I mean, sure, you can use Matrix for personal chats. It’s perfectly secure, but it’s not as easy to use as Signal. For example, if I told my grandma to install Element and send me her Matrix ID, she would be really confused. Signal is very easy to use, and the user experience is basically the same as on mainstream platforms like WhatsApp. I also don’t think that the phone number requirement is a US thing, as Telegram also has it. Signal only requires phone numbers to prevent spam, but they recently introduced usernames, so you don’t have to give people your phone number in order for them to message you.
The old version of Element ain’t great, but it is currently being replaced with a complete new, rewritten app called Element X. Check it out, it’s really awesome. Session isn’t good at protecting metadata, as it removes important parts of the Signal protocol, in order to work on a decentralized network. Just using Signal is probably the best solution for private communications.
No I think you are just stupid. I’m not even American lol. What does this have to do with racism? I don’t care about the nationality or ethnicity of the developers, but about the country from which the company operates or has ties to.
Ok, I see. Telegram tries to combine Discord, WhatsApp and WeChat, but it isn’t a great replacement for either of them.
Discord has groups, chanels, threaded conversations, allows you to mute people, great support for bots, folders, etc. Signal is much better for private chats though, it has a very secure encryption protocol and enables E2EE by default and is very focused on privacy in general. Btw Signal also allows scheduling messages. I tried Telegram for both groups/chanels and private chats and I found it really annoying to have my groups and channels in the same app as my normal conversations. Just use Signal and Discord/Matrix/Revolt.
I get it. That’s why I use Plus messenger. It’s a better, more customisable UI. Private chats, groups and channels are on a different page, if you want it.
Unfortunately I use Discord, WhatsApp, Signal, Element (Matrix) and SimpleX all combined because my contacts are spread out. Looking forward to secure interoperability.
Plus Messenger looks proprietary. You might be interested in Beeper once it’s released, it let’s you use all your messaging platforms in one app. And it’s supposed to be secure and open-source.
It’s not great if security is your main goal for organizing, but it has a better user experience than most chat apps. Especially if cross platform chatting is important to you.
I don’t understand why people like it so much, I tried it and found the experience pretty bad. Signal is a million times better and easier to use, and Matrix isn’t that hard to figure out either.
I started using it about 8-9 years ago at this point, back when the options were FB messenger or whatsapp. Both were trash and limited in comparison.
I only use signal for work but I find the app clunky and unintuitive. Telegram, being a somewhat privacy nightmare, but not connected to a big data broker company, also gives me the ability to search through a decade of messages to find an old joke, a picture shared, etc.
Telegram is simple enough that I can tell my aging gen x parents and apathetic zoomer siblings to install it and there’s nearly zero friction to them logging in and receiving messages. It solved the problem of being added to a new fucked up imessage groupchat every other week as an android user.
You dont have to boil down everything to “left vs right” especially not in Europe. Because if you do, blocking a chat app is by definition a leftist thing to do because of the government interference.
Please keep the American team vs team culture away from Europe.
This is one of the rare things where the Spanish left and right agree, for different reasons.
Simplifying a lot:
The left generally supports culture, actors, theatre, writers, Spanish made movies. They see piracy as a threat to the earnings of those people.
The right has historically cut any sorts of subsidies to the “culture creators”, but they see piracy as a threat to the publishing, TV (…) industries.
They both support SGAE, which translates cleanly to the General Society of Authors and Editors, who protects their interests by charging fees to everyone who dares look at copyrighted work.
You own a bar and you play TV, Radio, or Spotify? You have to pay SGAE.
You buy a computer, part of the money goes to SGAE.
You buy a blank CD, DVD, Hard Drive, you pay SGAE (because they know you will put copyrighted material there, and if you don’t, well, fuck you)
It’s a fucked up system and I don’t know if things have changed in the past few years as I don’t live in Spain anymore. But it honestly feels like a prosecution of the population who is so evil and trying to destroy Spanish Culture.
Yeah, true. Charging a tax on downloaded copyrighted material can be kinda okay if you don’t actively chase it. It’s not right to charge people a penalty for doing something but then prevent them from doing it. You can’t have it both ways, if it’s not right you can chase it, but don’t make me pay for doing something I’m not allowed to do! That would be like having to preemptively pay traffic fines before you actually drive over the speed limit, just in case.
Tbh switzerland has a similar system to the SGAE, where there is a “hidden tax” on all devices that you can load with data. And in turn the downloading of media (with the exclusion of computerprograms and games) is legal. Only the upload of copyrighted material is forbidden.
Not a bad system imo, the tax is so small that you dont really notice it so its a pretty consumer-friendly and piracy-friendly solution. Altho I assume the swiss government gets away with it because it would be too expensive to lobby/legal for a copyrightsholder-favoured system compared with the small amount of people (let alone pirate) who live here.
That’s different, we also have a “canon digital” which means you pay an extra tax on all copying and storing devices. But that has nothing to do with the SGAE, which is a corrupt organization that funnels money to their artist list, instead of giving it to the actual artists that are being played.
Not actually, the end to end encryption is not active by default for example. Its just that telegram is more of a unmoderated social media than a messaging app.
Signal, Matrix and similar are way safer but don’t usually have large piracy groups.
To be honest Telegram doesn’t ban private groups “for piracy” and only takes out public groups that receive a DMCA.
I think the above user is pointing out a rather fun fact - if you’re in some of the many private groups where shit is shared freely…those wanting to ban it don’t like the fact that they can’t see in those private groups.
Like, is there any evidence of private groups being monitored by media corps or their lackeys in gov?
Yeah, more my point is I was curious if Telegram has previously taken down private groups Vs public ones (I’ve seen a fair few of these obviously since they adhere to DMCA requests) but have never seen a private group taken down.
WTF is this ignorant “I know what they want but I’m smarter” crap, if you don’t know how it works you know nothing, and “what they want” you get from news.
I know of a few governments not trying to really. Like the Russian one.
Read something about its internals before saying something as stupid.
XMPP with OMEMO is secure (not for targeted attacks, in that case you’ll just get a trojan on your Android device via some unclosed vulnerability and finita la comedia, or rubber hose cryptanalysis will be applied).
Just use Signal if you want an easy, relatively privacy friendly and secure messenger.
Telegram hands over data to goverments, is infested with spammers and scammers and its encryption is not end to end for group chat which lets Telegram access those chats.
Edit: Telegram is great for lots of things like big groups, communities, piracy, drugs etc but its just not the place where you should expect secure communication.
This might not be relevant because you have other reasons not to use Signal, but you can get android signal directly from their website and via aurora store (on fdroid)
It’s more the attitude that bothers me. Signal’s refusal to support alternative appstores and clients is very disturbing. It gives the impression that Signal is a honeypot.
You seem to have really high standards around who you trust and in the same moment you call Telegram secure. I feel like you should atleast use the same amount of scepticism for Telegram that you use for Signal.
The official version of Telegram isn’t available on F-Droid either, and it doesn’t use end-to-end encryption by default, so it’s much more likely that it is a honeypot
That is not the official Telegram app. It is a fork called “Telegram-FOSS”. If you go to the F-Droid page and click on ‘Source code’, you will see that it links to this repo: github.com/Telegram-FOSS-Team/Telegram-FOSS
This is the description of that GitHub repository:
Unofficial, FOSS-friendly fork of the original Telegram client for Android
Also, it really doesn’t matter where Signal is based, as long as it’s client code is open source and it uses E2EE by default. Telegram doesn’t encrypt chats by default, and even if you enable ‘secret chats’ it uses a pretty weak encryption protocol.
Btw the official version of Telegram isn’t available on F-Droid either, only a fork called Telegram-FOSS. You can get the exact same thing for Signal from a 3rd-party repo: www.twinhelix.com/apps/signal-foss/, or use Molly.
Signal releases their own self-updating apk on their site, and this release doesn’t use Google services for push notifications. There are legitimate reasons why publishers sometimes avoid f-droid.
Also there’s Molly, which is a signal fork that allows database encryption; or Session, which doesn’t require a phone number for account registration and is decentralized. Both of these forks have repos that you can add to f-droid.
I do understand the hesitance to use a platform that has its infrastructure in the US, but I will say that international compliance with the US is a problem even if the infrastructure is located elsewhere. Session is a really promising option, since it’s decentralized, and I’d love to see more people using it.
It would be better even if they just hosted an F-droid repo for their app. If they don’t trust the f-droid organization with building the app, that’s fine I guess. But as I’m aware, they had said no to allf of what is f-droid.
The CEO is a Russian, the company is based out of Dubai, and messages aren’t encrypted by default. In fact, only private messages can be encrypted, group messages cannot. Telegram is not a trustworthy platform and a champion for user privacy like most people think, Signal is what you’re looking for.
It indeed empowers common people by distributing full seasons of series all in one place in a somewhat user friendly way without “10 chicks in 10mt” popups.
A bunch of my friends, who don’t even know how to install an adblocker, have a very rich catalog of things there.
Also, it is more difficult for a telegram channel to be banned than a website.
I mean Telegram has been blocked in Russia before and it didn’t stop their operations for too long. At best now some engineer at telegram has one more ticket and things will be back to normal.
And it is pointless too as there are countless other messaging apps that can be used and countless others ways that can be created to circumvent. Law makers clearly do not get tech.
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