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9 monthsAfter Trump was elected and inaugurated, Signal has finally been gaining some steam here in the Netherlands.
It’s still an American company, so it’s not ideal. But it’s still significantly better better than letting a tech giant like Facebook have control over the most commonly used chat app.
WhatsApp needs to go and Signal is the most likely way in which we can achieve that. We can worry about the American elephant in the room later.
There is threema, a Swiss messenger that gained some popularity earlier since they had end to end encryption before whatsapp.
Unfortunately the source code is not open (even though they do get annual audits with public reports), and the client costs 3 EUR or something (once).
Yeah, but Threema has basically no momentum behind it at all at this point.
I’m putting my social capital behind the option that currently stands the most chance of beating out WhatsappThen by all means keep that momentum going.
I’m just looking at this from a Dutch perspective, where Signal is seeing by far the most growth.- 9 months
You can help making it stronger. That’s what I did in Germany: if people want to contact me, I usually give them my Threema ID first, everything else comes later.
But my goal is not to move to Threema, my goal is to move away from Whatsapp.
Signal fits the bill while expending far less social capital convincing people to use it.
- philpo@feddit.orgEnglish9 months
And Switzerlands records in terms of privacy sadly is far worse than most people think - even with the last attack being repelled.
Matrix (preferably on a non-matrix.org instance) currently is the preferable non US and privacy friendly way.
- 9 months
I don’t know - this hype about Matrix reminds me of XMPP which was similarly popular a decade ago. Today, nobody even remembers it anymore.
- philpo@feddit.orgEnglish9 months
Which hype? Matrix as a protocol is used for a decade now, especially by various big governments (French, Luxembourg and German governmental messenger, various German states, German and Polish armed forces, German healthcare messenger, various smaller projects in Latin America), is bridgeable (I currently have it bridged to Whatsapp and Signal amongst others) but I really don’t see a hype - on the contrary I only see people predicting me the immediate apocalypse of Matrix for 5 years now, currently due to matrix.org (one of a hundred instances) introducing a premium account model for the most cost intensive (heavily media sharing)users. (See below for that).
Pepperidge farm remembers, and so do I. Lots of people I know use XMPP (Cheogram, Dino, etc).
- RollForInitiative@feddit.orgEnglish9 months
They also offer Threema Libre on F-Droid for all us folks who degoogled their phone
- ornery_chemist@mander.xyzEnglish9 months
FYI, while Threema front-end clients (apps) are open-source (and offer reproducible builds, which is surprisingly uncommon in open-source land), the server component, though supposedly audited, remains closed-source.
Sadly many still don’t want to switch. My most active chats are in signal now but the large majority of chats are still on whatsapp
Not all of them.
I have a non-official chat group with some colleagues, and a chat group for the neighbourhood that are not likely moving just because I am refusing to use Whatsapp. It would just result in me missing out on those chat groups.
Currently I just have both installed, and that is also how I try to convince people to install and try out Signal.
It’s ethical because it runs on donations and has a non-profit business model.
Meta likely spends at least $1 billion a year running WhatsApp.
Please donate to Signal if you use it.
- Arcane2077@sh.itjust.worksEnglish9 months
I like Signal. I even got all my close friends and family on it, specifically to message me because I won’t use whatsapp. The PIN reminders are annoying it enough to be legitimately holding it back from mass appeal imho
The fact that it’s opt-out is already a reason to push people away from the app
- Typotyper@sh.itjust.worksEnglish9 months
I think it was meant as a security feature in case someone picked up your unlocked phone. It perhaps someone cracked your front screen passcode. I know if you forget your password and have to reset it you lose all previous conversations. It’s very secure this way. Bit of a pain… but secure.
- Arcane2077@sh.itjust.worksEnglish9 months
That’s not even what it is lol.
And as the other commenter alluded to, defaults matter. You’re not replacing the thing everyone is already using by pitching “here’s an alternative that is better in ways which don’t affect your usage at all, and also you have to dig into the settings to turn off the optional daily popups”
- 9 months
Proprietary servers is still proprietary software
Don’t let perfection stand in the way of good enough
It may not be the holy grail, but moving away from Meta-owned Whatsapp is already a pretty significant improvement- Luca@feddit.itEnglish9 months
I agree and it would be much better if people would use Signal instead of WhatsApp, but I think there’s still one problem.
Due to how messaging platforms work, every time you switch you lose pretty much everything (messages, media, etc) This makes switching very hard even for a nerd like me, because if Signal is not “perfect” it means that I will have to switch again at some point and lose everything again.
- foggenbooty@lemmy.worldEnglish9 months
I’ve been using Signal for years and my database was getting really bloated with media, attachments, etc but I didn’t want to delete it all. I used this and it’s incredible:
https://github.com/bepaald/signalbackup-tools
Just make a backup from within signal, copy that backup file to your PC, then run this tool. The commands I used make an HTML webpage that looks just like the signal messenger, along with a way of searching your messages. You can choose different commands to export however you like.
I used:
signalbackup-tools [input] [passphrase] --exporthtml [directory] --split --searchpage --originalfilenames
So while this doesn’t help you move off your current messenger, you don’t have to worry that your data/messages will be lost in Signal.
- lemonuri@lemmy.mlEnglish9 months
Thats a problem with silos (where one owner hosts all the servers) in general. You will have to switch the entire ecosystem once the inevitable enshitification sets in. It’s a good idea to switch to something open source and federated (where many different non profit organisations and even self hosting individuals host many different servers). That way you can migrate your history and contacts to another server of necessary but never have to switch the ecosystem again. Think it how email works, it’s the best known federated system. If you don’t like you email provider anymore you can just chose another one and still keep your contacts and messages on a client like Thunderbird forever. Xmpp and matrix are the hottest candidates in my opinion, but you can check the messenger matrix that was linked in a comment above to see what suits you best.
- Luca@feddit.itEnglish9 months
Well said, the problem really is that Signal isn’t federated. I’m keeping an eye on Matrix for now.
You can save any media you care about. And Signal can backup your chats if that history is important to you.
- 9 months
Can I ask why are you so attached to your message history? I recently lost my entire WhatsApp history and it hasn’t made any difference in my life to be honest.
- Einar@lemmy.zipEnglish9 months
Most of the alternatives mentioned have such low adoption that they aren’t truly viable options yet—no matter how much we wish otherwise.
And I say that not as a critic—I actually use Matrix, XMPP, and Jitsi myself. But guess how many of my friends, family, or colleagues are on them?
Exactly.
That’s why I recommend Signal. At least there, people are likely to find folks they already know.
- thedruid@lemmy.worldEnglish9 months
Be careful with that ol’ Chestnut. Circumstances may dictate perfection, where less than such may be catastrophic.
In that case it wouldn’t be “good enough”. But I don’t think this is such an all-or-nothing situation.
Wish more of my contact list would switch over to Signal. It’s nearly the same. I don’t see why it’s so hard for some people to just start using Signal instead of WhatsApp.
Oh well.
- Kekzkrieger@feddit.orgEnglish9 months
Because people are beyond stupid. “i dont want to download another app” - while having an app for almost every other store and bullshit game and whatever
- Victor@lemmy.worldEnglish9 months
It’s super cathartic, I agree. Feels extra good when it’s big tech and fascist-owned as well.
- 9 months
My dad won’t switch from Facebook messenger so now we have to talk via unencrypted sms
- qaz@lemmy.worldEnglish9 months
It is though. I currently use Signal installed through F-Droid. You just need to add a separate repository.
- vga@sopuli.xyzEnglish9 months
And would have FOSS implementations of reference server & client + an openly specified protocol.
Like Matrix.
- Flipper@feddit.orgEnglish9 months
Matrix still has it’s problems. All the meta data is still saved on every server permanently.
There is still space to improve from there.
signal requires a phone number and won’t even allow you to send sms to those that aren’t on signal.
its better, but still not great.
It used to function as a fallback SMS/MMS messenger (like how iMessage does) but when Google started moving to convert Android from SMS/MMS to RCS Signal made the hard decision to cut the fallback functionality rather than follow Google’s new framework.
I personally hope once the dust settles Signal designs a RCS engine and restores the fallback functionality.
- oppy1984@lemm.eeEnglish9 months
Yeah killing the sms function was basically a deal breaker for me, no matter how much I tried I could only get three people to use Signal, the rest were all sms. When the sms feature was removed 2 of the 3 dropped Signal completely, so now the only person I know who still uses it is my mom and even she still flips back and forth between Signal and Google messages when texting me.
I still have Signal on my phone and suggest it people when they ask how to contact me, but everyone just wants to text my phone number.
- 9 months
If you need to send sms to someone not on signal, why not just send them an sms
if they need my phone number to have an account anyway, they can offer both.
i dont need more apps that do the same thing. i need less.
- FooBarrington@lemmy.worldEnglish9 months
It’s arguably a very bad idea for a secure messenger to also provide an SMS interface, since those are basically cleartext
- network_switch@lemmy.mlEnglish9 months
Ya it’d be better if it didn’t require a phone number but it’s a solid start as it’s build up a user base over the past decade. Matrix is good but I know far less people that use it and it’ll be a long time of growing with nerdy/geeky communities before it starts getting more mainstream users
- vividspecter@lemm.eeEnglish9 months
Signal has been a good option because you can get “normal” people to use it, which hasn’t been true for many of the alternatives (except Telegram, but that’s a mess).
- pycorax@lemmy.worldEnglish9 months
The problem is that it was easier to get people to move to Telegram since it had an abundance of features compared to WhatsApp which was compelling for the average person that doesn’t care about encryption. Signal doesn’t have any of these features that make it enticing for the person.
- pheonixdown@sh.itjust.worksEnglish9 months
Signal used to be the best answer to this conundrum, since it would use its own internal protocols if it could or fall back to SMS if it couldn’t, unfortunately they decided to drop SMS support a few years ago, citing users that sent sensitive information not realizing they were using SMS (that always felt kinda flimsy). I really disliked this change, because it raised the difficulty of adoption, from just getting people to replace their default app with Signal to making them manage multiple apps.
Now though, you basically need to advocate socially for the change you want to see in the world. Anecdotally, I started using Signal when they still supported SMS to talk with 1 friend group, and eventually convinced most of my closest family groups to also use it, many after SMS support was dropped. Apart from 1 tech illiterate elderly couple and 1 extended family member, I haven’t received any personal (non-company related) text messages in like 5 months.
- dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish9 months
The sad truth is that the majority of people are treating WhatsApp exactly as a social network. It is there to send memes and stickers. See what others are up to without having to interact. Then mindlessly scroll through reels. Ocassionally purchase something via chat with a corporate bot.
- Chronographs@lemmy.zipEnglish9 months
If you quickly uninstall it because you don’t know anyone using it it sounds like you’re part of the problem. If someone you know installs it to try it out that’s one less person they see as well. Personally I got the vast majority of my friend group to move to it years ago by just saying like “hey Facebook sucks we should move to signal”. If you don’t want to do that should at least leave it installed it’s not like it’s taking up much space
- philpo@feddit.orgEnglish9 months
Overdramatic blog post,sorry. I can’t stand the whole “fremmium” crybabies that then literally recommend the next freemium or “non transparent funding model” service… And don’t understand the fundamental difference between the Protocol and one of its implementations.
Matrix as a protocol is solid and is used far beyond the Matrix messenger. (e.g. the French and German governmental messenger, the German healthcare messenger,various armies,etc.) With a lot of commits coming from there - but not enough funding,that is definitely an issue.
The current issue with Freemium is solely limited to the matrix.org instance. There are hundreds of federated instances out there that aren’t Freemium and won’t have the need to go that way as they are funded differently.(e.g. the Lemmy Instance I am currently writing from, feddit - we are financed through other means) As they are federated it doesn’t matter - and honestly, I personally tend to see this as a good thing - it will lead users away from matrix.org towards other instances, making the whole network more reliable and decentralized.
There are two other issues that are relevant, though: The way the foundation is run is not ideal, definitely - there are and were issues and I am not happy with some management decisions, but at least they are getting somewhat better recently (government board). The whole protocol does not evolve as fast as it should be and this is an issue,especially as a it also affects bug fixing. As an executive for a (much smaller) company myself I see management issues and infighting due to lack of leadership within the foundation and I am not happy with that. The second issue is Element as a company that does things companies do - focus on making money. This in theory would be a good thing if Element would send enough money AND effort upstream to seriously bring the whole project forward. For a long time this seemed to be the case,but licensing issues and the “stale” development off Element X(Matrix 2.0) has me questioning that as well - but recent changes show us hope in that regard. We also need to carefully reconsider if element is keeping too much"closed" source code for monetized features and what influence VC really has. In conclusion: We need better leadership for Matrix,more transparency and more funding.
The good news is: It doesn’t mattter too much - if the current foundation fucks up and goes belly up it is not the end of Matrix - the protocol is decentralized enough and the licencing of the core components permissive enough for another (better?) foundation to start over. There are dozends of clients available and we have alternative servers available by now.
The funding part nevertheless is my major pet peeve here. All around Europe governments try to get rid of US tech - and use Matrix protocol based products. But they hardly if ever fund that. If Germany, France, Poland and Luxembourg (the big users) would give 5€ per year for each client they implement all issues with funding would be gone, Matrix 2.0 would be available in a few months, VC could be pushed out of elements AND they could mandate more transparency.
The issue with funding is relevant for all NGOs and especially in tech. Running servers costs a fuckton of money.
Signal has a respectable amount of backers but is a centralized protocol and when Trump does something shady moneywise their infrastructure,money and possibly even people will be gone within 24 hours.
Threema has a more sustainable business model but Switzerland is,well, difficult, in terms of privacy and intelligence services overreach, especially towards traffic pointing to foreign servers or hosts.
Revolt is a centralized service with no federation,limited selfhosting capabilities,with unclear funding(we are waiting for a financial transparency report for ages now).
Polyproto is still not quite there feature wise and funding, etc. is unclear.
Delta Chat is indeed an option but has massive technical limitations.
That leaves XMPP as the sole big competition if you want non-centralised, non-US based, privacy friendly, messaging.
- eodur@lemmy.worldEnglish9 months
How about Delta Chat? At least as secure as Signal, open source, and decentralized.
- falynns@lemmy.worldEnglish9 months
Humans are too stupid to switch from convenience to slightly less convenience even if they get privacy for free. Any amount of discomfort is too much and changing an app is basically death.
- 9 months
They see no value in it. They don’t see that privacy is proactive measure that can protect you.
On Facebook, especially in my family, accounts get lost and hacked. One fine day, it might be someone with more influence in the family who’s attacker might make off with stolen bank information or passwords.
but “that’ll never happen”, right?
- 9 months
Anyone using Session? I finally got most of my friends and family on Signal so I’m not gonna switch but I just heard about it, seems pretty good.
Basically Signal but without the weakness of a phone number & runs on a Tor-like network. It’s still a work-in-progress thing but you CAN use it to send messages
- Der_Fossyler@feddit.orgEnglish9 months
Have a look here: https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html
I like the comparison and prefer simplex as an replacement to Signal in the Future. Self hosted Matrix Servers are a good idea aswell if you have the money and knowledge.
- 9 months
When you’ve been around a while, you begin to notice certain trends.
This particular trend being the one where the young, bright, ethical start-up turns into the sort of monster they originally rallied against, ensh*ttifying their product and spouting all the same reasons for it.
Signal is relatively young, bright and ethical. The cynic says “for now”.
- trailee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish9 months
Signal is very actively and directly working to pioneer a new financial model for long term software business stability that does not rely on surveillance capitalism. Your experience with young companies enshittifying into monsters is the natural cycle for the surveillance economy, and if Signal does eventually go that way it will be a profound disappointment, but I expect the foundation would rather die first. Check out this interview from last year with the president of the Signal Foundation for more depth on that.
That’s a risk, and a reason I’d like to see something federated succeed in this space. Unfortunately neither Matrix nor XMPP has managed to achieve quite the level of UX necessary for mainstream adoption, nor have the average person’s tech skills and comfort level improved.
Signal’s status as a well-funded nonprofit gives me hope that the current situation is reasonably stable.
