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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.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
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Slashdot has a comparison of a few alternatives. My preference is Briar as my user name would indicate!
It’s not like they exactly didn’t before: https://www.androidpolice.com/telegram-germany-user-data-surrendered/
Also, nothing said about whether they’re going to start making transparency reports, not that I’ve expected anything else from this crapshow of a messenger…
They never told they didn’t
They’ve explicitly told in there FAQ 0 bytes of info was disclosed. And I suspect whatever they’ve shared with Germans alone wasn’t 7 bits long.
FAQ =/= TOS
In FAQ, you aren’t punished if you tell BS there, at least as I understand it.
They made it now more clear, what exactly mean by 0 byte:
“Protecting the children” is always code for “We’re manufacturing consent to fuck you over.”
Shout out to right wing nuts for rushing to Telegram early on - keeping me from ever using it.
Good thing I never used telegram.
Honestly that isn’t bad. They were knowingly protecting people who target children.
Privacy should be enforced on a technical level with zero knowledge
“Protecting the children” is always the excuse for fascism, pay attention.
Time to close all the fascist schools and put the kids back in factories as Marx intended.
You seem to have made what’s known as a converse error in your logic:
The person you replied to said that
You seem to have mistakingly confused that with the false claim
And as such you have responded to a statement the commenter never made.
And equivalent mistake would be claim that since every time it rains it is cloudy, therefore whenever it is cloudy it is always raining. Honestly logical errors happen for everyone, I hope this helps.
Did they? Did you just make a reverse strawman fallacy?
Personally I think the comment could’ve been worded better as it can be interpreted either as
(I.E. Fascists use the excuse, provably correct and can be generalised to authoritarianism in general) However I do see that it could potentially be taken the other way as
(I.E only those who used the excuse are fascists, completely false) I used the principle of charity and assumed the inital argument was logical, though its understandable if others aren’t willing to do that
Damn, are you Bob Hoskins? Cause you could easily play a live action Mario with that leap.
Hey don’t blame me. You’re the one who used the A-word in a place filled with OCD nitpickers and in a discussion around CSAM.
It has nothing to do with fascism. Fascism is what left leaning politicians call people they don’t agree with. On the right they call people they don’t like communists.
Outside of that mini rant I disagree with the idea that Telegram is a force for good. Telegram doesn’t use e2ee and has questionable ties. They let people in public group chats post CSAM and other child abuse related stuff. If you look up telegram in the news it is constantly the platform used by criminals. It isn’t private and it sure isn’t anonymous. There are many better alternatives that don’t actively support human trafficking and such. Its not like Telegram has zero knowledge of what happens. They knowingly allowed people to exploit children and then to go around bragging and plotting to harm others.
This isn’t some attack on freedom or privacy. Telegram is frankly a risk to all. If you want encrypted messaging there are many other platforms that are way less sketchy.
They can take down the child weirdos and human traffickers
Take down my rom emulation hosted ZIPs and we’ll fucking riot
Well it’s only a matter of time
the libgen channel was practically eliminated in the last week
They took down a z- library post It’s over
when free & democratic country jails your ass one time
any way to read this without a telegram account?
deleted by creator
👀 Was this written by AI, or was it a person trying to be as annoying with their emojis as possible?
posts on durov’s channel have been like that for some time
Looks like your post was written by AI so given your emoji use 😉
Ya that was the commentary on how shitty the icons were
I can’t read this, who thought adding pictures like that was a good idea 😭
So what’s the replacement?
https://simplex.chat/
Wire. Fully encrypted, easily anonymous because no phone number needed
wire sold out years ago.
How?
Should be noted that their canary was removed at the same time.
OK, but it is Foss and encrypted client-side
Seems to be an iOS app from the screenshots on the Play Store.
Its an app on everything
It’s clearly using iOS design though
So far, irc, jabber/ xmpp and matrix and plain old email with gpg :-)
there’s deltachat for gpg - i love the concept, since your friends don’t even need to have it installed in order for you to chat with them.
but i am forever stuck with telegram because i refuse to install software running on set-my-computer-on-fire-pls-Electron (which every single MODERN chat application does today, bar Telegram).
For private messaging? Signal was always better. The way I use Telegram, and the way Telegram should be used, is like another public social media. I use it for following channels that give news about things I’m interested in.
I love the premise of Signal, but there are too many red flags. Some of my issues are:
That’s fair. I just use it because it’s what everyone’s on. When I used Briar only one other person I spoke to used it, and I just use Matrix for some more techy communities I’m in. For my friends and non-tech-savvy comrades, they’re all on Signal, and I imagine trying to move people to something more decentralised/more in the spirit of foss/etc would lead to my social circles becoming very split in terms of how I talk to them. But I get your point.
Why not Signal?
matrix is great but sadly not all my friends use it and i still use discord :(
All completely irrelevant to most people. Nobody they know is on those platforms.
There are only two alternatives to the Big Tech messengers that are anywhere near critical mass: Signal and the shady one we’re talking about here.
Though I would love Matrix to go mainstream.
This is sadly the exact reason it will stay like this. People can’t reach me because i don’t use WhatsApp? Well bad luck. Use a better app or just don’t. I can’t reach them because they only use WA? What a bummer but so be it.
As long as people install WhatsCrapp because some distant aunt still uses it for the xmas-greetings, it will continue to be #1.
Doesn’t it get lonely though?
I remember the times where we didn’t have a tiny computer with us all day to be reachable. And if I’d be lonely because i don’t give a rats ass about WA, fb and the likes, that’d be indeed lonely but not due to that
I was talking about your attitude. Lol.
Nobody is on Signal either.
I actually had notifications of many non-technical friends getting onto signal. It gained significant traction I think?
Compared to Telegram’s 1-billion user base, it’s still a roundoff error.
I feel like there needs to be an incentive in mind for those apps to bring in ppl. People care about privacy but won’t even delete FB, let alone use a different messaging app
If they cared about privacy then they wouldn’t use a searchable public database like FB.
I think there’s misconceptions, trust being put in the wrong place, unawareness involved, or simply they don’t think it through, rather than not caring (anectodal/IMO). E.g. “I don’t have anything to hide, so what if they collect everything”.
If we could build a tool to gather such info, that’s easily accessible and for free, to show all the data available on you in the marketplace - that might make them uncomfortable. And then perhaps they’ll start to try and understand why they’re uncomfortable, and why this is bad.
Ironically though Matrix has a Problem with metadata leaking out while signal doesn’t
Possibly unsolvable given its distributed nature. Seems like there will be at least some small cost to pay for that benefit.
regarding its UX, nothing close exists; when it comes to converting normies, so you have someone to actually talk to, then there are no alternatives. that’s a pretty shitty state of affairs for something that shoulda been solved a long time ago.
lesson learned, I guess, don’t put all your eggs in one basket and have multiple fallback solutions. I’ve begrudingly moved to Signal and I’m cursing it out at least once per day, can’t believe the navel-gazing, self-righteous cluelessness behind it; but that’s the best there is at the moment. it’s beyond shitty that we’re having trouble achieving what we had in like 2012 by way of XMPP and friends, let alone surpassing it.
I think https://simplex.chat/ has good UX, but I hear that telegram is best in class.
It’s shocking how many people just outright ignore UX.
What don’t you like about Signal?
Requires both a phone and a phone number
to me it looks and feels like shit, compared to Durov’s spyware it’s like a PoC from 2015 looking for funding. fine demo you got there, now bring us the real thing.
but, to practical things, I lose/sell/buy/switch devices frequently. with telegram, I can lose all my devices, log on from a fresh one and all my shit is there - a decade+ of convos with 100s of people with valuable info. no juggling around with the crappy electron desktop app that doesn’t give me access to convos or the inane procedure to replace a lost device and restore chat history… the other day, I successfully retrieved a piece of info from a convo from a decade prior.
I realize there are people out there that need that sort of security, but I don’t. I just want Telegram with an OTR plugin (OMEMO nowadays) that prevents any nascent mass surveilance and LLM ingestion and I’m golden. but that shit’s explicitly against Telegram’s ToS; the only logical conclusion is they’re adamant about leaving all your shit unencrypted in the cloud for some specific reason.
I can’t think of any such reason that’s not malevolent.
I see it a lot when ppl complain about signal, but just can’t understand why you would save 10+ years in old msgs. Almost all my signal conversations even GRP chats are set to 1 week auto delete. If something important Is said that I need to save, I copy/paste it into my note app where I can organize it. Its sounds so impractical to dig through 10+ years of data everytime you need something. Plus it would be awful to know there is a log of all the dumb things I said 10 years ago lol.
I agree with you about saving the things you need. Especially images and videos since they are not worth the storage size.
But a history of your conversations with people is pretty nice to have if you didn’t think about saving some info or it only becomes relevant later on. And as long it’s only kept on your own device, I’m fine with it. (But I guess, on the devices of people you speak to)
Plus if you only save text, even 10 years worth of data is not much at all. A few videos probably weighs more.
E: typo
Completely agree! The ephemerality of Signal is a feature, not a bug.
I didn’t always see it this way, but then a thought occurred to me. None of the conversations we have in person are recorded. Those communications are just as meaningful if not more so than text conversations, and yet somehow we get by just fine without them being stored indefinitely on some personal device, let alone in someone else’s datacenter.
This is a case of technology controlling us when we should be controlling it.
I agree that we are fine even without it. But that does not mean it’s better than not having that history.
An easy example that comes to mind are all arguments wherr someone remembers one thing while someone else remembers another thing.
Decent counter-example. In turn I’d say that’s an edge case where we could still survive just fine without knowing the relevant fact for sure. And certainly not worth the cost in privacy terms of recording and storing everything.
XMPP is still around although there’s a constant campaign trying to claim it’s gone.
because things moved forward in the last decade or so and it’s not viable. the same way matrix and element and those ridiculous things aren’t viable and never will be. can you use it today? absolutely. can you convert normies to it and make it an actual widely used comms platform? no. fucking. way.
this is coming from a guy running their own prosody instance and utilizing rocketchat on two separate client instances. yeah, I know how to set it up and deploy it; but the amount of absolutely credible complaints I get from normies forced to use it staggering.
XMPP would be viable in theory but for whatever reason no one wants to build a modern client out of it.
How do you define modern? I would call these modern clients personally:
modern as in stable, good UX, plug-and-play, and supporting features a modern chat client is expected to have with zero hassle.
the stuff needed to convince your mom to install it.
To be honest, I think the above clients and services like Snikket fit that description.
Now, I wouldn’t say they’re all on the same level UX-wise as WhatsApp, Telegram etc. But I do think they are 90%-95% of the way there, and in my experience that’s enough to convince friends and family to switch over.
In my experience, when people haven’t wanted to switch, it’s normally not been because of the clients, but because they don’t want to install yet another app to talk to someone.
How about something e2ee? (Even Whatsapp is more privat than telegram)
Element 2.0 or Signal is only worth ones, I think.
But to be honest - it’s only IP and phone number. If you have concerns about possibility of such request about your persona, you always can buy Telegram’s anonymous phone number / fake telephone number / use VPN to login.
what guarantees they won’t hand over chat history? if police requested that, could they say no?
I prefer wire.
Unlike matrix, wire encrypts everything. Its not possible to send unencrypted messages on Wire.
Unlike Signal, you don’t need a phone or a phone number to use Wire. Create an account with an anonymous email address directly on either the desktop app or the mobile app.
Element I’m not that sure, it’s so bloated that I’m surprised it works on mobile phones. Regarding matrix sure
They said element 2.0, which I’d assume means Element X using matrix 2.0. From my testing in the last few weeks, element X has been the fastest messaging app I’ve ever used. Probably still some bugs but does not feel bloated anymore at all.
Not bloated because it doesn’t have almost any features. No spaces, no threads, joining channels doesn’t work, wait until becomes as the predecessors. The performance improvement is negligible in my experience. It does simply depend on thr homeserver performance , not much on matrix version
Who do you talk to on it?
His friends, maybe? lol
Just clarifying for the ones who don’t know: Element is a Matrix client.
For the illegal goods? Sir this is privacy not piracy.
You really gonna come in here with a “want privacy? Must be because you’re a criminal.”? Get the fuck out.
This was obvious a joke, but whatever.
I thought it was funny.
The illegal goods on telegram aren’t piracy related.
Sir, this is for privacy not for CSAM
No, doesn’t have the same ring to it
Sure, it was just for the laughs.
Matrix?
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I noticed performance of matrix depends strongly on the server. Matrix.org is dead slow, I started using tchncs.de and even old ( somehow legacy ) element android is blazing fast
Basically because of how it works,it’s based on math graph.