I use the apps my friends use but it gets tiring to keep up with so many.
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Matrix and bridges
Only if you tell your contacts about it, and explain to them what a bridge does
Why?
Take Signal to Matrix for example. They use different encryption protocols, which means a message sent from one end has to be decrypted, and then re-encrypted with the protocol of the recipient before they can actually receive it.
So basically, your encryption is not very e2e anymore, and the fact that someone can set this up, effectively giving encryption keys to a third party without their contacts being able to do anything about it is pretty fucked.
Oh, and different TOS between different services also come into play.
So if you do this, at least tell your contacts about it, so they can make an informed decision about whether or not that’s okay for them.
Just self host the bridges. I mean if you trust your phone more than your server, this won’t help.
Do whatever you want, but again, make sure your contacts can make an informed decision about it.
I bet none of my contacts made an informed decision about which chat app they are using. I don’t think that this really bothers one of them. Most of them do not know, what the difference between Insta-pms and Whatsapp even is, as far as security and privacy are concerned. And from my point of view I don’t know it detailed enough too. Making an informed decision about a closed source software and as a non technical person is not as easy as you may think. At least from my point of view.
You’re hitting the nail directly on the head.
Not knowing what’s going on being a bad thing is precisely my whole point
If I own the bridge, nobody but me is accessing the message.
Yup, this is what I do.
XMPP & Gateways
Hey what’s the app tho?
From left to right we have instagram, signal, whatsapp, element, discord, telegram, and messenger
Isn’t Instagram the same as messanger?
WhatsApp is also owned by meta, so out of the 7 options, 3 of them are owned by the same company and yet continue to lack support for interoperability.
The fact that Meta doesn’t even bridge their various services or chat platforms really speaks volumes about what their broader goals and plans are
In terms of being useless, most certainly. But they are two separate services despite being owned by the same company.
Well, actually no
Literally me… I’ve 5/7 of these installed and even have Threema in addition. I don’t need more than one Meta Inc product in my life though
I like Threema a lot, but it lacks basic features such as text editing, so I can’t imagine recommending it to anyone.
How many contacts do you have in Threema though?
Only one that I actually talk to
You mean text editing after sending? I would definitely not consider that a “basic” feature - we are talking about E2EE here, editing a message that you already encrypted locally and then sent on its way is by no means trivial - especially with the kind of E2EE that we have nowadays.
It actually is super easy, barely an inconvenience. When you edit an E2E encrypted message, your client simply sends another E2E encrypted message telling your contact what to replace your previous message with.
I think I have like a dozen chat apps installed but everyone I know just sends me SMS instead… Literally the worst option.
I have 3/7 and I hate it. I wish signal never removed the ability to function as sms
4/7 here. I’m fine with it. Though sms should be included.
Even if it did, it didn’t support rcs
That’s because Google is gatekeeping the android API for RCS
Wait, I thought Google wanted Apple to start supporting RCS. So that everyone can talk to each other.
So Google is just…trying to strong arm apple to give up their proprietary protocol for their own?
That’s so fucked up.
RCS is an open standard. However, on Android you can only use it with Google chat. So android stops any other apps from using it. Nothing to stop you making your own phone from scratch and adopting it.
It’s incredibly stupid, I know.
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Yeah, it’s mad.
Samsung messages app also supports RCS, depending on your carrier, though? It’s super fucking buggy and frequently switches back to sms so I still switched to Google messages, but it does technically have it.
They only have it because they reached a deal with Google.
Are you even a true nerd if you have so many friends?
As long as those friends have strong and inflexible opinions about chat apps then yes.
I remember when WebOS had unified messaging. Those were the days. 👴
Don’t make me cry. Android gets the job done but I miss WebOS so damn much
We can cry together.
Yeah, there was a nice period when Pidgin could easily handle all the chats. Then providers siloed their apps 🫤
I actually tried pidgin maybe 6 months ago just for kicks if it could handle whatsapp, signal and telegram, and whaddaya know, it could. It was ugly as hell, but it could be done.
For whatsapp, my experience with Pidgin was terrible. Stickers had to be downloaded as photos, group chats would only show up once someone sent a message, contacts would only show as the full international phone number, all existing chats were horizontal tabs, like a browser.
Yup indeed, it wasn’t a pleasant experience. Self-hosting Matrix with all its bridges is kinda nice tho (although a bit lacking).
You can bridge to all of the apps in the image from Matrix
Or Slidge
That was the time when all the apps were standard XMPP. It didn’t have proper encryption back then. WhatsApp is still XMPP nowadays, but excluding federation and non-standard implementation on Meta servers and so on
It didn’t have proper encryption back then.
OTR predates all the commercial platforms adopting XMPP, so that’s not exactly true.
Was OTR a protocol where the server had zero knowledge of the unencrypted content? Or was it basically like SSL?
OTR is E2E, it’s the direct predecessor of OMEMO/Signal on which they are both based.
Fun fact, iMessage is also XMPP based!
So is WhatsApp, Zoom, Jitsi
Had no idea about Zoom!
It’s kind of crazy that all these services use it, and on the federated side of things, Signal killed it.
It also powers the communications / presence on many gaming avenues as well like Fortnite, League of Legends, & whatever Nintendo is using for notifications + online status (assuredly a lot more games).
XMPP is old, stable, & massively scalable for industrial applications – while maintaining decentralization + efficiency & allowing for extensibility like OMEMO encryption which is covering most folk’s chat use cases. Since the XMPP foundation don’t put budget into marketing & hype, a lot of folks weirdly assume it’s dead or not being used. It’s strange to me how folks seem more interested in RCS & Matrix despite their histories/ownership/flaws rather than embracing what is already good.
My brother in Christ do you know what fun means
Federated XMPP is fun yes, defederated XMPP is, indeed, not fun.
Also I’m no Christ’s brother, thanks. Beelzebub maybe.
Everybody’s got email. Just saying.
Everyone can read your emails, just saying.
Maybe they can but I never do
GPG S/MIME are still a thing…
Well, I run my own email service.
Np, they read your mails on the destination, anyway.
S/MIME says otherwise.
I work on email systems everyday.
Please don’t let this protocol survive.
Forget emails that is functionally a terrible communication tool.
You never know if it will be received by the recipient. There is always false positive false negative classification in spam.
SMTP is an outdated protocol that needs to die.
It sounds like your problem is with the way providers handle email and not email itself. Email is actually a really nice protocol. It’s got so much fault tolerance built into it. I could take my servers down for 24 hours, and none of my customers would miss an email.
Yes, there is definitely a spam problem, but overzealous spam filters are not the fault of email, they are the fault of email providers.
As much as I hate Gmail, at least they are pushing for everyone being required to use SPF and DKIM. That alone will eliminate a huge portion of the spam problem.
Also, email isn’t the only protocol with a spam problem. I get so many spam messages on SMS, Facebook (back when I used it), Telegram, etc. Basically anything that allows someone to send a message without two-party consent first (like scanning each other’s QR codes) is going to have a spam problem if it’s popular enough.
It sounds like your problem is with the way providers handle email and not email itself.
No. Providers handle mail this way because they have no choice to do so.
You are stuck between two major Issues.
On one hand you can have your anti-spam very lenient and receive pretty much everything. But if you do you will get more phishing and malware ridden mails. So the users will be exposed to one of the most dangerous vector of infection.
On the other hand you can have a super aggressive spam filter but some mail will be dropped. Whether an email notifications or the contract of the year for a business. It’s no matter. It might never be delivered.
And since we have to block millions of spam mail everyday we have to block them silently because if you respond to certain malicious SMTP server online they will just spam you.
In reality businesses are used to email so that’s what is commonly used.
But it’s far too unreliable to communicate with clients of that business. You can’t just have an important contract sent as an attachment by mail with some chance that it will be silently dropped at some point.
The simple fact that you can send an information to someone by email and it might be silently dropped without you ever being aware of it should IMO have led to the conclusion that it should never be used for anything remotely critical.
If it’s important it shouldn’t be an email. The reality is millions of dollars worth of business conducted solely through email conversations. And also a very lucrative business of spam.
Even businesses are often spammers or as they may call it “gray mail”.
No email providers will guarantee you a 0% fault spam filtering.
Not Gmail either.
As much as I hate Gmail, at least they are pushing for everyone being required to use SPF and DKIM. That alone will eliminate a huge portion of the spam problem.
It’s a good thing Gmail does that but it helps only their users right now (since February’s changes). If your business communicates with thousands of small domains on small providers it will take another decade for every SMTP server to fix their s***. And even then there will still be spam.
What’s the difference between a spammer going through all the hoops of creating a mail domain and a new business ?
Not much. Both mynewlegitEmailDomain.com and SpammerWho UnderstandsDNS.com are essentially the same for a spam filter.
They both would have “legit DNS records” but would both have trouble sending mail to Gmail at first.
Because Gmail cannot know if you are a spammer that setup a new disposable domain or a serious actor in email that just wants to communicate with you.
Truthfully Email is a terrible protocol that cannot be fixed with yet another layer of duct tape. You will never have any guarantee your mail is delivered. There is plenty of communication systems that’s will tell you it’s delivered or not.
Again, your problem is with the way providers handle email. It would be perfectly possible to deny email that’s flagged as spam, then the sender would get a bounce notification. “Dropping them silently” (which actually means accepting them and delivering them to a spam folder in this context) is a choice that providers make. It’s already general practice to deny email from an IP address that’s been blocklisted.
Also, spammers aren’t going to spend the money to buy and set up domains if each one is blocklisted before it makes a profit. My own email service will mark something as spam if it fails FCrDNS, SPF, and DKIM. Gmail went one step further and doesn’t even consider FCrDNS.
And again, any communication method will have a spam problem if it is popular enough and it allows non-two party consent messaging. Email’s popularity is the reason it has a spam problem, not its protocol design. And any distributed system cannot guarantee delivery. If my server tells your server it’s delivered, you just have to trust it, no matter what protocol you’re using.
Give Beeper a try! It consolidates all the listed apps into one texting app.
Tried it, its bloated and battery hungry. It isn’t also clear how beeper saves and uses/handles your messages.
People really need to consider the pedigree of the guy who created this company and how willing he is to walk away from a company when it becomes unprofitable. Eric Migicovsky sold Pebble when it became unprofitable, promised that people would still have their jobs as devs, and at the last minute, the sale didn’t include their jobs, so everyone was left fucked out of luck and with no job. Also, the fact that he has zero long term plans for how to keep fighting Apple for iMessage access after he used a teenagers reverse-engineered code to make a standalone Beeper iMessage app which Apple promptly broke after only days. If that’s as far ahead as he was able to “plan” in regards to that, it speaks to his weakness on having a long-term business plan. Lack of realistic long-term business plan coupled with how badly he fucked over the developers when he bounced from Pebble screams “Don’t trust this.”
Beeper is just paying someone else to maintain Matrix bridges for you.
And that’s a bad thing ?
Yes… because you have to trust that person/company. Which you implicitly should not… especially since they’re already shown themselves to be untrustworthy in their previous endeavors.
Beeper is great
Seconded. Good support team too
Fuck, I actually do have all of them.
I have 2 more :(
Wait a moment it is actually march. How about the DSA against Gatekeepers from the EU? I thought we are all able to communicate to every messenger from the messenger we chose.
Gatekeepers like WhatsApp need to open their platform, but the other app developers need to attach to those provided connections. And so far Signal and Threema already announced that they will not use the opportunity.
Am I the only one who agrees with this non ironically?
I like how my notifications are segregated by friend lol.
You’re probably in the minority, but probably not the only one.
I only use two of these (signal/molly and discord/aliucord/webcord)
Edit: oo element is on there. I also use that lol.
I use Discord and WhatsApp
Element is okay, but I really wish Matrix had better clients on iOS. If Cinny put out an iOS app or got the web app working better on mobile, I’d be way more willing to start using Matrix more.
Element sucks but the fact that it uses Matrix makes it really good.
Unable to decrypt message
Syncing for 15 minutes
