I use the apps my friends use but it gets tiring to keep up with so many.
And other countries don’t understand why US users stick to txt/mms… Its convenient and built into the phone so everyone has it.
Family abroad uses viber🤦
Yeah, there was a nice period when Pidgin could easily handle all the chats. Then providers siloed their apps 🫤
I actually tried pidgin maybe 6 months ago just for kicks if it could handle whatsapp, signal and telegram, and whaddaya know, it could. It was ugly as hell, but it could be done.
For whatsapp, my experience with Pidgin was terrible. Stickers had to be downloaded as photos, group chats would only show up once someone sent a message, contacts would only show as the full international phone number, all existing chats were horizontal tabs, like a browser.
Yup indeed, it wasn’t a pleasant experience. Self-hosting Matrix with all its bridges is kinda nice tho (although a bit lacking).
You can bridge to all of the apps in the image from Matrix
Or Slidge
That was the time when all the apps were standard XMPP. It didn’t have proper encryption back then. WhatsApp is still XMPP nowadays, but excluding federation and non-standard implementation on Meta servers and so on
Fun fact, iMessage is also XMPP based!
So is WhatsApp, Zoom, Jitsi
Had no idea about Zoom!
It’s kind of crazy that all these services use it, and on the federated side of things, Signal killed it.
It also powers the communications / presence on many gaming avenues as well like Fortnite, League of Legends, & whatever Nintendo is using for notifications + online status (assuredly a lot more games).
XMPP is old, stable, & massively scalable for industrial applications – while maintaining decentralization + efficiency & allowing for extensibility like OMEMO encryption which is covering most folk’s chat use cases. Since the XMPP foundation don’t put budget into marketing & hype, a lot of folks weirdly assume it’s dead or not being used. It’s strange to me how folks seem more interested in RCS & Matrix despite their histories/ownership/flaws rather than embracing what is already good.
Yeah, XMPP is great and all, but the client side is a big old mess, everything is full of friction and missing support for feature xyz. Have you tried using XMPP on iOS?
Conversations compliance test has brought most clients into an acceptable base to where most basic chat/audio/video needs are met, so if you are comparing older legacy clients then the experience will be different. The XEP system means everything is optional & can be pitched by making a spec & seeing who uptakes the idea. It also means the bar to create your own server is absoluetly minimal since everything is an extension which means you could build one in a weekend which is great for those learning to code since the barrier to entry is extremely low if Conversations isn’t the goal.
IDGAF about Apple since you have to have a wad just to publish an application on their proprietary store & the EU didn’t do a good enough job so it’s expensive to open alternative stores like F-Droid while also being antagonistic towards sideloading as well as PWAs (not to mention needing to buy their overpriced hardware to build/release applications). Heck, you can’t even publish a GPL-or-similar-licensed app on their store. This is a giant slap in the face to free/ethical software developers & probably why the clients aren’t in a good state; if you aren’t trying to make money, why would you develop in an ecosystem that is entirely hostile for you to develop in?
Well said! I really miss having a huge roster on XMPP
We can start it up again. Time to nudge in the next Lemmy AMA to allow XMPP addresses alongside Matrix. You’d be surprised how little things like that can nudge adoption & pique curiosity.
My brother in Christ do you know what fun means
Federated XMPP is fun yes, defederated XMPP is, indeed, not fun.
Also I’m no Christ’s brother, thanks. Beelzebub maybe.
It didn’t have proper encryption back then.
OTR predates all the commercial platforms adopting XMPP, so that’s not exactly true.
Sure, but now you show me all the clients that supported OTR back then 😜 - or now, for that matter. Besides, OTR doesn’t work in multi user chats. OMEMO does, and support for it is still not exactly widespread…
Was OTR a protocol where the server had zero knowledge of the unencrypted content? Or was it basically like SSL?
OTR is E2E, it’s the direct predecessor of OMEMO/Signal on which they are both based.
Are you even a true nerd if you have so many friends?
Give Beeper a try! It consolidates all the listed apps into one texting app.
Beeper is great
Seconded. Good support team too
Tried it, its bloated and battery hungry. It isn’t also clear how beeper saves and uses/handles your messages.
People really need to consider the pedigree of the guy who created this company and how willing he is to walk away from a company when it becomes unprofitable. Eric Migicovsky sold Pebble when it became unprofitable, promised that people would still have their jobs as devs, and at the last minute, the sale didn’t include their jobs, so everyone was left fucked out of luck and with no job. Also, the fact that he has zero long term plans for how to keep fighting Apple for iMessage access after he used a teenagers reverse-engineered code to make a standalone Beeper iMessage app which Apple promptly broke after only days. If that’s as far ahead as he was able to “plan” in regards to that, it speaks to his weakness on having a long-term business plan. Lack of realistic long-term business plan coupled with how badly he fucked over the developers when he bounced from Pebble screams “Don’t trust this.”
Beeper is just paying someone else to maintain Matrix bridges for you.
And that’s a bad thing ?
Yes… because you have to trust that person/company. Which you implicitly should not… especially since they’re already shown themselves to be untrustworthy in their previous endeavors.
Remember E-Mail, everyone?
A lot of people around me are genuinely confused when your email is not
firstname.lastname@gmail.com, as they mostly just use it for confirming logins. That’s how bad the situation is.Damn I’m over here with like 4 emails
Personal / gaming, the professional one with my name, my collage one, and the new one I made to make it harder to dox me
Having an untraditional gTLD like
.xyzmakes many confused as well, especially those not in IT.I recently started using a
+in my email address to make use-specific aliases, so I can more easily filter content from them or see if they’re leaking my email.I signed up for a rewards program in person the other day and the strange look I got:
Do you have an account with us?
Idk
I can look up your email
Ok, it’s foo@bar.com
I don’t see it, would you like to make an account?
Yes, but instead of that email, make it foo+yourcompany@bar.com
Uhhhhh… Ok…
Like “you don’t have an account but you have an email specifically for our business? Sus AF”
Never heard of her.
she’s nice. You should check her out
Random hot take, I’m at least grateful that my wife and I use an app that none of our friends use. Removes the “oh shit did I send that to the wrong person” panic.
Beeper!
Too much relatable
No SimpleX??
Somebody please tell me what’s wrong with just texting? Why did half the world decide SMS needed to be replaced with a proprietary app? It works, everyone has it and there’s no confusion. Unless you are concerned about privacy or something, why not just text?
because cellular providers are actually criminals.
Also sms (and mms, whatever the fuck else exists, it’s all terrible, shits all packets flowing through the internet, it’s the same shit) sucks, and is bad, and you shouldnt use it.
It’s unencrypted and we know with certainly that the messages are stored by federal agencies and cell carriers. It also requires giving out one’s phone number which may be undesirable in some situations
SMS doesn’t handle pictures, videos, gifs, reactions, or group conversations. Things I use all the time. MMS handles some of that, but implementation varies greatly by carrier and device. If you want consistency of that functionality, you have to go with an app. Apple and Google have created replacements for SMS and MMS that could be the next version of “texting” but Apple refuses to let anyone else use theirs (iMessage) and Google has only half opened up theirs (RCS), so those don’t really fix much.
(I guess I don’t know the difference between SMS and MMS.)
I must be using MMS for texting. All of those features work for me and anyone I text with. The only issue I’ve ever had is imessage compressing videos to and from my android.
I still don’t get it
This article does a pretty good job differentiating SMS, MMS, RCS, and iMessages
Why did half the world decide SMS needed to be replaced with a proprietary app
SMS is even worse in terms of openness. You won’t find a modem that runs open source baseband firmware. It’s because the radios are subject to several regulations which means customers can’t be able to modify that firmware.
Wait until everyone and their dogs gets back to MMS…
You know how expensive they were during the upcoming of WhatsApp? Germany paid 0,80€ (at the time. Though the price is probably not much different during the early iPhone/Android 2.3 times) per picture. Compare that to the amount of stuff sent today and at the time you will probably pay 5€ per day just to get some things across.Source: https://www.derstandard.at/story/1747665/deutschland-hohe-preise-fuer-mms-verderben-das-geschaeft
It’s ironic that Europe adopted SMS years before we did in America because texting was absurdly expensive here. I remember paying $0.25/SMS back in 2003 or so (it dropped to a comparable bargain of $0.10/SMS after you sent 20 messages in a month), plus we had to pay to both send and receive them. I remember having to pay my parents $20/mo extra just to have unlimited SMS/MMS on my line only a couple years later once I was old enough to get a job.
I’m surprised that Europe kept up per message charges for MMS so long, they were basically always billed at the same rate as SMS here.
It’s just that almost every phone plan includes sms (dunno about mms) nowadays. So it’s a no brainer and those that are getting pre paid sims probably only need it for calling anyways.
MMS is still 0.37€ for me right now (SMS is free though). Completely unacceptable.
SMS and MMS are literally the worst possible option. Zero security, zero privacy, zero features, dogshit quality photos and videos (especially when messaging an Apple user).
MMS doesn’t have much bandwidth available and it’ll just compress instead of failing to send, so even android to android if you send a long enough HD video the recipient will get compressed garbage. Then, of course, there’s the fact any videos sent over MMS from android to an iPhone(and vice versa iirc) becomes compressed garbage no matter how long or HD the video was, but that’s more Apple’s fault than MMS directly.
Imma be honest, half my communication involves emojis on discord. Jeb with his arms up is part of my personality now and I won’t apologize. When I started seeing someone a few weeks ago I had to explain that he’s missing out on half of my personality by texting. I substitute by jebbing in person but it’s just not the same 😔
(and yes, Jeb has become a verb)
JEB!
what’s wrong with just texting
If you have friends in another country, it might cost a quarter every time you send a message.
In regions of the world (e.g. Europe, and a lot of Asia) where some countries are the size of a large city (or perhaps the entire country is one city), that’s a problem. You’d be sending international texts all day every day.
Element is okay, but I really wish Matrix had better clients on iOS. If Cinny put out an iOS app or got the web app working better on mobile, I’d be way more willing to start using Matrix more.
Element sucks but the fact that it uses Matrix makes it really good.
Unable to decrypt message
Syncing for 15 minutes
Yeah yeah we got it you have multiple friends quit bragging about it now
Whatsapp for irl friends, Discord for online friends and gaming, email for professional communication. Not too complicated
And if you have two phone numbers which you want to use for WhatsApp then you need to clone the damn app because they can’t even make such basic functionality
Shelter is a nice FOSS app.
Samsungs also have Secure Folder…
Samsung actually allows app cloning for multiple profiles without using secure folder.
I’m not sure if it’s a list of supported apps or any as I don’t use the feature
Wait, do you guys have friends?
