Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
So many choices, so much discussion. Looking for the "Wisdom of the Crowd" from the HN community. Other options in the comments would be welcome
Asking to leave WhatsApp is like cancelling your contract with your ISP and going offline just because you don't like the company.
What's more, several cell phone operators' plans include unlimited WhatsApp, but only a few GB of other data... meaning when your data limits are reached you can still use WhatsApp for the rest of the month, but not i.e. Signal or Telegram. That makes is rather hard to convince people to switch.
So yeah, pretty damn close to critical infrastructure. I'm still going to delete my account and see what happens, but unlike the siblings here I can't disagree with parent, at least for Brazil.
[Edit] When I delete my account I'm going to lose old conversations, but that doesn't bother me anymore because I already recently lost them once when I switched from Android to iOS... WhatsApp has no way of keeping your history in that case. And otherwise there's really no friction to deleting an account, since you can always recreate it.
WhatsApp is "critical" now only now due to its network effects, but you can transition away to something else.
Right now I have maybe a dozen friends and family members on my matrix server. I helped them set up the app, configured their communick accounts, made a few video calls to ensure it was working, etc. Current step is to help my wife to do the same with her friends. Slowly but steadily, we are moving our communication network away from WhatsApp and into Matrix.
Each one that we move makes WhatsApp less "critical" and makes us more free from monopolistic assholes. We don't need the Government to control any of that, in fact I believe that waiting for the government to do anything is not going to achieve anything.
Adding another app — my vote goes to Signal - and making a lot of noise on WhatsApp is one option. If I recall correctly, WhatsApp has statuses. Changing yours to “Keeping WhatsApp for business transactions only — find me on Signal for private chat” is one idea. The people on this board have the power to move their friends away from terrible software. Use it.
If I choose to stop using my ISP, I have no need to "go offline". I can simply switch ISPs and I still get the exact same internet. This is why we must not fall for this "critical social infrastructure" trap. No one company deserves our business. We can and should go elsewhere.
Messaging should be like the internet. If I don't like my messaging provider, I should be able to switch and still message everybody. Ideally, I would be able to bring my identifier with me. Luckily, SMS already provides this. I therefore recommend old-fashioned SMS/MMS for messaging. If you want something more "modern", I would recommend Matrix, as it is the only "modern" messaging system that wants to allow people to switch providers while still messaging the same people.
But that is all the more reason to get rid of it. Of course this makes life complicated. But if we don't make these hard choices and 'sacrifices', it will never stop. They will keep eroding away at our privacy and freedom. It will only become harder the longer we wait.
This kind of things will keep happening though as long as we allow monopolies and closed platforms. We should really be more careful with accepting these companies into our lives.
EDIT: got some answers re SMS. Fine, though that doesn't explain why there is so much overlap/redundancy with social media applications. At a glance, it appears I could do the very same things (groups, multimedia) messaging people on facebook without having to install an app, and if people are on whatsapp they're almost 100% on facebook.
Apparently the "critical" nature of this is the facility of sending high rates of pictures and videos to others. I suspect mere FOMO owing to group-chat being localized there is enough to keep some people from cutting the cord, not the ability to communicate to multiple people in itself. People really are addicted to each other.
If we do nothing then the problem only gets worse.
I considered just accepting it and moving on, but I've thought again and I'm trying to get as many contacts onto Signal as I can.
At least there will be another option and as much as I love matrix I think Signal is the best balance between user friendliness and privacy.
I made the mistake before of giving multiple options which just scares non-tech people off, so now I'm just pushing Signal.
I guess what I'm saying is that the network effect is just too damn strong (for me at least).
Hopefully the reason this is at the top is not this sentence.
This hallucinatory idea is exactly what Facebook PR, a.k.a. "damage control", wants people to believe.
You have no contract with Facebook. You pay them nothing. There is no legal recourse whatsoever. You cannot enforce "your end of the bargain" because Facebook undertakes no obligations to you.
Say what you want about the quality of your internet or cellular provider's service, etc., or how much you hate a company, but the fact is they have to fulfill their contractual obligations and provide service, they cannot just do whatever they want, whenever they want, as Facebook can.
If the internet/cellular provider does not deliver, then there is no Facebook. Whereas Facebook could disappear if their advertisers stop paying and the internet would still be here, because people would still be paying for internet access, and internet users would still use the internet to do all the same things they do now, and more.
Practically speaking, you may treat a tech company like a common carrier, like a telephone/internet/cellular provider. After all to the user it may seem no different. It is accessed through a "phone" and it seems to work like the service they pay for through an ISP or cellular provider.
But the minute you say this is like a "contract" you are submitting to pure delusion. You have no contract with Facebook as a user and you pay nothing. You're a product not a customer. Facebook has essentially zero exposure to liability from user complaints and that is why you are reading so many complaints about them, e.g., on HN. The best a user can do is rant into the aether and pound sand. There is no contract to enforce!
Then there is the absurdity of pretending that access to one company's computers is equivalent to access to the entire internet. This is like saying cancelling your subscription to AOL is like cancelling your account with your ISP. Today, no one is naive enough to equate AOL with the internet, as people once did. But Facebook believes people are naive enough to equate "Facebook" with "the internet". No doubt the AOL phenomena is a running joke at Facebook. The more things "change" the more they stay the same.
Do whatever you want, but let's refrain from propagating illusions that tech companies want people to believe.
If this is a poll about what I intend to do? Nothing, facebook has me by the balls and will for years to come.
Maybe certain small groups or individuals will be willing to switch with me, but it's not like I'm uninstalling WhatsApp any time soon.
I'll just link my comment from the other article about the Whatsapp changes:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25672109
Plus I'm sure they've linked all the data they can in their backend already. It's hard to believe the notice we all got this morning was really going to realistically change very much of anything.
This process was turbocharged by COVID19
Most unemoloyed people with no steady income turned to last-mile delivery of all kinds of random goods and services... All done via whatsapp
Its frictionless. Like a website chatbot. Except its free and you can do it on the move.
I dont think it will take off here becuase businesses here have built web infrastructure for e-commerce.
Whatsapp is to ecommerce what smartphones where to connectivity.
3rd world countries skipped fixed wires and laptops and went straight to smartphones over air
This is the same process.
The privacy, security, and governance story is not great though. If you care about such things, I think Signal wins hands down. And the UX is fine, just not quite as good as Telegram in my view.
(A third option not in your poll that might be worth evaluating is Wickr. I haven't used it personally, but I've seen it come up in these sorts of discussions.)
You could add XMPP there as well, but it really doesn't matter. What does matter is for us to start pushing for openness and start evangelizing/helping others to adopt anything that puts us back in control of our communication.
This is the one thing to fix, and the one opportunity that we are getting now to do this right.
- Element's client is not "nice": we can fix it. We can not fix closedness.
- Not everyone is using it: we can fix it. We can not fix privacy abuse from Facebook.
- It's work to run/manage a server: find a hosting provider (cough https://communick.com cough).
Viber, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Threema and Discord are all built on the same paradigm: accounts tied to a single service and thus the inertia of network effect makes vendor lock-in a real problem when acquisitions happen or Terms of Service change.
Signal is in theory the "best" of these 5 options in the short-term, but it being open source is utterly irrelevant when you consider the network effect lock-in of a single-service model.
In fact, Telegram is probably a "more open" option given the portability its API provides. Openness vs privacy/security are entirely different concerns in isolation, but I believe openness is most important for providing a model upon which privacy can be sustained in the longer term.
Of course Matrix is the only truly long-term sustainable option of these. Encouraging users to move to any of the others will only lead to this discussion re-occurring down the line. And being ultimately more difficult as platform-switching fatigue intensifies.
Tried Whatsapp once, hated it, never tried again. Viber is even worse.
Telegram has been what an IM program should be, for years now (it gave me the vibe of my much beloved Miranda IM almost 20 years ago). I'd love it if they added more link previews (9GAG and Instagram previews stopped working almost a year ago and the functionality was never recovered) and even more keyboard shortcuts for full navigation without a mouse -- but even without these it's the most solid IM experience I ever had.
Maybe they are not as encrypted or protected in general as Signal. Maybe (but what do we know about Signal, save for a lot of claims?). But the fact that several governments and corporations demanded them to give access to various keys or to shut down channels is a testament that Telegram isn't as amateur in encryption and protection as the overly nitpicky HN audience would have you believe.
But if you want to avoid a repeat of what's happening with WhatsApp, support decentralized alternatives. Go for solutions that are built on Matrix or XMPP, the primary contenders in this space. Both are open networks with plenty of open-source software, public servers, paid hosting (i.e. you are not the product) and self-hosted options.
Personally I'm in the XMPP camp, and working on https://snikket.org/ specifically as an alternative to WhatsApp and the other centralized services.
I am also interested in Berty[3] and Iris[4], but those aren't really "ready" yet, despite being cool tech.
[3]: https://berty.tech/
The problem is that everybody's contacts are on Whatsapp. How do you make THEM switch?
- Telegram might be the easiest to use where you likely find the most people but I disagree with a lot of things done by/around telegram.
- Threema (now open source) is as far as I know the most privacy focused one and by far my favorite. I like the way they are doing many thinks and they have many small goodies (like you can give a small "thump up/down" to messages in 1-to-1 chats from the message received notification to indicate agreement/acceptance). Or the way they handle accounts (separate from phone number and license, you can give people your Threema id without giving them your phone, the "trust levels", etc.). Or that they have a clear&clean business model. There are also a bunch of aspects which are useful if used in a e.g. business context like account revoke-ability, in person QR code based key exchange, fixed chat history etc.
One great advantage over WhatsApp is emoji reactions on messages like Slack does to avoid the dreaded “haha” taking up threads.
Signal seems to support all media I threw at it, and has an awesome MacOS desktop client.
Downsides were no web search for group icons (a great feature of WhatsApp) and live location sharing.
Overall I am happy to have nearly all of my conversations migrated to Signal over the preview few weeks.
I never blamed technology or any algorithms, people was evil before and still the same. I'm so glad, the folks here that I find brilliant, is having this conversation. Just keep the dialogue going, it is working. Change happens in small steps, one people, one family, one neighbourhood at a time.
As far as I can tell, the TL;DR of the change is that your WhatsApp identifier will be linked to your FB data, so that personalized advertisements can be displayed in WhatsApp. The only detail I find highly objectionable in the change, is FB collecting through WhatsApp "Other people’s phone numbers stored in address books." Why don't we focus on the objectionable parts of the change, rather than panicking that there was a change?
Moreover, a less popular HN story [2] mentions that "The new privacy policy also doesn’t apply in Europe due to stronger privacy legislation there." (I can confirm that on my side: I'm living in Europe and I haven't seen the dreaded popup yet.)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662215 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25668367
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-UlA4-tslROBDS9IqHal...
I just switched my family to it, because that was the last reason for me to use WhatsApp.
I'm sad not to se it as an option.
I guess Signal would be the best bet as an alternative because of where it is right now in terms of market share.
With Telegram, I have been using it more recently and found it to be even effective in a work-setting for group chats, sharing files etc. Its basically a Slack and the fact that it is available on multiple platforms also has made it very appealing.
And there are several clients out there that are compatible, it doesn't lock you inside an "official" client.
So yeah, I don't like Facebook's malevolent dictatorship over WhatsApp, but there's zero chance I could - or even would bother to - convince all my friends and family to make the switch.
A more practical solution might be not to switch from WhatsApp entirely, but to limit the amount of data it can get from you. Some ideas:
- trimming the contact list to the minimum; move most conctacts from the builtin phone address book (Google Contacts) to another store for contacts, which is not integrated with the system
- getting a separate phone just for WhatsApp; different account, different number, different contact list
- revoke most of the app permissions, use only the most essential features (basically text)
- post new _content_ elsewhere
- FB will probably try to track / intercept links in the app; setting Duck Duck Go as the default browser might help (purge browsing data often)
I'm not sure how far iOS 14 privacy features will go. It's their time to shine. If they do prevent WhatsApp and Facebook apps from doing shady stuff, it might be a time to switch.
It’s very convenient of the government to do this, but I do find it a bit dubious at time to mix provision of essential services with FBs marketing tracking. The same with government websites that use Google Analytics, I’m not always sure they should be mixed without thinking properly through the privacy considerations first.
Due to network effects, whatsapp still holds lion share. It is not a problem if it is optional tool that has to be used just for talking to friends. But, I am seeing it is being used for even communicating to school children by teachers and schools as almost official channel! In such cases, there does not exist much choice, at least in my country. People just refuse to use mail or call directly.
Combined with signal-cli (https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli.git) you can easily set up your own files & messaging upload. For instance, I've created an automatic upload to a Google Photos album for my family group chat and they love it !
2-3 People are using other contact options like Discord or SMS. Which is fine with me.
[0] Something like this https://github.com/fingersonfire/Whatsapp-Xtract , although I can't recall if it was that exact one.
I still use Matrix, but it's often frustrating with messages showing up late or out of order, and none of the clients feeling quite good enough yet. Especially if you use multiple accounts.
Every XMPP client I've used supports multiple accounts, but for Matrix I've only recently run into Quaternion which supports this, and I believe also Neochat (they both use libquotient), but they're still rough to use.
I wouldn't even consider options that aren't free software, and I'd also exclude signal because of them not putting their app on f-droid, not being properly decentralized, relying on a phone number, etc. (note that both email and phone number are optional for Matrix accounts)
I personally can't use signal. It's great that it's secure, but I can't tolerate frequent reliability issues when it comes to messaging. The first thing that comes to mind is group chat, and having messages show up in a different order on everyone's phones (discovered via screenshots), often with multiple-hour delays.
Check it out for yourself; set up a free personal account at this link:
I've been using Signal for some time; I preferred Wire, but gradually it became clear that Wire was only interested in corporate clients. One bonus compared to Signal is that you don't need to tie it to a phone number.
Personally I use Telegram because there's a distribution of it on F-Droid. If you do you should consider telling your friends to only use secret chats since only those are encrypted end-to-end. Signal has some nice features like not storing your in-app contacts on their servers and the "sealed sender" feature which largely hides who is talking to whom in a conversation.
As for the others I can't really comment on them. Maybe another option to consider is Briar[1] which works entirely peer-to-peer over Tor, Bluetooth or the LAN and defers sending until both devices are online at the same time (which might work for phones).
End-to-End encryption is something which cannot be enforced for all communications(contacts) with email.
I used telegram seriously, to connect to my team members, connect to friends in groups and message friends privately, before our government blocked it and people migrated to whatsapp.
Usability:
1-Whatsapp is only available on one phone (I know it's because of e2e encryption, but we'll get to that later) and only android/ios. Anything else needs to use web and connect to the main device, which limits the experience, if you use it heavily.
2-Whatsapp does not have edit, the web version cannot set ctrl-enter to send, any mistaken enter will send an incomplete message that cannot be edited.
3-You lose all your chats when you change your phone. Backup is still a solution, but not if you want to migrate from iphone to android (something I did) and do not trust an app that has 100 install to migrate your data.
4-You cannot use multiple phone numbers by one whatsapp on one phone.
5-If you add a person to a group, they cannot see past messages. (I know, another side-effect of e2e)
6-It has many minor bugs with bluetooth headsets. If you press the answer, it just disconnects from the headset, you should answer on phone screen.
7-Lacks many useful features for organization, like chat folders (I know, this is also recent in Telegram)
On the other hand, telegram is heavily customizable, has clients for all major platforms, can connect to many accounts at once, your data is not tied to your device.
About E2e encryption:
I don't mind that telegram does not have e2e. My private messages are not worth the effort for a large organization or government. As a citizen of a country where the government actively and strongly suppresses freedom of speech, e2e in groups is not useful. Any breached device or one informer in any group is enough for all messages to be breached. This is only needed in case the government does not have access to the (apparently infinite) list of security problems by whatsapp, which apparently they do (why they block Telegram and not whatsapp?)
In usability, I can go on and on with increasingly detailed differences between whatsapp and Telegram and everywhere Telegram wins hands down, except that by default, chats do not have e2e encryption and groups cannot have e2e at all.
I think companies are way too power full right now, and the ability to shift position, sometimes they are a platform and sometimes a publisher. Companies should not be allowed to "shift" depending on how asks the question. I think a normal human would be forced to answer (in court), if they said different answer to different people. But these companies get away with it.
Much of the conditions that has helped shape the current situation might shaping new efforts as well..
Support and client questions etc will probably be avoid as much as possible. Example do NOT explain why a BAN was issued, give as little chance to appeal as possible, and avoid all discussions about why something was done. Just say that they broke a rule, do not mention what rules or where in the text / video the "crime" was committed.
Appeal process is very expensive, and if a company gave reason for example when they did a BAN that would sometime cause the banned person to appeal. If they stated why, a person in USA could appeal using the common justice system and perhaps claim in-justice, or lying (I guess a person might have a chance if the company did not apply its rule consistently, or if they could prove a lie)
If they can avoid to given any reason for it, there is no way they will keep any rules well defined, it gives them much more power if the rules could be flexed a bit.
I think the "common justice system" with defender, accuser and judge would be much better. A court also has to keep record of decisions and reasons. But I think no company would do that, it would limit their control/power and probably be expensive as well.
I still think the companies have a bit too much power, and in a way wonder if they could be forced to solve "justice" better than now.
WhatsApp has been a more or less indie creation helped to cut cost of text messages to zero. Then it was acquired by FB and is now part of big tech. We all know what this means.
With signal as a notable exception, I doubt that there could ever be a different outcome for any commercial product.
Why is it, that we do not see more competition from non-profits? The tech world has changed so much, that the ideas of the open source/free software movement are not as applicable as they were when Stallman founded GNU. However, with Wikipedia we see a worldwide Top10 site being a non-profit.
So, where are all the Google/Twitter/Facebook competitors funded by contributions of its users? Given how hard and expensive it is to really compete in that space, is the goal unrealistic? Or is it that there are some (hidden) incentives in the game which contradicts that goal? (Other than monetary incentives for the founders)
- Great user-driver sticker ecosystem. Creators can submit their sets to the store and earn pasive income; there's even an sticker creation app [2]
- modern, good UX and web-client with default E2E encryption.
- ability to login with an account rather than phone number exclusively.
- chat extras: photo albums, event calendars etc. especially great for group chats.
- original quality photo sharing.
It's a bit bloated being a full service suite and all but underneath it all it's a really good messenging experience!
1 - https://line.me/
Luckily I don't have any friends on WhatsApp, so the transition will be easier. Let's see if my family cares enough about messaging me that they'll download Signal.
I think something similar could be achieved client side only by reverse engineering each app's api and maintaining compatibility at every update.
Matrix is close but it's not very user friendly (and I think it requires you to host your own server).
Signal, for example, seems to be designed to store messages only on a single active device, which is normally a mobile device. Lose access to your device, perhaps to theft, maybe to accidental damage or hardware failure, and you lose all your messages.
I'm all for privacy, but security matters too, and that includes being able to keep safe copies of my own data on my own terms. With things like emails, or even mobile SMS messages, there are tools widely available to do this, and I can export my data and have it encrypted locally and then stored safely off-site. Too many new messaging systems seem to be fighting against this for various reasons, and I don't think it's a healthy trend.
Signal has also pretty horrible management, I remember one day outage for many house because admins in US just went sleep, so Signal is all nice if you dont care about reliability and can get through bad UX, for instance very well hidden option for force sending SMS to Signal contact through long tap Send button, there is now ay to find this during using the app
> Everyone I talk to uses Signal; even my siblings, who are not technologists and who I do not talk to about this stuff, use Signal (sometimes to my annoyance, since iMessage works just fine when we're figuring out what each of us is bringing to dinner). But for the purposes of this post, almost literally any secure messenger is better than email.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22371316
Hopefully the fact that even tptacek can admit that convenience actually plays a role when deciding what messaging platform to use for everyday stuff can help certain people here lower their shoulders somewhat ;-)
Also, I can't seem to find anything about a messenger named Zom, do you mean Zoom? If so, is Zoom really something people use for the same use case as Whatsapp?
Which of these support that?
However everybody around me use WhatsApp, including the people using Telegram. I use Telegram with 3 or 4 friends, WhatsApp with everybody else even if I see a constant flow of contacts installing Telegram (the app sends a notification.) The only viable migration path is that enough people start using both until a tipping point when most of their conversations happen on Telegram. Same for any other platform. An abrupt switch is impossible unless WhatsApp start charging money or is banned by law.
The next popular platform is Telegram, but it is used mainly to share and access pirated movies and apps from shady channels than for everyday communication.
I know the reflex answer is "they won't do it because iPhone exclusivity sells iPhones" but suspect that's increasingly only true in the US.
People here are describing how phones there are increasingly WhatsApp-running platforms, and Apple would be wise to prevent that while it can. Might also offer them an upsell route for their other cross-platform services.
I decided to go for Telegram (although I use Signal as well).
So far, I managed to convert... 17 people. Out of approximately 1200. It is a lost case. WhatsApp is practically everywhere.
Damn.
I simply don't trust a single one of the messaging apps that they won't immediately upload my entire address book to their servers so they can have a more complete social graph.
I've tried Telegram at one point but it was a huge pain to use if you didn't let it access your contacts (or maybe it didn't work at all... my memory's fuzzy on which messaging apps were which.) Whatsapp was similarly awful as well.
I like a lot Telegram, even if I'm a little bit sad that they don't do more to push end to end encryption. One can have a look at cryptpad to see that cloud storage and e2e is possible.
But still, so far, for so long, there never was any proof of any deceptive behavior of the telegram team.
Not a single private message leaked to a gov, company or anyone. So I kind of trust them for the moment.
Telegram is no E2E-Messenger. I know you can enable it per chat, but that's so solution. And groups are always not encrypted. Also they use some non-standard encryption. Why?
Signal needs my phone number. I dislike that idea.
I use Discord for anything unimportant. I prefer to not use it though. For voice I still prefer TeamSpeak, because of the end to end encryption and self hosting.
I don't know or don't use the others.
I eventaully switched to iMessage.
I’ve turned off contact access. I can’t see the names behind the numbers. Will fb still see the numbers of the new contacts I message?
And Telegram because more of my friends use it.
At least with telegram, I can use it, turn off contact access in WhatsApp, and not give fb my address book.
Please also mention if there are any client/servers FLOSS
People have just switched messengers in the past fine; ICQ -> MSN -> google chat / fb messenger (and I probably forgot a few). I agree that Whatsapp has become more "critical infrastructure" than messengers were, but don't give up right away because it seems impossible
Those are the only alternatives with enough penetration to rival WhatsApp (that I know of).
I know that they are not secure, but neither is WhatsApp.
Surprising to see Matrix 3rd despite being added after half an hour. Will check it out.
Having said that, I think its ideal use cases at the current time are probably less of a general messaging solution with friends, and more for specific scenarios where off-internet and security is maybe most salient.
As long as I can be far away from the Facebook world, I’m happy.
And same would go for tiktok as it too also grabs your contacts.
This is a slippery slope.
I know it’s a really elementary question when the rest of you are looking at this from a high-level (great discussion btw) but I’m never ever going to convince anyone to use anything but iOS messenger if they need two apps.
About 10% of contacts moved to Signal. I lost touch with the rest and Signal was in many ways worse than WhatsApp for everyday communication.
I ended up using WhatsApp again. For me, it's too popular to leave.
Also signal needs group video chats..
I've never used WhatsApp so I don't know what is so special that so many people seem to use it.
Other, than this, Threema looks promising.
Microsoft in my opinion is a far more respectable company compared to Facebook.
With the new options they are single provider, centralized, and locked in. Matrix is an exception in some categories.
It's kinda sad how the technology landscape shifted.
Because WhatsApp's moat/lock-in-effect is that ~2 bln people use it whilst the second largest listed here, Telegram, has around ~400M.
By this comparison, on average, by removing WA and limiting one's social circle to Telegram, chances are, that you cut ties with 4/5 of your contacts.
In fact I've dumped WhatsApp in favor of Conversations several years ago, when Facebook bought WhatsApp.
(I'm pretty sure that Facebook already helped themselves with all of WhatsApp's data back then, and this recent development is only ass-covering...)
It is encrypted, uses email under the hood, and they have a large amount of funding as I understand it. The independence and cross-provider nature of this option means whatever email provider you use, they get very limited data about you and your contacts.
There won't be money in it for them. But it would even further improve their privacy-first market(ing) position.
And they would have the leverage to really achieve it.
I'm watching Slack closely since the sale to Salesforce, and will switch those groups to Telegram or Signal if I see cause for concern.
But be careful with them. I have lost message with them. One client show the message, the other wont. And a scary room update process. I always scare of losing message with their Element client.
One thing that I am considering is keeping WhatsApp around without leaving any of my groups, but making very strong efforts to only send new messages through my new service.
I have iMessage, Whatsapp, Telegram on my phone. Each one is used to reach a certain group of people. I also have Signal, but nobody is on there and I never use it.
By the way, bare e-mail is usually enough if you omit bloated signatures and quotations and just send short messages that way. There even is a Telegram clone which actually is an e-mail client.
I just installed signal on my wife's phone and she doesn't have anyone using signal as well.
How can we build the network effect when the network effect is so strong for WhatsApp!
I have all of them installed, different people use different ones, I don't care really.
It has syncing, a web client and optional one-to-one encrypted chats.
It also uses Microsoft accounts, which many already have because of Windows integration.
I'm not a willing participant in WhatsApp, it's what my boss and coworkers use.
Whatsapp's value to me was negligible (that isn't to say I wasn't using it quite a lot; it's value was just low).
So I'm removing it and not replacing it.
All my friends splittered around Telegram, Signal, Threema, Riot etc.
I wish we could finally find one system to use again.
Whatsapp became a standard non-carrier app to communicate globally. People do not even know any of these apps. Removing whatsapp from the phone means disconnecting from many remote friends and family members.
If you need anonymous, then none of the above really work either.
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
Best software product of the past decade.
WhatsApp is bad. They are owned by a data collection company notorious for gross privacy violations. Both the client apps and the server are completely closed source, which means either could be spying on you without any way to know. They do claim to implement the secure Signal Protocol, but how do you verify end to end encryption without seeing source code, anyway?
Telegram is a perfectly adequate choice. The user experience is similar to WhatsApp. It does practice some dark patterns - end to end encryption is only available in "secret chats" and calls, which means all other messages you send are readable by anyone with a warrant - and has had some high-profile exploits over the years, but the current iteration of its cryptographic protocol has been proved secure [1] (disclaimer: the paper claiming so came out within the last month, and I haven't found any discussion or review). All of the client apps are open source. The server is not, but if the clients are properly encrypting messages, that shouldn't be a security concern (To my knowledge. I am not a cryptographer).
Discord is community-oriented. It's primarily based around "guilds" (commonly referred to as servers) that function similar to Slack workspaces. A robust role-based permission systems has made it pretty much the de facto standard for large communities wanting a real-time discussion platform (think subreddits, Discourse forums, etc). They have some top-of-the-line engineers who sometimes publish cool blog posts about their ridiculously performant clients [2]. Nonetheless, nothing is encrypted, they aren't open-source, and they have an unclear monetization model [3].
Signal is designed, intentionally or not, as a SMS replacement. It's build around one on one and small group messages. Their encryption is strong, independently verified, and enabled by default (Signal falls back to SMS for others who don't use it). Think iMessage, but open-source and secure. You'll see HN complain about its UI from time to time, but really, it's quite good. It's also extremely easy to convince friends and family to switch to.
Matrix aims to be to real time chat what email is for asynchronous communication. Rather than a service, it's a standard, which means you'll see swaths of clients strewn about GitHub and other websites, the most feature complete of which is Element [4]. In practice (or for the time being), Matrix is just better IRC. VoIP and video calls are somewhat hodge-poged into the spec, but do work well, and encryption by default has been rolling out over the past year. Direct messaging, group chats, and communities are also all supported, although the latter suffers from the IRC-like limitation of only one "channel" per server.
I know nothing about Threema or Viber, sorry.
[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.03141
[2]: https://blog.discord.com/why-discord-is-switching-from-go-to...
[3]: https://cadence.moe/blog/2020-06-06-why-you-shouldnt-trust-d...
[4]: https://element.io/
Is this a typo for Zoom?
- Unlimited storage that doesn't expire
- Complete API access. There are many alternative Telegram clients because of this, and the official clients are opensource, too.
- Native clients for all the major platforms (macOS even has two official native clients), including a web client. All clients work without needing to link up with a phone. There are unofficial clients for the terminal and Emacs, as well.
- Excellent bot API that gives you the ability to easily write your own bots, and has enabled a rich ecosystem of bots. E.g., https://t.me/InLaTeXbot, https://t.me/MusicsHunterbot, https://t.me/GmailBot, https://t.me/libsan_bot, https://t.me/scihubot, https://t.me/to_kindle_bot, https://t.me/music, https://t.me/youtube, https://t.me/imdb, https://t.me/minroobot, ... . Check out https://github.com/SpEcHiDe/UniBorg for a self-hostable bot that is just superb.
- Good support (best I've seen) for sending text, images, audio, links, etc.
- The above combined with support for one-to-many "channels" has enabled a very rich ecosystem of personal microblogs (ala Tumblr) alongside official news channels. (As this needs networks effects, the ecosystem might not be strong in English. I only follow https://t.me/techmemenews and https://t.me/tldrnewsletter in English, which are bridges to some non-Telegram newsletters I have built myself.) There are also a lot of channels that "liberate" "information", such as https://t.me/HeadSpaceChannel .
- Those channels are also great for private note-taking.
- Ability to selectively export data to HTML (good for human viewing) or JSON. There once was an unofficial terminal app that exported to sqlite, but the maintainer gave up after this feature was added to the official clients. Nonetheless, exporting data via the API is still an option.
- Multiaccount support
- An open and free-as-in-beer ecosystem for (potentially animated) stickers, which has resulted in some really creative stickers, and where one can find stickers for most niche interests.
- Multi-device usage (Signal only works on a single phone)
- Seamless device switching, courtesy of not having E2E on by default. One also doesn't lose history.
- A lot of small quality-of-life features, such as: Video profile avatars; Granular settings for notifications, storage, privacy, ...; Ability to group chats into folders; Ability to group files (including photos and videos) into a single post; Animated emojis; Ability to pin chats to the top; "Instant view" that lets you read a cleaned version of articles in Telegram itself; Rich link previews; Scheduled message posts; ...
- E2E chats are available when you want them, and you can even set a self-destruct on your posts.
- You can fully use Telegram without revealing your phone number to anyone.
- Great support for groups and their administration, and you can always use bots if you want some niche feature.
- Group voice chats
- Acceptable search through everything in your history. (I am not up to speed on what the competition offers.)
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/matrix-one-chat-protocol-to-r...
Idk if that was just a market trick or if it was real.
In Telegram you don't get censored. But it lacks the essential blocking people feature.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25668547
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25669657
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25668659
Edit: if you would like to avoid constant switching in the future, you have to think long-term and consider a distributed network, not another walled garden.