I use the apps my friends use but it gets tiring to keep up with so many.
Am I too old that one of these should’ve been Skype?
I abandoned my chat to make a new one in Discord. Despite them complaining about Skype daily for years, suddenly they loved Skype.
Humans are silly. Either way, it’s been Skype, Snapchat, and regular text for half a decade now.
I didn’t known Skype still existed and i thought I was getting old.
Sorry dude.
/sad old man groans.
I literally had to bring all my group kicking and screaming onto discord literally within the year it launched. Same story, non stop bitching about Skype but all of a sudden nobody wanted to try discord. I straight up had to send a message to all of them saying I’m uninstalling and dropping my discord link if they wanted to play. Over the course of a month they all switched over, couldn’t be happier.
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 have 3/7 and I hate it. I wish signal never removed the ability to function as sms
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.
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.
4/7 here. I’m fine with it. Though sms should be included.
Are you even a true nerd if you have so many friends?
Everybody’s got email. Just saying.
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.
By dropping silently I meant really litteraly. If you answer to SMTP commands, you are not silent. You essentially say a spammer server that you are a valid target and that they can go on.
It’s not even a question if spammer buy domains to spam. It’s well known and the reason why commercial products provides a feature to filter too fresh domains.
There are procedures to “warm-up” an IP if you are a large provider and if you don’t do it and attempt to send a lot of mails to Gmail this will not work. It’s not just about DNS records. You could have donne everything perfectly DNS wise and still be blocked by Gmail servers.
You should take a look at the requirements of Gmail for large providers. As far as I recall Gmail does check FcrDNS since last month. On top of more requirements for authentication.
Still you can’t just buy an IP, a server, set MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, ARC?, FcrDNS and expect large amounts of mail to go through right away.
And again, any communication method will have a spam problem
The major issue here is that anybody can send any email to whoever. Most communication apps won’t let you do that certainly not like emails.
You can’t open WhatsApp and start spamming the whole world. You basically can only do that with phone calls and emails ?
So no, SMTP/IMF has rotten foundations. No matter how many (optional) protocol you add on top, it will always be such an hassle to maintain and there will be always people who can’t afford that much effort.
Small businesses having to set that up just to reach Gmail is a big problem that they usually externalize with Outlook365 and so on.
Again, Gmail calls the shots because they are the leader. But on paper my fully unauthenticated mail from Barack.obama is perfectly RFC compliant and legit. These protocols that are essential are optional at the end of the day. They became virtually mandatory because of the spam issue and Gmail pushing in the (right) direction because they have leverage.
SMTP on its own is trash.
Everyone can read your emails, just saying.
Well, I run my own email service.
Np, they read your mails on the destination, anyway.
Maybe they can but I never do
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
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.
Yeah, XMPP is great and all, but the client side is a big old mess, everything is full of friction and missing support for feature xyz. Have you tried using XMPP on iOS?
Conversations compliance test has brought most clients into an acceptable base to where most basic chat/audio/video needs are met, so if you are comparing older legacy clients then the experience will be different. The XEP system means everything is optional & can be pitched by making a spec & seeing who uptakes the idea. It also means the bar to create your own server is absoluetly minimal since everything is an extension which means you could build one in a weekend which is great for those learning to code since the barrier to entry is extremely low if Conversations isn’t the goal.
IDGAF about Apple since you have to have a wad just to publish an application on their proprietary store & the EU didn’t do a good enough job so it’s expensive to open alternative stores like F-Droid while also being antagonistic towards sideloading as well as PWAs (not to mention needing to buy their overpriced hardware to build/release applications). Heck, you can’t even publish a GPL-or-similar-licensed app on their store. This is a giant slap in the face to free/ethical software developers & probably why the clients aren’t in a good state; if you aren’t trying to make money, why would you develop in an ecosystem that is entirely hostile for you to develop in?
Well said! I really miss having a huge roster on XMPP
We can start it up again. Time to nudge in the next Lemmy AMA to allow XMPP addresses alongside Matrix. You’d be surprised how little things like that can nudge adoption & pique curiosity.
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.
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.
Sure, but now you show me all the clients that supported OTR back then 😜 - or now, for that matter. Besides, OTR doesn’t work in multi user chats. OMEMO does, and support for it is still not exactly widespread…
I miss pidgin for the cross platform chat
i miss when using the internet gave you ptsd because of the actual things that you saw, rather than the software that you were using.
I’ve only recently threatened to take my own life due to spam. Never thought that’d be my 13th reason.
gotta love the internet, only the best, for the worst, and the worst for the best.
Try Matrix bridges or Beeper
Anyone remember trillian?
Libpurple had constant breakage due to proprietary apps having no incentive to keep their protocols stable. A lot of it worked easier then since no one was using e2ee either. Newer gateways exist in the space but it’s a real shame since for a brief time the earlier 2010s, most chat applications were using the same protocol—until they realized it’s harder to capture profits when the garden walls are lowered.
I miss pidgin so much. I tried to use it the other day with Discord and it was terrible. So God-awful.
Give Beeper a try! It consolidates all the listed apps into one texting app.
Beeper is great
Seconded. Good support team too
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.
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.”
- Have friends
- Talk to them.
What kind of a take is this? What are you trying to say? “don’t use messaging”? Amish take? Genuinely trying to understand
I have all of them. Plus linkedin. This is madness
What is the middle one?
Element.io apparently. I’ve never heard of it before
Element. It’s a popular client for Matrix, which is a federated messaging platform (similar to lemmy and mastodon) with different instances.
Which funnily enough, has bridges to Signal, Whatsapp, Discord, Telegram and some more, meaning you wouldn’t have to have as many other clients installed to chat with contacts on those platforms
I remember looking into that a while ago, but it’s not like I can just instantly hook up my WhatsApp or Telegram account into that, right? I’d need a server to act as a bridge.
And I wouldn’t be so keen on giving that kind of access to a random server.
Yes your Matrix homeserver does have to run the bridges. So I agree with you - you have to somewhat trust the admins of your Homeserver, or host your own homeserver and bridges. But I understand that the latter is not for everyone.
Although official tg bridges are meh: they have trouble with sending/receiving pics and loose messages from time to time. Plus those work for chats only (AFAIK)
Is it cross platform with other major messagers?
Not directly no… But there are bridges you can implement (or use on servers that already have it implemented) to connect to those other services.
We need a new Trillian or Adium. Fucking anti-interop gatekeepers.
Omg trillian immediately reminds me of ICQ and MSN Messenger
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.
Beeper handles most of these
Beeper doesn’t seem to exist yet
There’s a waitlist, they’re churning through it
Fuck, I actually do have all of them.
I have 2 more :(
