oh my god, this (basically culture war) is so hard to witness as a european.
just use signal for god's sake.
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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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.
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!
Nah, imma stick with SMS like most of my country does.
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.
I clicked figuring it was not giving a fuck.
The thing is... The bubble colors do matter. But people aren't caring about the colors for the right reasons.
The color matters because the color has to do with the security of that message.
Sending a message through the iMessage protocol is more secure than SMS/MMS.
People should care that their messages are secure and private (and they do care, they just don't always realize it or know it yet). Unfortunately, the people behind the whole blue vs. green bubble culture war don't seem to focus on this security aspect, which is actually what/why it matters.
As an Apple investor who would benefit from more iPhone sales, "Buy an iPhone" is not the right response/solution to this problem, despite what Tim Apple says.
Choose open source. Say no to walled gardens.
Use—and donate to—Signal.
Greetings from GrapheneOS, as a former iOS and stock Android user.
So you're saying if the Android messaging app were to suddenly change its security overnight, the bubble colors would change by default?
Nope. I suppose in theory it could, but not necessarily—it'd be up to Apple/Google to make the color decisions regarding that.
The important thing here is that it's not about the colors themselves, but about what the colors signify.
Apple chose blue to denote that the message you're sending is to another Apple device. By default, this Apple-to-Apple message uses the iMessage protocol. If it uses iMessage, then that implies a certain security standard.
Apple also made the deliberate choice to denote non-iMessage texts with green. If it's green, then it's SMS/MMS, you lose iMessage encryption, and other features like reactions.
The colors are not gonna change by default—it's up to them to coordinate what colors are used for what. Apple's not gonna open up iMessage (at least not voluntarily, and we saw how far they'll go with Beeper), so Google can't do anything about that. Which is also why they're pushing so hard to get Apple to adopt RCS.
If Apple does adopt RCS, maybe they'll denote it with purple bubbles, who knows. Then you'd have iMessage as blue, RCS as purple, and SMS/MMS as green.
But again, this is all about what each color signifies in terms of privacy and security.
Lmfao they did not say that.
Fucking WHHHHHHYYYYYY? WHY DO YOU CARE ABOUT BUBBLE COLORS?
Make the colour configurable as I can see myself wanting to send orange, yellow, pink etc and maybe black texts
good luck sending images over sms
They're mms
And Apple said they are finally going to support RCS.
Have you heard about MMS before?
Brilliant!