Use matrix, setup bridge (defederate from matrix network if you want), meet your friends where theyre at.
I tried to make a bridge to my telegram and Whatsapp account, but I didn’t get it to work. Do you have any guide to follow?
I just used the guides by mautrix for the respective bridges. https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/setup.html there are instructions for a bunch there that work well. What was the issue you faced?
Hi, average idiot here, whats matrix?
Its an open standard for communications (like xmpp, but the new hotness) with a focus on federating IRC chat. (lot of cool work on state resolution by them wrt that). So you can communicate with people on different matrix servers as long as they federate with each other. Additionally, they have built in support for bridges that let you connect to other people via matrix giving you a seamless experience on that service via matrix. Lemme know if you need more clarifications.
I’m indifferent, since I’ve got both installed, there’s no escaping having to use WhatsApp in many countries around the globe. If I want to keep in touch with family/friends then only one or two contacts use signal, for everyone else it’s WhatsApp or the alternative is SMS.
I’m also indifferent though because of I want the interoperability, Beeper is doing fine.
It’s different, because not being forced to use their app and have WhatsApp account to still talk to someone there?
It’s certainly different, but for signal users who want to maintain that level of privacy, it’s probably something they want, right? From their perspective this is probably a good decision.
I’m indifferent because I’d personally rather have interoperability and Beeper gets the job done.
That is one good thing about america, whatsapp never caught
Yeahhh it’s amazing, your choices are a closed platform that forces you to buy their expensive devices, or SMS, or another proprietary platform ran by a notorious privacy predator.
sms is fine.
SMS sucks. Not private and it handcuffs you to a phone. Who wants to type on a phone when you’re at a real keyboard?
Sms has been god awful since the beginning, both the standard and the business implementation. Remember bullshit pricing models for texts? 10center per text over your limit. Even today, the standard hasn’t kept up with modern times.
Sms is not encrypted, your service provider can read all your texts.
Theoretically anyone at the right point can read all your SMS texts.
A great example being the police “stingray tower” system that masquerades as a cell tower that your phone will happily (and quietly) connect to.
Convince a phone that you’re just another authorized relay, have a target in mind, and it’s like reading postcards before they hit the mailbox.
This is also why it’s an absolute joke for 2FA, but institutions like banks still happily use it because it’s easy to understand.
Not only easy to understand but for a while it was the only way to do 2fa that was usable by lots of people. Smartphones aren’t as ubiquitous as people think, even today.
SMS’s fall from grace wasn’t actually that it could be intercepted, it was the fact it started being used as an excuse to ask for a phone number and use that to track people.
Google still won’t allow you to use any form of 2fa if you don’t give them a phone number. Twitch/Amazon too. Facebook used to (until they got Whatsapp, now they don’t need to ask.) LinkedIn used to (until they got broken into so many times it became a humongous liability).
What sort of irks me is what a mixed bag EU regulation is. Some is good (GDPR), not denying that. Some is annoying (you’re going to be accepting cookies 100 times a day until you’re dead thanks to them), and Whatsapp runs on all devices, so while interoperability nice, even as a free-software, Linux person I don’t really care.
However, if you have to deal with friends or family in the US and you don’t have an iPhone though, god help you. They don’t care about this.
I guess my complaint is that EU regulation may seem legally elegant, but I think it is sometimes quite blind to the real situation on the ground.
It looks good on the books but we still, say, don’t have a standard ARM boot process for smartphones that would help users not be dependent on whatever shitty ROM the OEM wants them to have. That would be life changing, but it will never even be talked about.
Whatsapp runs on all devices
Nope. Android, iOS, Windows and Mac are not all devices. And web versions are far from ideal (some may suggest expanding web capabilities, but please don’t).
Mimimimimimimimimi
If you have nothing to say, say nothing at all.
Wait and see what happens when Google removes traditional tracking from Chrome and every sites start requiring registration to access content !
The cookie consent also has a huge fail whale of unintended consequences - training users to click [accept], or really [anything], to make the annoyance just go away.
Nefarious actors have their run of the place now. They can slip onerous terms into EULAs and know they will largely be accepted.
That wont hold in court tho
I partially agree with you, and of course I hate those cookie banners, they’re completely annoying.
But please remember that it’s not the EU’s fault is every website is trying to violate your privacy.
If websites weren’t tracking everything you do, then cookie banners wouldn’t be needed.
I think we should collectively ask for websites to stop spying on us, not changing the cookie banners regulation.
That’s already a solution to cookie banners: the “do not track” setting. It’s been tested in court in Germany and confirmed to count as rejected permission for GDPR purposes. Websites dinky have to obey it.
It’s currently slowly gaining traction, there’s a privacy advocacy group suing high profile targets over this to create awareness.
We also need a formal change to the cookie law/GDPR to acknowledge “do not track” as the preferred method. Then the banners will slowly go away.
Yep, all the EU done is forced websites to have consent if the website want to process personal data. There are many analytics that does not process IP address or fingerprint and so does not require consent banner. Be annoyed on the websites, not this law.
And yet we live in a world where consent spam is actually harder to deal with than tracking, if you’re smart.
just get an extension and adblocker filters to automatically dismiss/block cookie dialogs and use an allowlist for sites from which you actually need to persist cookies in your browser’s settings and set your browser to delete everything else on exit. With Firefox and browsers based on it you can, in addition to that, use container tabs (try sticky containers extension) for even better context isolation.
Obviously. But that is very difficult on mobile.
on Firefox if a desktop addon has no mobile version you can look up how to add custom add-ons collections when it comes to cookie prompt blockers, but ublock origin and adding filters to it work out of the box. Recently also some apps started showing cookie prompts with no option to decline unless you pay, if they can work offline, make them so
Back in the 80s and 90s we imagined a world of interoperable standards all agreed upon by the industry leaders for the benefit of all.
Then capitalism took over and shat on EVERYTHING.
Extremely bad take in my opinion. Not supporting alternatives means you force users into installing the alternatives
People could be using WhatsApp if they cared about it, but they chose signal for a reason. And making signal weaken its privacy for the purpose of reaching more people is against everything they stand for.
This is correct, and everybody who complains about how “hard” it is to use more than one messenger app is pathetic. That’s like the epitome of first world problems. People should be GLAD that they have the option of using Signal, instead of whining about how they didn’t build it the way they wanted it to be.
Its hard to get others to do so, for seemingly no reason. I have Signal installed, have had it for years, have told all my contacts about it. Only like 3 installed it, but quickly forgot about it. I still have to have WhatsApp installed to not fall off the world so they end up texting me from WA anyway.
Its not like SMS vs Signal where there is a clear benefit to the average Joe to use Signal, there’s no difference between Signal and WhatsApp to the average person so they will just keep using WhatsApp out of habit.
It’s not hard for me to get others to use it. I simply don’t have a Whatsapp account or anything else. If they want to contact me, they will use the right app.
Thats great, now try that with acquaintances, coworkeea, classmates or companies that only chat through WhatsApp. I wish I could go nuclear but WA is a necessity.
Your problem is you allow them to do that to you. I simply do not allow it, and it works out fine for me. Have never used WhatsApp a single time.
It is literally not a necessity. It’s a convenience that you are making yourself dependent on.
The trouble is we end up having to install both when we could be only using Signal
Same goes for people who you convince to install Signal. They’ll end up never using it because they just forget about it and they’re not the ones who wanted to use it anyway. Being able to message people on WhatsApp through Signal would also make it a lot more easy to convince people to install it.
And once those people have it installed, they’ll talk to each other using signal-to-signal as opposed to signal-to-whatsapp!
It pretty much solves the chicken and egg problem, and yet they’re scoffing at it as a solution. IMO it’s a big mistake.
Using only signal in such a scenario is like using only whatsapp today, to chat with whatsapp contacts. What are you hoping to gain?
I would use signal if I could convince people to use signal.
I could convince people to use Signal if all their conversations were on signal and they could talk to people on WhatsApp in a seamless way.
Right now you MUST have WhatsApp if you have any kind of social life. Signal is the other app that no one has because it’s kind of a pain in the ass to have two messaging apps.
I would love to switch to Signal, but inter-compatibility with WhatsApp is a must. The EU is essentially handing them a golden opportunity on a silver platter to become a mainstream app, and they are like nah, we good wtf
Nope. Fuck people stupid enough to use FBInc at all.
Clearly written by someone from somewhere where WhatsApp isn’t de facto mandatory.
Yup and no fucks given.
Ooh you’re hard.
If you think think such of no respect for the FBInc or fucking any closed source software then, yeah, duh.
Using whatsapp is an absolute necessity in most of the world, its the only way to communicate with coworkers, classmates, businesses and even some government services. Not using it means you are essentially disconnected from the world. Good luck convincing more than 2 close friends to install Signal just to talk with you. No one uses SMS. FB really is that dominant.
Doesn’t give any reason to swallow that kind of sucker punch.
It’s OK to be “disconnected.”
Especially if “connected” implies dependency on one corporation which has shown general disregard for its customers’ privacy and mental health.
I don’t use Whatsapp, FB, Instagram, snapchat, google, and somehow manage to make my way through the world.
Believe it or not plenty of people still interact in meatspace, limited as it is.
It might be OK for you to be “disconnected”, but some of us have got stuff to do.
If you don’t live in a place with WhatsApp as the dominant chat app I don’t think you could get it. I don’t have FB, Instagram, Snapchat, Google, Outlook, or any form of social media, I am as disconnected as can be. But WA is truly inescapable.
Need to ask a very specific question about taxes? The government support person only answers through WhatsApp. Need to file an insurance report and even check if it was approved? WhatsApp. Need to schedule a certification exam? Whatsapp. Hell, more and more companies and government services are moving to WA only customer service/support, like not even help you if you show up in person and in some cases their phone lines (which are “always busy”) just direct you to their WhatsApp.
Its also the only way of reaching coworkers/classmates. Not for like socializing or messing around, but for group work, file sharing, scheduling meetings, sharing important/urgent announcements, etc. And good luck getting mere acquaintances to install a secondary chat app just to talk to you, when we can barely get our friends to install adblockers in their browsers. Well, there are other secondary ways to reach them, Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs, but we both likely agree on what to make of these ones.
I hate Facebook and am aware of their practices, but they have reached an absolute dominance over communication in most of the world. You can’t just ignore them in day to day life.
The people who say “just don’t use WhatsApp” really don’t understand. They may as well be saying “just don’t use email”
For millions, possibly billions of people, it’s a straight-up requirement for partaking in modern society.
Like somebody else here said, the EU has handed Signal, on a silver platter, the chance to become a mainstream messaging app, and rather than embrace it, Signal have comprehensively rejected it.
Honestly, what are they doing?
That’s a bummer. Means I have no alternative but to keep using WhatsApp then.
you’re getting downvoted for not being American 💀
I’ve had this conversation before. The consensus last time was that I should tell every single person on my contacts list to download Signal if they want to stay in touch and if they refuse it means they’re shitty people that don’t care about me but I’m totally not a shitty person for forcing my preferences onto others.
People don’t realize that in most of Europe WhatsApp is more popular than iMessages are in the US. Not having WhatsApp means you’re not texting to anyone.
Well for me it works and I have most of my people on either Signal or threema though threema is getting slowly obsolete
Yep. And it’s not just a Europe thing. WhatsApp is basically the only messaging app in South Asia, West Asia, south America and a lot of parts in Africa. Telling someone to stop using WhatsApp here is like telling an American to stop using E-Mail ans SMS.
Americans have something even worse: SMS
I never really understood why is it so complicated to also have Signal on the phone? I mean most people have a shit ton of stupid apps anyway. It’s not like it slows your phone down or anything. Just use Signal as well until most people also have it, and then you can choose to ditch the other apps. It’s like one extra icon in your app list. Also this is the fastest way to ditch shit apps, have everyone use Signal in parallel with the shit ones.
I’ve had Signal installed for years. There’s like 3 of my contacts that I never talk to anyway. Most people use facebook and tiktok and can’t even bother installing an adblocker. They’re not interested about a privacy focused messenger when they already got WhatsApp.
Wholeheartedly agree, but most people wont do it, so you end up with signal for 1 or 2 friends, telegram for a few others, and all the crap ones for the rest (whatsapp, slack, teams, messenger, etc)
Ive ditched every messaging app but signal and telegram, and its really annoying sometimes
Matrix will implement a bridge using the new api, that’s enough for me.
There is one thing about interoperability that I don’t see many people talking about:
Your messages going to and being handled by other services means you’d be subject to their TOS and privacy policy as well.
As long as services are transparent about it so users can make informed decisions based on it, that’s generally fine.
But then services like Beeper, or just Matrix bridges in general, make it so anyone can setup such a connection between services without their contacts even knowing about it.
Your messages going to and being handled by other services means you’d be subject to their TOS and privacy policy as well.
This is true of literally every one of your contacts, too. When you send someone a message, they can screenshot, copy, archive, and forward however they see fit (and most people don’t govern themselves by any kind of TOS or privacy policy). Which then means that if any one of your contacts chooses to use another service as a bridge, or as an archival tool, you’re naturally going to expose your messages to that service, on that contact’s terms.
But that isn’t about interoperability per se. It’s about how other people store and use their copy of data shared between multiple users. Apple iMessage isn’t interoperable with anything, but users still have conversations archived all the way back to the beginning of the service over a decade ago, and can choose to export those messages to be saved elsewhere. (For example, I use a bridge for iMessage so that I can view them on my Android phone, but the mechanism is software that leverages the Mac’s accessibility API).
Some of us are data hoarders. If you’re gonna have a conversation with people like me, you’ll have to trust that we don’t use those archives in a way that either inadvertently/negligently or intentionally exposes that data to some bad actor. I’d like to think I do a good job of respecting my friends’ privacy, and secure my systems, but I’m probably not perfect.
You’re not wrong but a friend (maybe even inadvertently) being negligent with my message, and a business structurally sending my message (received from my friend’s app) to third parties seems like a different ballpark.
This is a centralization problem. Come and force federation upon my SimpleX server in Iceland!
Indeed. I wish your comment was the most visible here.
Signal and Threema can be all about privacy, but they are still companies which can make money only by keeping their service as centralized as possible.
Decentralised messaging like Matrix, XMPP, Jami, have no issue with interoperability.
You’ll be happy to know it’s the top comment thread, at least in Sync
I’m using sync, it’s the second top-most for me.
Signal is developped by a non-profit.
SimpleX looked pretty intriguing…is it basically a better / private / more secure replacement for IRC?
pretty much, though it’s pretty basic in terms of functionality at the moment
upvote for SimpleX
With Signal’s default settings, Google reads your Signal messages when they come in through push notifications.
Correct me if I’m wrong.
Or… And hear me out, Molly FOSS with Unified Push notifications. Problem solved!
I’m looking in to this, thank you!
Edit: Molly (UnifiedPush) isn’t something I can reasonably expect friends and family to set up.
Please note that to receive notifications, you will need to set up a server to run MollySocket, available on https://github.com/mollyim/mollysocket.
You need the right flavor of Molly to use UnifiedPush: https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android-unifiedpush. You can install MollySocket via: Docker/Podman: docker pull ghcr.io/mollyim/mollysocket:latest Crates.io: cargo install mollysocket (see INSTALL.md for the setup) Direct download: https://github.com/mollyim/mollysocket/releases (see INSTALL.md for the setup) A distributor app (easiest is ntfy) You can optionally install your own push server like ntfy or NextPush. For beginners, you can use a free service like ntfy.sh (do consider donating if you have the means).
You are wrong ;-) The push stuff is just used to signal the receiver that there is a new message. No meaningful data is sent that way. Not even an encrypted message.
Call me paranoid, but Google owns Android. They can easily read the content of a notification as it’s displayed. They even have a Notification History app where you can see all applications from all apps.
You’re missing the point, there’s no message content sent in the notification, there’s nothing to read.
that’s not how push works. usually, google would only know you received a notification, but not it’s contents. that “dummy” notification wakes the app up, which decrypts and shows the real notification.
content aware stuff runs entirely locally on your phone, so no data is sent to google (unless you have telemetry enabled, in which case the reply or action you used will be sent to google together with the next telemetry data upload)yes, some apps actually push the content directly through the push system, but that’s not how this is handled in most apps that handle private data in notifications.
or even a Matrix service would mean a deterioration of our data protection standards
Why? They use same algos, same scheme. Just add support for matrix message format in your app.
WhatsApp is closed source, and obviously it must be able to decrypt messages for the end user to read them. Anything could happen to the unencrypted data at this point. Therefore it’s less secure allowing conversations to flow into that app.
Re-read my comment please. I’m talking about Matrix, not whatsapp. Not downvoting because you are correct, but it is out of context.
Thanks for clarifying, my bad!
I believe Matrix doesn’t have nearly as strong (if any) metadata encryption as Signal
seriously, don’t use the ddg browser, it sucks ass. just get firefox and install ublock origin.
NP using Ublock Origin, goes right in and no ads.
Also got nextdns running on my router
Ghostery works too for me
Same
Using Threema is not an option. This is paid software and it is too difficult to purchase a license for this software when Google does not allow us to pay for purchases through their Android app store. No one from my entourage will bother paying for a license for this software using cryptocurrency. They will just install another messenger.
Know many people who bought Threema on Google Play
me neither
