Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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You may be offered a free premium Telegram subscription – but please don’t accept (archive.is)

submitted 8 months ago by ozoned to c/[email protected]

94 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Telegram is giving away FREE Premium subscriptions! All they need from you is to use your cell phone as a relay to text out their OTP codes! And the recipient of the OTP sees your phone number! What could POSSIBLY go wrong with this deal?

PLEASE don't use Telegram! I personally recommend Matrix as it's totally FOSS, you can self host, there are tons of front end clients to choose from. Or even use Signal. I have my own issues with Signal, the fact they don't allow third party clients, you can't self-host, they have a proprietary shim in their stack that only they know what it does, they were pushing crypto, etc, but at least Signal is better than this garbage.

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[–] TCB13 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

PLEASE don’t use Telegram! I personally recommend Matrix as it’s totally FOSS

No, Matrix isn’t even near good in terms of privacy and openness. It is a metadata disaster.

Matrix’s E2EE does not, however, encrypt everything. The following information is not encrypted: Message senders, Session/device IDs, Message timestamps, Room members (join/leave/invite events), Message edit events, Message reactions, Read receipts, Nicknames, Profile pictures

Matrix is developed by a for profit entity, a group of venture capitalists and having a spec doesn’t mean everything. The way Matrix is designed is to force into jumping through hoops and kind of draw all attention to Matrix itself instead of the end result.

For all the people about to downvote:

Decentralized communication protocol Matrix shifts to less-permissive AGPL open source license Element, the company and core developer behind the decentralized communication protocol known as Matrix, has announced a notable license change that will make the open source project just that little bit less appealing for companies looking to build on top of it.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/06/decentralized-communication-protocol-matrix-shifts-to-less-permissive-agpl-open-source-license/

Stop recommending questionable open-source like Matrix. XMPP is the true and the OG federated and truly open solution that is very extensible. XMPP is tested, reliable, secure and above all a truly open standard and decentralized it just lacks some investment in better mobile clients.

What people fail to see is that XMPP is the only solution that treats messaging and video like email: just provide an address and the servers and clients will cooperate with each other in order to maintain a conversation. Everything else is just an attempt at yet another vendor lock-in.

[–] ozoned 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Any recommended clients for XMPP? I'd love to try it, but from what I've seen is that it's massively complicated and while I'm sure I could figure it out, if it's not simple then there's no way I could help my family get it working as they're a long ways away from me.

[–] TCB13 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Even Thunderbird does XMPP... There's also conversejs and xmpp-web for browsers and a bunch of others for specific platforms. This video has a good explanation of the XMPP architecture and usefulness.

Here's the thing XMPP is great as a protocol and as a concept, unfortunately the clients don't seem to be following up on times really well, but with a bit of patience you can get things to work, even push notifications.

[–] nastyyboi 2 points 8 months ago

Thats a really informative video. Thanks