Some of the hurtles I’ve encountered using privacy focused chat apps with friends and family is the lack of smooth group chats and adding people remotely.
Some apps have a QR code feature but also allow you to enter a code. It can be a challenge to setup with older family members.
in their minds, they should be able to buy a device and when they open it up, it should already come pre-installed with their granddaughter’s name and contact ready to go through a mind reading technology that knows that knows who bought the device and knows who exactly they want to talk to and when.
Signal feels the closest, it’s basically equivalent to other messaging apps. Somewhat cleaner and easier to use IMO
The only downside is chat backups for people coming from Messenger, in particular those on iOS devices. Streamlining that process might get me to go “contact me on signal, I don’t check messenger often”, but right now I get why there’s a last bit of friction with my friends
WhatsApp has a similar limitation but they walk you through the backups process. Even then, they limit backups to google drive iirc. Signal could do something similar, but much better by explaining the process and opening up backup locations
We got reasonably close with signal, but I know what you mean. I’ve had friends think I was some sort of escaped convict just because I’d rather use Matrix to chat instead of FB.
Exactly. And I gave up trying even when it was “easier”. Not to mention, since it can’t do SMS anymore, I actually helped my mom. stop using it, because then she’d need 2 different messaging apps. She and I now use Google Messages to text and whatever Google is calling the integrated video chat app now.
Yeah, a new messaging app is definitely a hard sell for me if it’s data/wifi only. I have Discord for unimportant internet conversations that can wait for me to burn data and texting for important things like work because I get unlimited texts. Having a separate app for a couple of people would be annoying.
I seriously don’t understand the resistance. It doesn’t lack any features, people have 40 thousand apps on their phone anyway - just install one more if you want to talk to me?
Signal gets some things right, but others wrong, such as phone numbers and centralized architecture. As such, it doesn’t fit the “everybody wants to use” part.
Seeing how the dumb community feels trapped now that Meta stopped supporting KaiOS, I can tell there are a lot of people that wish they could leave the service. A lot of spaces make you feel like you have to use it, not want to use it. I used a few months while I was in the UK, but after that I’ve been lucky enough to delete my account as the service was useless elsewhere where other places I lived, no one used it.
…That said, I now have issues with LINE as a defacto chat option locally that gets in the way. My account was crushed after they canceled LINE Lite which was 10× smaller with no bloat or trackers & I refused to “upgrade” (where like WhatsApp & Signal, one is forced to have a mobile device as a primary device). Largely I can inconvenience everyone by making them choose a different means of communication (with email be largely the only common denominator) but if I were dating again, I would inevitably be forced to use the unsafe app putting myself in the position a lot of WhatsApp users feel they are without effective choice.
(And are you sincerely suggesting WhatsApp, which is run by one of the largest and most aggressive privacy invaders the world has ever known, as a privacy friendly application? I would suggest re-thinking that position if you want to be taken seriously.)
The guy I replied to is saying that not everyone wants to use Signal because it’s centralized and based on phone numbers. But billions of people use WhatsApp despite being exactly that. Signal nails the privacy stuff but obviously people don’t give a shit because they’re using WhatsApp anyway.
My problem is that it does not work on multiple devices at the same time, so I have personally given up on it. Maybe it has changed, did not check for a long time.
I don’t think they’re in trouble, they’re just talking about long term funding because it’s relevant. Can’t expand and get more funding without mentioning that you need it
Of the articles I saw about funding
one was by Signal, estimating future costs
one was by that Grayzone guy, misrepresenting where funds were from (said it was CIA lol), how much was being changed (title implied it was entirely CIA funded but it was a past, publicly documented investment by a government program)
Signal is great. I miss when it worked with SMS. There are 2 E2EE SMS apps that I’m aware of, bit one is not well supported and the other needs quite a bit of UI work before it’s usable by the general public. Also, neither can be used as the default SMS app on Apple phones,but that’s not the app’s fault.
Banks could simply come together and develop an open banking standard for customers. Would probably save them a lot of money too, since the development of their stupid apps presumably costs them a lot.
Banks in the US use Open Banking APIs too, they won’t open it up for the public to use, though. Every company, not just banks, wants us to have their app on our phone.
I was developing these apis for one of the biggest banks in central/eastern Europe.
You’re right that they are not intended for bank to customer access directly. What they allow though is for third parties (other banks, mobile apps, services) to access these apis. It requires a licence though.
Point is that a lot of banks in Europe allow to add other bank‘s accounts to their app. Also aggregator apps exist.
Not sure if this already exists in some form, but I want something that always records where I’ve been. I am a very forgetful person and the Google maps timeline feature has been very helpful more than a handful of times. Unfortunately, it means that Google knows exactly where I’ve been also…
I just want to be able to check where I was the afternoon of a random Tuesday three years ago!
I use GPS Logger as well. Everything is saved locally in a kml file. The trick is to find an optimal settings which gives you enough data points but doesn’t kill your batteey in the process.
A browser addon that utterly floods advertisers and trackers with dummy data. A single person using it is easy to single out. A thousand start to eat into the profits. 100k should make them go offline (DDoS’ed) with an interesting frequency.
For real! One of the things that made using Signal a non-issue for me was due to it being able to use SMS as a fall-back and therefore didn’t need me to push friends to also install another message app. I really only first installed it because it was the messaging app my local chapter of the SRA was using. I was excited that it did the shit I loved about the old Google Hangouts before they unnecessarily chose to break shit back out into three replacements. Being able to use a more feature rich messaging service when the people I am messaging also have it is awesome. But being able to still send a basic SMS from the same app without leaving is super nice. It is the main thing I always envied about how iMessage has worked basically forever.
Fortunately some of my friends and co-workers also have needed to install Signal for similar reasons I did or for remote therapy stuff. But it is so hard to get others to just install it just because it is privacy focused and since we already have Facebook Messenger/Discord/Snap/IG/Line and of course SMS. Also hate feeling like I am being pushy or annoying unless I am directly asked about apps to try or some specific reason.
I also have fond memories of using Gaim/Pidgin back in the day for being able to just have one IM client that could work with basically whatever any of my friends/contacts liked using. A universal chat/message client really seems like something that would be cool to see come back.
I also would like to have a universal messaging client but sadly it doesn’t seem possible , just look at the recent reverse engineerediMessage apps, why would you waste all that effort reverse-engineering proprietary chat apps, when they can get (and will get) shut down by the service. Especially while better, open protocols exist.
Try beeper, it’ll let you use sms and signal (among others) on the same app, the app isn’t open source but their server infrastructure is open source and self hostable (it might not be easy to self host it though)
Something that produces a wealth of plausible web traffic on my connection and browser that woefully misleads anyone monitoring it as to what I actually am browsing. Rather than hiding my traffic or ensuring some hyper level of encryption I simply want to use maybe an LLM or something to create such a close facimilie to “normal” online traffic that my online fingerprint becomes useless as sub 5% of my traffic is actually real.
Essentially I want privacy through drowning out everything with noise. It seems like the harder the to unwind in the end if done in a clever way. That plus some basic security protections and I will feel fairly secure.
That’s the premise behind AdNauseam, albeit only for ads and not general navigation: It clicks all the ads in the background, so the data won’t ever target the real you.
Not sure if this counts, but a simple FOSS BIOS/UEFI option that could be installed on most desktops and laptops. The current options (Libreboot, coreboot) are too limited by hardware compatibility.
A version of WhatsApp that doesn't require full access to all your contacts to work properly. I have about 10 people I need to Whatapp with - I just want to add those people. Meta doesn't need to know my Doctor's phone number.
The hard part is getting used to it. How do I share my public keys? How do I use GPG (the program)? How do I access them easily? What do I do when I want to encrypt my mails on desktop (maybe Windows+Linux), laptop, and phone? It’s just relatively much work to gather the knowledge.
I want to legally buy my movie paying it to the creators, and be able do do whatever I want with my copy with me knowing I bought it just for buying it and being allowed to Own it without it being a DVD, because I don’t want DVDs, because I live in 16m² and I move way to often, while keeping the concept of buying it
Add comment