Folks, I have finally figured it out.
Have a baby.
Since having a baby a week ago, all of a sudden everyone is willing to install a decent messaging app in order to receive pics of the baby.
We explained that we weren’t ready for images of our child to end up in the wrong hands via non-private apps. Another thing was telling them that the one single friend who had already got on board with this had already been recieving pics…
It’s been a conversation starter for many and I think seeing privacy from the point of view of a newborn has helped our family and friends understand it a bit more easily. Plus they’ve had to put up with it if they want any photos, so they will see it working firsthand.
So, if you want to have a baby, know that it can be a wonderful opportunity to help loved ones communicate more privately.
It also increases the sum total of love, community and compassion in the world and in your own life but that’s a conversation for another community :)
Edit: If anyone has good tips on how to share a little one’s journey more privately with those that care about them, please post them in the discussion.
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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Personally this would be the exact reason that would stop me from signing up for a new messaging service.
Yes, your baby is special and amazing. To you.
There’s no signup involved for the apps we’re using - you just download them and share IDs with people (you can even choose to add only people who don’t have kids). Worth checking out:
getsession.org/
jami.net/
Who’s down to make babies?
Time to have a baby then.
Always.
That’s why my aunt and uncle finally got iPhones. They were missing out on iMessage and FaceTime with the grandkids and rest of the family making plans.
Wait, so the family chose to keep two people out of the loop until they caved and bought new hardware instead of adding one more app that would be common for everyone and give everyone the option to use whatever hardware they wanted?
Nobody uses third-party messaging apps here; it’s not just those two old people. There’s just no need. MMS has horrible quality videos and can’t be added and removed from a group chat and breaks functionality for everyone else in the chat.
That’d why Apple is getting sued by the DOJ among other reasons
DOJ needs to fuck off. Of people want to use an inferior product like android they’re free to, but nobody else should have to suffer for their bad decisions
Ok Tim Apple
Yep. This works pretty well.
Got the whole family to convert to signal by using kid photo sharing as a catalyst.
Damn of all the times to be an antinatalist… I guess it’s Messenger 🤢 video chats with my family for the foreseeable future
We are all antenatal my friend.
Lol nice
Based. This is something I may do down the road since it may be the only way I can get my friends and family on Signal.
I usually phrase it as “it’s one more app on your phone and it doesn’t ask you for anything, it’s really not that big of an ask”.
Signal has stories 🙂
Anti Commercial AI thingy
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Yes, but Signal and Matrix-something aren’t good “messaging” apps. Just a bunch of poorly written desktop and mobile clients tied to questionable backends and metadata disasters.
Maybe not Signal: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/why_not_signal.html
You can’t recommend Signal over anything when it comes to features and service quality it just can’t handle large group chats (hundreds of people) and the cross device sync fails often with a “signal can’t display this message”. Signal’s desktop and mobile clients are simply a pile of react and javascript garbage that can never be as fast as the native applications from other apps.
Maybe not Matrix: metadata disaster
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.
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 and it can be configured to be secure and private. Everything else is just an attempt at yet another vendor lock-in. Here a quick overview of the architecture.
SimpleXchat is the goat
Synapse and Element are fully open source, there is nothing questionable about it. Having a company backing your project as main developer does not mean it suddenly becomes closed source or said company owns the project now.
None of the issues you mentioned are a big deal or make Matrix inherently worse than XMPP. The biggest flaw you can pin on Matrix is its performance but they’re working on it.
I do prefer xmpp, but fuck I have never gotten a single person to use it.
Yes, I get the pain, XMPP is good but it just lacks some investment in better mobile clients. And that most likely happens because there’s no easy way to monetize and sustain a mobile XMPP client.
Man, we need Paris to get off their ass do another commune, and fill it with software devs.
Cool. I’m a dude and pretty old, though. Having a baby might be a bit of a problem.
Just do it, you’ll figure out the details later.
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It’s what I did 5 years ago. All family and friends now on Signal.
Awesome, well done!
They also still use WhatsApp for their wider connections, but still, progress.
Literally just don’t.
It’s 2024, don’t lead horses to water. Just live your life and check out.
If they want to connect, tell them where you choose to be. Compromise is for babies.
Also git fetch, git pull & git push every once in a while please
Very once in a while.
Genius idea. Is there an app that reverses a vasectomy and twenty years of aging? But seriously, this idea has got legs, I love it. Congrats with your baby. Have you made a Facebook account for them yet?
Haha. Thanks :)
No, if they want a facebook account they will have to wait until they are 18!
I’m not arguing with your parenting style or saying you’re doing it wrong etc etc, I agree with it in theory but I’d like to share my younger sisters story.
My mum decided she couldn’t have social media until she was “old enough” to protect her, this however caused her to end up getting a secret phone and create secret social media accounts. This eventually led to her being cyber bullied by students at her school who’s parents were less cautious. But because she was doing all of this secretly as her mum had said no to social media, she didn’t feel like she could get the support she needed. Fortunately she had an older brother who could help her, but I couldn’t go to the school for her as I’m not her guardian.
I personally after this would lean into the world of not necessarily supervised social media usage, but educating and cautioning what it means to post on social media. How it will never go away and when it’s there, it’s there forever.
My sister fully understands this now and is doing alot better, but ultimately the damage is done.
I fully understand the point of view of no social media until 18, I just want you to be aware of potential consequences of being strict on it.
I’ve heard of people having success.eiyh setting up an account for the family pet and friending their kids and friends before they are old enough to understand the concept of sharing online.allows you to keep tabs on them unobtrusively and can obviously deactivate or defined as appropriate when they age.
Hopefully though, I stead, you’ll teach them how to use privacy controls to not allow you to see, when they are old enough that it’s appropriate.
Even if they don’t create a secret account, they get left out of groups, and probably mocked because everyone else is doing it. Not being able to do things that everyone else does when you’re a kid sucks. My wife and I were just talking a couple nights ago about how we’re glad we didn’t have to deal with that with our kid. We probably would have said no, which would have caused our kid some issues for sure.
I don’t think you can really control kids after 12-13. If they really want something or their friends are all doing something then they can figure it out at that age, whether it’s the internet or drugs or whatever
6402373705728000 is a lot
Indeed
This would be a good use case for private posts on self-hosted Movim + XMPP. Only your followers can see the posts but they persist unlike messages which tend to fade either due to expiry or just being too far back in the history. The XMPP platform’s clients come with OMEMO for double ratchet E2EE & Movim has a slick progressive web app for anyone that doesn’t want ta install some app while being able to comment on posts, participate in DMs+audio/voice calls, as well as MUCs (multi-user chat).
If I had a kid, this was my plan.
So, xmpp or matrix ?
We’re using Session with friends and family because I think it works most reliably with people who use apple devices out of the box. We use Jami for each other because it’s p2p (distributed) and endorsed by the FSF. I set up Jami on my mum’s phone too. You can use your own push notification provider with it or simply let it run in the background if you want to run your phone without google or apple servers but still want instant notifications for messages and voice calls. Jami is the app I would most like to see succeed. I believe you can also use it on internal networks, which is a pro in terms of independence future-proofing
Thanks, I didn’t know about these two !