Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
I don't really like Apple, but once in a while they do the right thing. This comes from the App store's new labels on apps.
Signal just has "Contact info" under the "Data NOT linked to you" category. This is just the phone number + contact discovery.
There's another post adding telegram here. This is what it looks like:
How is telegram holding up here?
Personally Signal seems the best, but I constantly have messages that get delivered like 12 hours late - which is a deal breaker.
Not very well. Telegram is not fully open source, E2EE is off by default, they use their own weird cypher, etc.
This thread has some very good suggestions, so if Signal isn't your cup of tea, I'd suggest taking a look at one of them.
Honestly, if getting people to get a jabber account wasnt such a pain that would still be my go to solution.
None of the other apps really do it for me. I ran matrix/element for a year or two, was way to unstable for daily use and impossible to get friends to migrate.
Signal has the benefit of incorporating SMS as well, but it's been fairly hit or miss with message delivery for me and some friends.
Telegram works fine but isnt fully open source
Yeah, there's no perfect solution, unfortunately.
If you don't mind me asking, what issues specifically did you encounter with Element/Matrix? I'm trying to get my friends on Element and was under the impression that it's good enough? Haven't used it in a while though, so I could be wrong.
When I used it last the homeserver issues were to frequent. Delays in delivery, service outages etc.
And it was difficult getting more than a couple of friends on board. So it fell to the side for me.
It might be better these days tho, I dunno.
I'm also not overly fond of Electron apps. (I mainly use desktop versions as I dislike smartphones in general;))
Oh, I feel you. I hate Electron apps with a fiery passion. Thankfully Element has tons of clients to choose from and if I ever get my friends on it, I will NOT be choosing the default desktop app. Anyway, thanks for the info!
I have toyed around with a couple of the other, actually native, apps. They were pretty nice back then but not really feature complete. I assume that has changed somewhat since I last used it. :)
Telegram is far far behind Signal. In terms of privacy, it's not owned by a big Corp but Signal isn't either, and from a technical perspective, Telegram has pretty no E2EE, while almost everything in Signal is E2E encrypted.
The issue with the messages being delivered late only happens when there are notifications issues too. Check your settings. Also, it seems that when an app isn't opened for a while, it looses the notifications. I have that issue with element.
for what? turn off notifications? thats pretty useless.
It's happened quite regularly for me, and I mainly use the desktop version.
When I enabled it for SMS as well I missed several important texts for a day or so.
So all in all, I have not really been that impressed with it.
I've been using Signal (the apk downloaded from the site, not the play store one) for a long time, and I've never faced a delay when sending or receiving messages until the last few days. My dad started complaining that he hasn't received any of my texts, and he is not able to send images to me either.
In this case, he just had to update the app.
But people face this issue when their phone itself decide to doze off Signal. If you are facing the issue, you might as well disablle battery optimizations, install APK directly (or build one yourself), or change your ROM.
What I am reading here is that it's definitely not the app to get my non tech friends to install.
Notifications delay is a common issue for every messaging app relying on google's push notifications, because based on the android specs, manufacturers are allowed to aggressively "battery-optimize" apps relying on FCM for push notifications. WhatsApp is not relying on them for example, and in a lot of cases OEMs specifically whitelist it from aggressive battery optimization. I've had this issues with friends that started to use Signal, Telegram, Wire and even Slack and DiScord. They were not receiving messages until I told them how to exclude the apps from aggressive battery optimization. Unfortunately there isn't a common standard way to do that, but every OEM has its own place in the settings to check (and sometimes it's more than one). You can refer to https://dontkillmyapp.com/ or to Slack's help page about this issue, which is quite well explained
That explains a lot of things. I don't receive notifications in apps I rarely use, but What'sApp always worked (while other widespread apps didn't like Discord or Slack). The fact that it's in an allow-list for this kind of stuff explains it. Fuck What'sApp!
For me, installing it on the play store worked fine for all of my family and friends.
Wasn't OpenWhisper Systems, the maintainer of Signal, acquired by Twitter?
According to the timeline on Wikipedia :
The foundation is still here and relies on donations, to pay for development and hosting. So what your saying is near the truth (and I wasn't aware of that actually) but today Signal is a fully independent non-profit.
Thanks, would that explain the change from TextSecure and RedPhone to their merger into Signal?
You can check out the Timeline on Wikipedia, they did change the name to Signal after merging RedPhone and TextSecure.
Check the signal app settings. The app should be allowed to use any battery it wants etc, many android flavors give it a battery restriction which inhibits signal from working in the background.
And the reason why should that matter for my desktop app is? If my phone is off won't the desktop app run?