I use the apps my friends use but it gets tiring to keep up with so many.

  • Resonosity@lemmy.world
    0·
    4 months ago

    This hurts me so much: it’s why I revert to text messaging because everyone has a phone number. The only downside is that you can’t add/remove numbers to existing groups, so it can get out of hand quickly with the number of group chats.

  • KuroeNekoDemon@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    4 months ago

    Wait you guys use Signal? Idk a single Canadian that uses it we all use Discord, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, WeChat, and Snapchat depending on the person. The reason why I put WeChat there because I had to use it in university because at the time we had a lot of Chinese international students so had no choice

    • tsugu@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      A lot of people around me are genuinely confused when your email is not firstname.lastname@gmail.com, as they mostly just use it for confirming logins. That’s how bad the situation is.

      • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
        0·
        4 months ago

        I recently started using a + in my email address to make use-specific aliases, so I can more easily filter content from them or see if they’re leaking my email.

        I signed up for a rewards program in person the other day and the strange look I got:

        Do you have an account with us?

        Idk

        I can look up your email

        Ok, it’s foo@bar.com

        I don’t see it, would you like to make an account?

        Yes, but instead of that email, make it foo+yourcompany@bar.com

        Uhhhhh… Ok…

        Like “you don’t have an account but you have an email specifically for our business? Sus AF”

      • EvolvedTurtle@lemmy.world
        0·
        4 months ago

        Damn I’m over here with like 4 emails

        Personal / gaming, the professional one with my name, my collage one, and the new one I made to make it harder to dox me

      • neutron@thelemmy.club
        0·
        4 months ago

        Having an untraditional gTLD like .xyz makes many confused as well, especially those not in IT.

  • myusernameis@lemmy.ca
    0·
    4 months ago

    Random hot take, I’m at least grateful that my wife and I use an app that none of our friends use. Removes the “oh shit did I send that to the wrong person” panic.

  • Anna@lemmy.ml
    0·
    4 months ago

    Yeah yeah we got it you have multiple friends quit bragging about it now

  • repungnant_canary@lemmy.world
    0·
    4 months ago

    And if you have two phone numbers which you want to use for WhatsApp then you need to clone the damn app because they can’t even make such basic functionality

    • LWD@lemm.ee
      0·
      4 months ago

      Shelter is a nice FOSS app.

      Samsungs also have Secure Folder…

      • CertifiedBlackGuy@lemmy.world
        0·
        4 months ago

        Samsung actually allows app cloning for multiple profiles without using secure folder.

        I’m not sure if it’s a list of supported apps or any as I don’t use the feature

  • Clot@lemm.ee
    0·
    4 months ago

    I use telegram mostly because it have great features and its certainly better than any meta apps in privacy and private enough imo. It was easy to get my friends and family on telegram because they loved those features, signal is just… boring.

    • neutron@thelemmy.club
      0·
      4 months ago

      Sometimes boring is better, sticking to the fundamentals. I didn’t like when signal tried to mix crypto into it.

    • preasket@lemy.lol
      0·
      4 months ago

      Wdym “boring”, what do you want a messenger app to do? It does what it’s there for and it does it well.

      • Clot@lemm.ee
        0·
        4 months ago

        Sure, but we have to consider what other people wants too, and if they are getting alot of feature in a single app without any big compromise, they would prefer that and thats perfectly logical.

        • preasket@lemy.lol
          0·
          4 months ago

          From my experience of getting other people on Signal, the main issue is that not everyone is already on it. People generally want to use only one app and it attracts them to the most popular one because they don’t need to switch as much.

          Secondary issues are:

          • No automatic phone transfer (no cloud backups, has to be done manually)
          • No large public channels

          I might add another one, but it applies to WhatsApp too - it’s crazy that there’s still no easy way to move between iOS and Android…

          • Clot@lemm.ee
            0·
            4 months ago

            OTOH telegram gives you option to export your whatsapp chats there making migration a bit more convenient. For the last point, yeah it sucks a lot and fuck whoever is responsible for that…

      • Clot@lemm.ee
        0·
        4 months ago

        and how? dont send me a decade old audit on the protocol which telegram isnt using anymore.

        • strahlemann@feddit.de
          0·
          4 months ago

          chats are not e2e encrypted by default and group chats are never e2e encrypted. even whatsapp is e2ee for every chat.

          • Clot@lemm.ee
            0·
            4 months ago

            And how does being e2ee by default guarantee you are secure? whatsapp doesnt even encrypt metadata.

            • SmilingSolaris@lemmy.world
              0·
              4 months ago

              It’s fun watching people argue about things I don’t care about. Like, y’all haven’t already abandoned your sense of privacy to this world? Lol

                • SmilingSolaris@lemmy.world
                  0·
                  4 months ago

                  It’s fun though. I’m glad they keep an eye on this stuff because I don’t and someone definitely should. But it really is just a hobby. It’s fun how serious they take it. Super serious hobby lol. Love them to death though. Greatful too!

            • strahlemann@feddit.de
              0·
              4 months ago

              I don’t like whatsapp either but my claim still holds. e2ee by default for all chats is arguably more privacy respecting than opt-in e2ee for 1-1 chats only. and what metadata exactly does telegram encrypt but whatsapp does not?

              • Clot@lemm.ee
                0·
                4 months ago

                e2ee by default only for your data to be used when you back it up. Atleast there have been no data breaches reported in telegram so far

                • strahlemann@feddit.de
                  0·
                  4 months ago

                  you can encrypt backups in whatsapp but we might agree on whatsapp and telegram being equally bad then

                  no data breaches reported in telegram so far

                  yes they hand it out voluntarily, search term: telegram german authorities

  • OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee
    0·
    4 months ago

    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.

    • hector@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      4 months ago

      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

        • LWD@lemm.ee
          0·
          4 months ago

          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.

          • JohnDoe@lemmy.myserv.one
            0·
            4 months ago

            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).

            • LWD@lemm.ee
              0·
              4 months ago

              All those points are about how one server communicates with itself. Federation doesn’t factor into it

        • aidan@lemmy.world
          0·
          4 months ago

          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.

          • JohnDoe@lemmy.myserv.one
            0·
            4 months ago

            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.

            • aidan@lemmy.world
              0·
              4 months ago

              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.

              • JohnDoe@lemmy.myserv.one
                0·
                4 months ago

                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.

                • aidan@lemmy.world
                  0·
                  4 months ago

                  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.

        • toastal@lemmy.ml
          0·
          4 months ago

          Meanwhile Matrix was built & funded by Israeli Intelligence (to which I’m sure there are anonymous donors today). It’s expensive replication model means only those with the deepest of pockets can run a server leading many to flock to the mother instance of Matrix.org centralizing, replicating the data to a single node (being decentralized in theory, not so much is practice). It’s funny to see them call out Signal, but luckily there are private, free alternatives to both.

    • Lord Goose@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      0·
      4 months ago

      Element. It’s a popular client for Matrix, which is a federated messaging platform (similar to lemmy and mastodon) with different instances.

      • shadeless@discuss.tchncs.de
        0·
        4 months ago

        Which funnily enough, has bridges to Signal, Whatsapp, Discord, Telegram and some more, meaning you wouldn’t have to have as many other clients installed to chat with contacts on those platforms

        • Matomo@lemmy.ml
          0·
          4 months ago

          I remember looking into that a while ago, but it’s not like I can just instantly hook up my WhatsApp or Telegram account into that, right? I’d need a server to act as a bridge.

          And I wouldn’t be so keen on giving that kind of access to a random server.

          • shadeless@discuss.tchncs.de
            0·
            4 months ago

            Yes your Matrix homeserver does have to run the bridges. So I agree with you - you have to somewhat trust the admins of your Homeserver, or host your own homeserver and bridges. But I understand that the latter is not for everyone.

        • fl42v@lemmy.ml
          0·
          4 months ago

          Although official tg bridges are meh: they have trouble with sending/receiving pics and loose messages from time to time. Plus those work for chats only (AFAIK)

        • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.comEnglish
          0·
          4 months ago

          Not directly no… But there are bridges you can implement (or use on servers that already have it implemented) to connect to those other services.