I'm not nearly as salty about SMS because of the following differences from the WhatsApp scenario. Signal-SMS was only supported on Android, call it half of Signal users whereas a potential WhatsApp integration (or lack thereof) would affect nearly all Signal users. Then the Android users who have to reach others over SMS already have a built-in system app that does this, so they don't have to install third party app that exists to vacuum data. So the downgrade for the Android Signal user is in ease of use, not in overall security.

while i see where you're coming from, being able to message WhatsApp users from a client app that respects privacy would be better than being forced to have WhatsApp installed on your device, with it snooping casually on your everyday device usage and your contact list and so on.

WhatsApp is the only Facebook app on my phone and i'd love to get rid of it without losing the ability to message all those buffons using it (which make up for 99% of my social circle)

Not sure what you mean, of course WhatsApp can disable it's own encryption. That would be an argument for open source third party apps and interoperability.

No body said it's going to have the same level of security, but that still doesn't mean that should just give up on it, just put a small icon indicating this is a WhatsApp user.

Realistically there is going to be a bridge which you can either self host or use to federate matrix.

Every Matrix protocol server, excluding some experimental or internal for a company ones, are federating? And it's not an app as you can choose an app, the protocol defines client<>server spec too.

Whatsapp has been owned by Facebook since 2014. It was created in 2009. That's 5 years without Facebook, 10 with :/

Wasn't it google?

You'll be happy to know it's the top comment thread, at least in Sync

Signal is developped by a non-profit.

pretty much, though it's pretty basic in terms of functionality at the moment

My wife told me to fuck off when I installed signal on her phone 😔

I managed to convince one long distance friend a few years ago. So now I need to keep Signal just to be able to communicate with him.

I have both WhatsApp and Signal installed.

In the 3 years or so since I installed Signal, I haven't had a single conversation on it. Only a handful of people from my Contact book are showing as Signal users, and none of them people I speak to regularly.

I live in anticipation of someone deciding to message me on there, but I'm not exactly optimistic at this point.

It's not about converting people close to you. In some situations, you're asking them to install an app just to talk to you, while everyone else they talk to is on WhatsApp. I personally have to use WhatsApp for work and for personal, otherwise I'd literally not get those messages. There's no option when, if you stop a random person on the street, regardless of what OS their phone is running, and ask to look at their phone, it's going to have WhatsApp installed. It's like your phone having email; who the fuck doesn't have email? It's the same with Whatsapp, it's just assumed you have it.

My point isn't that metadata isn't useful for them, there's no need to be condescending about things I never said.

You do that regardless of which app you use to send SMS.

Calling someone a dumb fuck, even indirectly by using Zuck's famous quote, is quite rude. People aren't dumb fucks because they are forced into using WhatsApp.

Maybe you're from the US or somewhere where iMessage, SMS, or WeChat dominate, but here, you either use WhatsApp, or you become an outcast. Whatsapp is de facto mandatory. Even half of my delivery notifications and 2FA comes to my WhatsApp, not SMS. When people say "just don't use WhatsApp", they may as well be saying "just don't use email".

I don't want to be one of Zuck's users. That's why I want an open and secure protocol for cross-client messaging. So I and others can use something else without being isolated from friends and family. Being lonely isn't pleasant.

Facebook's WhatsApp is almost certainly filled with backdoors and exploits

Perhaps it is. We can never know due to its proprietary nature... which is why I don't want to use it.

As it stands, I can use Signal with one contact. The rest refuse to use it, or used it and abandoned it.

It would be amazing if everyone woke up tomorrow and flocked to signal, but here in the real world, outside of my fantasies, I have to go with the standard, which unfortunately is WhatsApp.

The only other alternative is SMS which is far worse in terms of both security and privacy, and would also cut me off from talking with friends as I'd have no group chat access and because nobody uses SMS.

My choice is between:

• being alone and unable to talk to anybody, but being a privacy purist.

• conceding some metadata but retaining private chats and using a client I want to use. It would also bring more people to signal as they also won't be locked out from chatting with others. Overall I'd gain signal-to-signal contacts, as well as imperfect signal-to-whatsapp ones.

• giving in entirely and using Facebook software.

To me, there's an obvious answer there. It's not perfect, but it's better than the others.

The trouble is we end up having to install both when we could be only using Signal

I would use signal if I could convince people to use signal.

I could convince people to use Signal if all their conversations were on signal and they could talk to people on WhatsApp in a seamless way.

Right now you MUST have WhatsApp if you have any kind of social life. Signal is the other app that no one has because it's kind of a pain in the ass to have two messaging apps.

I would love to switch to Signal, but inter-compatibility with WhatsApp is a must. The EU is essentially handing them a golden opportunity on a silver platter to become a mainstream app, and they are like nah, we good wtf

This is correct, and everybody who complains about how "hard" it is to use more than one messenger app is pathetic. That's like the epitome of first world problems. People should be GLAD that they have the option of using Signal, instead of whining about how they didn't build it the way they wanted it to be.

Using whatsapp is an absolute necessity in most of the world, its the only way to communicate with coworkers, classmates, businesses and even some government services. Not using it means you are essentially disconnected from the world. Good luck convincing more than 2 close friends to install Signal just to talk with you. No one uses SMS. FB really is that dominant.

Clearly written by someone from somewhere where WhatsApp isn't de facto mandatory.

That's already a solution to cookie banners: the "do not track" setting. It's been tested in court in Germany and confirmed to count as rejected permission for GDPR purposes. Websites dinky have to obey it.

It's currently slowly gaining traction, there's a privacy advocacy group suing high profile targets over this to create awareness.

We also need a formal change to the cookie law/GDPR to acknowledge "do not track" as the preferred method. Then the banners will slowly go away.

Yep, all the EU done is forced websites to have consent if the website want to process personal data. There are many analytics that does not process IP address or fingerprint and so does not require consent banner. Be annoyed on the websites, not this law.

That wont hold in court tho

Right. That's a very different business model. I don't necessarily have an opinion about whether it would be better or worse. It is easier to look at our current problems and say it would be better. But, eh, I can block most trackers and be a leach off of websites that stay up by selling other people's data. shrug

Mimimimimimimimimi

Obviously. But that is very difficult on mobile.

While I do think you are correct, you have to remember a few things:

1. SMS really isn't used outside the US (and iMessage pretty much was the death of text messages and now iMessage also supports RCS)
2. Open source projects can be strict about following a moral code
3. Anything more than just sending secure messages is just an attack vector and more layers of code to maintain

can't have 2 apps installed?

I've had this conversation before. The consensus last time was that I should tell every single person on my contacts list to download Signal if they want to stay in touch and if they refuse it means they're shitty people that don't care about me but I'm totally not a shitty person for forcing my preferences onto others.

People don't realize that in most of Europe WhatsApp is more popular than iMessages are in the US. Not having WhatsApp means you're not texting to anyone.

Americans have something even worse: SMS

I've had Signal installed for years. There's like 3 of my contacts that I never talk to anyway. Most people use facebook and tiktok and can't even bother installing an adblocker. They're not interested about a privacy focused messenger when they already got WhatsApp.

Wholeheartedly agree, but most people wont do it, so you end up with signal for 1 or 2 friends, telegram for a few others, and all the crap ones for the rest (whatsapp, slack, teams, messenger, etc)

Ive ditched every messaging app but signal and telegram, and its really annoying sometimes

Like another person said, most people don't even bother installing adblockers on their browsers and yet complain about ads anyway, despite them being like 4 clicks away. Even after being told they exist and how to do it. Now imagine that with an entirely "new" "unheard of" messaging app.

It's certainly different, but for signal users who want to maintain that level of privacy, it's probably something they want, right? From their perspective this is probably a good decision.

I'm indifferent because I'd personally rather have interoperability and Beeper gets the job done.

Yeahhh it's amazing, your choices are a closed platform that forces you to buy their expensive devices, or SMS, or another proprietary platform ran by a notorious privacy predator.

Also got nextdns running on my router

Its an open standard for communications (like xmpp, but the new hotness) with a focus on federating IRC chat. (lot of cool work on state resolution by them wrt that). So you can communicate with people on different matrix servers as long as they federate with each other. Additionally, they have built in support for bridges that let you connect to other people via matrix giving you a seamless experience on that service via matrix. Lemme know if you need more clarifications.

I just used the guides by mautrix for the respective bridges. https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/setup.html there are instructions for a bunch there that work well. What was the issue you faced?

You could go on without doing it. I would like to use signal to signal, but there are literally zero people interested in my environment :-(
Using signal just me would be much better than using whatsapp directly, and would reduce the data collected.

If signal suddenly stopped being mostly a geek desert and people could still talk to all their contacts, don't you think they would be much more willing to move? The more people, the more people interested in migrating, and the less data for meta.

I know this. That's why I wrote that it's too difficult to deal with cryptocurrency payments on their website. Most people won't do it. Other payment methods are not available from my country.

I am aware of that but when all our friends or communities either use whatsapp or discord then it's just more convenient. Honestly messaging these days is a mess

• Teams and Slack for work
• Whatapp and Discord for family, friends and interests/communities
• Signal for the techsavy friends

If.

This is the only path forward.

This is the way!

It still needs a phone number for registration. You just don't need to share it with people you want to talk with.

That doesn't solve the issue that you have to give them a phone number to start an acc.

You can pay anonymously with cash or btc.

Oh i didn't know that sorry as i said i haven't used both of em.

Re-read my comment please. I'm talking about Matrix, not whatsapp. Not downvoting because you are correct, but it is out of context.

Unfortunetly no. Can be shown when you reset the encryption keys, relogin and see that times of messages, who you are talking with and even reactions are visible. But I know for reactions and replies they are working on it.

Which is also exactly how Signal works too; I migrated both two days ago. Process was virtually identical.

I much prefer Signal, but can't judge WhatsApp to harshly on this tbh.

Also when logging in on the website version on pc, you need to keep whatsapp open on your phone to sync old messages and media to your pc if you want to be able to see them there.

Thanks. I stand corrected. I was one of those that paid $1 for life when WhatsApp was a new kid on there block but haven't used it since news broke that Facebook acquired them like a decade ago. At the time, you had a new phone, your messages would transfer. Dunno how it is today after all those years but seems to be similar to Signal.

Based on the stories coming up on Facebook and their lack of moral / humane boundaries I still won't trust them not to have access to a private key when their app is so invasive. Their whole model is based on behind the curtain trafficking.

Thanks. Haven't used them in like a decade so things seem to have changed. At the time, new phone meant your messages transferred automatically.

At the same time, even if Facebook requires a backup for the messages to show up, as the app is close sourced, how would one know for sure whether the app doesn't harvest the private key anyway?

Call me paranoid, but Google owns Android. They can easily read the content of a notification as it's displayed. They even have a Notification History app where you can see all applications from all apps.

At some point, Android is reading the message to generate the quick replies that were showing in the notification. They're content-aware and this is not a function of Signal; if someone sent me a question, there were "yes" and "no" quick replies. If someone sent that they were going to be late, there were quick replies like "That's OK", etc.

I'm looking in to this, thank you!

Edit: Molly (UnifiedPush) isn't something I can reasonably expect friends and family to set up.

Please note that to receive notifications, you will need to set up a server to run MollySocket, available on https://github.com/mollyim/mollysocket.

You need the right flavor of Molly to use UnifiedPush: https://github.com/.... You can install MollySocket via: Docker/Podman: docker pull ghcr.io/mollyim/mollysocket:latest Crates.io: cargo install mollysocket (see INSTALL.md for the setup) Direct download: https://github.com/mollyim/mollysocket/releases (see INSTALL.md for the setup) A distributor app (easiest is ntfy) You can optionally install your own push server like ntfy or NextPush. For beginners, you can use a free service like ntfy.sh (do consider donating if you have the means).