I have gotten my friend group to switch to using Signal for our group chat. It was pretty hard because I’m the only Android user but I ended up convincing them
Why is that? They constantly bitch about me not having an iPhone, but they won’t download any app that gives us back rich messaging features. I’ve suggested everything except for Facebook Messenger. I’ve pushed hard for telegram, since I use it with all of my other iPhone friends, but they just complain and refuse to install anything. It’s super annoying.
First, Telegram messages are only “transport-encrypted”, meaning that the messages are safe while in transport from you to Telegram and from Telegram to the recipient of your message. Very importantly, these messages are not encrypted while Telegram has them! Even WhatsApp has better and more encryption than that (Called End-to-End encryption, only sender and recipient can read a message).
Therefore, you have to trust Telegram not to look at your messages (they certainly do) while other services simply can’t.
Second, at least here in Germany Telegram has become the main platform for conspiracy nuts and antidemocratic organizations. Someone who is “very active” on Telegram is most certainly an idiot.
Second, at least here in Germany Telegram has become the main platform for conspiracy nuts and antidemocratic organizations. Someone who is “very active” on Telegram is most certainly an idiot.
You need new friends. It’s not healthy for you to keep those. And you should be pushing them to Matrix, signal or something similarly private and secure, not telegram.
Signal sucks, a lot. Try using their “privacy first” service with a VPN. You literally need so solve a captcha on every new chat you start.
There is no official FOSS client. You can use Twinhelix’ Signal-FOSS which works great. I recommend using Molly though, which has more needed features like linking multiple mobile devices (for example using an Android Tablet and a phone, with the full version instead of the uncapable Desktop version).
Signal is still based on phone numbers, which is its biggest strength. But it is a centralized Service, nobody runs a Signal server (apart of the country servers from Signal themselves).
Try SimpleX. It is really great and now has like eveything you need. It is completely anonymous, but can also be different. It gives the users a lot of control, which may not be wanted and confuse people.
Sliding Sync does work fully for me on my Synapse server with Element X clients, it just doesn’t support the “regular” version of Element/Element Desktop (yet?) as far as I know.
The culture war is v stupid, yes. But “use signal” is the same as “dont text your friend with a different app at all” with signal dropping sms. They are in a different position that google and apple, so not saying i blame them for dropping, but i did stop using it once it become “another app” instead of how i text.
oh my god, this (basically culture war) is so hard to witness as a european.
just use signal for god’s sake.
I have gotten my friend group to switch to using Signal for our group chat. It was pretty hard because I’m the only Android user but I ended up convincing them
I can’t force my friends to use it. I can’t even get them to install telegram
Having friends that refuse to have anything to do with Telegram is a God’s Send nowadays!
Why is that? They constantly bitch about me not having an iPhone, but they won’t download any app that gives us back rich messaging features. I’ve suggested everything except for Facebook Messenger. I’ve pushed hard for telegram, since I use it with all of my other iPhone friends, but they just complain and refuse to install anything. It’s super annoying.
Two reasons.
First, Telegram messages are only “transport-encrypted”, meaning that the messages are safe while in transport from you to Telegram and from Telegram to the recipient of your message. Very importantly, these messages are not encrypted while Telegram has them! Even WhatsApp has better and more encryption than that (Called End-to-End encryption, only sender and recipient can read a message).
Therefore, you have to trust Telegram not to look at your messages (they certainly do) while other services simply can’t.
Second, at least here in Germany Telegram has become the main platform for conspiracy nuts and antidemocratic organizations. Someone who is “very active” on Telegram is most certainly an idiot.
Bet the majority of them drive cars as well.
You need new friends. It’s not healthy for you to keep those. And you should be pushing them to Matrix, signal or something similarly private and secure, not telegram.
Signal sucks, a lot. Try using their “privacy first” service with a VPN. You literally need so solve a captcha on every new chat you start.
There is no official FOSS client. You can use Twinhelix’ Signal-FOSS which works great. I recommend using Molly though, which has more needed features like linking multiple mobile devices (for example using an Android Tablet and a phone, with the full version instead of the uncapable Desktop version).
Signal is still based on phone numbers, which is its biggest strength. But it is a centralized Service, nobody runs a Signal server (apart of the country servers from Signal themselves).
Try SimpleX. It is really great and now has like eveything you need. It is completely anonymous, but can also be different. It gives the users a lot of control, which may not be wanted and confuse people.
I hope sliding-sync is merged soon, so it is usable enough that I can invite my friends to our matrix server
Sliding Sync does work fully for me on my Synapse server with Element X clients, it just doesn’t support the “regular” version of Element/Element Desktop (yet?) as far as I know.
Quite nice too!
The culture war is v stupid, yes. But “use signal” is the same as “dont text your friend with a different app at all” with signal dropping sms. They are in a different position that google and apple, so not saying i blame them for dropping, but i did stop using it once it become “another app” instead of how i text.
You should not use SMS for anything. If they actually supported encrypting SMS, it may have had a sense for situationd with no internet.
But SMS is so incredibly insecure and unprivate, that they didnt want to mix it in with their secure messenger.
Having an app also being an SMS app makes no sense as you shouldnt use SMS. But I like Deku SMS which allows encrypting SMS.