to you?
- RCS is licensed GSMA, not owned by Google
- Signal requiring a phone number is a REALLY minor drawback
- Obviously lemmy mentions would not be for messages intended to be private, but for anyone to see, just like this one here.
You know RCS is not proprietary, right
But like saying Android isn’t proprietary.
Like yeah, technically true, but in reality everybody uses a proprietary version of it controlled by Google.
Add SimpleX and Conversations-i2p
Yep SimpleX works great. Although every time I read the name I think of herpes.
Hahaha, SimpleX on Android is fine, the Desktop client is kinda incompatible with anything (no flatpak, the ubuntu version is kinda broken, no repo, their sync requires a random firewall port to be open)
Interesting. For my desktop, I just installed a binary from the AUR and it works wonderfully.
Yeah I avoid installing stuff to my system but I looked into RPM .spec files and that should be possible too. Flatpak would be the way to go though.
Personally, I do the opposite. I try to avoid flatpaks and the like. And the AUR enables that really well
Welcome to security I guess
Security is a compromise between convenience and safety.
However, simply using flatpaks isn’t inherently more secure than using a binary or compiling from source. But it can make it easier to be secure for people that don’t want to manage their own sandboxes.
It’s also easier for devs so they only have to make one version of their app which in theory should work on all systems. But in practice I find it doesn’t always work that way
After posting I realized an exported PNG is the same size and looks much better. Enjoy.
if you won’t talk to me except through insta then you’re not worth being friends with just fucking text me like a normal ass human.
