I use the apps my friends use but it gets tiring to keep up with so many.
i really fucking hate discord.
Why does EVERYTHING have to be proprietary. Fucking capitalism.
I don’t get why people like it either. It’s a mess of chats.
Because it’s the standard for gaming. I use it and would drop it in a heartbeat if it wasn’t standard for every mmo out there.
Gamers using it for gaming. In game Voice communication is trash
And that’s fine, but why do gamers use it over any other VoIP option? And why the infinity chat channels over infinity servers?
Content creator branding, and “community”
Its pretty amazing for voice communication in gaming.
As a messenging app? Meh
dude discord has been one of the worst experiences for voip in gaming IME. I started using mumble SOLELY because discord was actually just disappointing. Though tbf maybe if i paid out the ass for nitro it’s better? I ain’t paying for that though.
Though yeah, for messaging, it’s dogshit, It’s a mess.
Removed by mod
this is honestly the only good thing about discord, the krisp noise reduction is actually kind of good. It only took them like 3 years to implement it on the linux client. And we’ve only had system wide noise filtering since the dawn of time.
Although since we’re on the topic, discord manages input/output in the single most inconceivably stupid manner possible.
On Linux I use an app called NoiseTorch that creates a virtual mic to cut out background noise in any application
i get much better call quality in telegram
I really wanted to keep faith in it after the ui overhaul recently - VoIP performance was SO much better on Xbox, latency specifically. But good GOD the mobile app is just a pile of garbage nowdays. I have so many friends stuck on that platform, I still end up sharing links there to Lemmy memes and like 60% of the time when I share to the app it permenantly sticks on the splash screen??? 🙄 notifications are fucked these days too, myself & my friend group regularly miss messages entirely, even with direct @ mentions?!
Worse, I dropped a crap review and complained that function has dropped horribly since the update and the devs INSTANTLY replied like “Have you tried pretending you’re a beta tester for us? Do you mind doing a buncha troubleshooting you definitely haven’t already done?” (They wanted me to reinstall the app… Smh)
Anyway - fuck discord. I’m planning to shift to Revolt, but if anyone has better suggestions I’d be happy to try some!
im genuinely surprised discord even tries testing things on the two test branches they have. Yes, you heard me correctly, they have TWO separate testing branches. Bugs literally should not exist on the stable branch.
also when it comes to voip, i’ve enjoyed mumble, it’s pretty solid, minimal, configurable (highly integrated into games already, it’s old af though so maybe not new games) and works pretty well. Revolt seems alright, but it’s plagued with bugs, and weird issues, plus it’s self hosting is just, jank.
We could use a self hosted discord replacement tbh.
Reject Discord, go back to Teamspeak
Don’t like it - don’t use it. It’s a free (capitalist) country.
that’s the cool thing, i dont, but you know who does? You, and you know how i would need to contact you? Through discord! Uh oh!
I don’t use discord
damn didn’t know you weren’t all of my other friends.
What frustrates me the most about this is that if we promote one commercial solution to the top of the heap, destroying all others, we still lose.
I use telegram mostly because it have great features and its certainly better than any meta apps in privacy and private enough imo. It was easy to get my friends and family on telegram because they loved those features, signal is just… boring.
Wdym “boring”, what do you want a messenger app to do? It does what it’s there for and it does it well.
Sure, but we have to consider what other people wants too, and if they are getting alot of feature in a single app without any big compromise, they would prefer that and thats perfectly logical.
From my experience of getting other people on Signal, the main issue is that not everyone is already on it. People generally want to use only one app and it attracts them to the most popular one because they don’t need to switch as much.
Secondary issues are:
- No automatic phone transfer (no cloud backups, has to be done manually)
- No large public channels
I might add another one, but it applies to WhatsApp too - it’s crazy that there’s still no easy way to move between iOS and Android…
OTOH telegram gives you option to export your whatsapp chats there making migration a bit more convenient. For the last point, yeah it sucks a lot and fuck whoever is responsible for that…
Sometimes boring is better, sticking to the fundamentals. I didn’t like when signal tried to mix crypto into it.
interestingly it’s worse than whatsapp regarding privacy
and how? dont send me a decade old audit on the protocol which telegram abandoned around the same time.
chats are not e2e encrypted by default and group chats are never e2e encrypted. even whatsapp is e2ee for every chat.
And yet no one was able to crack it.
it’s not about cracking anything it’s about the telegram owners being able to read your messages???
You can use E2E!!!
They hated him, for he spoke the truth.
And how does being e2ee by default guarantee you are secure? whatsapp doesnt even encrypt metadata.
I don’t like whatsapp either but my claim still holds. e2ee by default for all chats is arguably more privacy respecting than opt-in e2ee for 1-1 chats only. and what metadata exactly does telegram encrypt but whatsapp does not?
e2ee by default only for your data to be used when you back it up. Atleast there have been no data breaches reported in telegram so far
you can encrypt backups in whatsapp but we might agree on whatsapp and telegram being equally bad then
no data breaches reported in telegram so far
yes they hand it out voluntarily, search term: telegram german authorities
It’s fun watching people argue about things I don’t care about. Like, y’all haven’t already abandoned your sense of privacy to this world? Lol
These nerds will debate platforms way more than use them productively.
It’s fun though. I’m glad they keep an eye on this stuff because I don’t and someone definitely should. But it really is just a hobby. It’s fun how serious they take it. Super serious hobby lol. Love them to death though. Greatful too!
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.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”
Having an untraditional gTLD like
.xyz
makes many confused as well, especially those not in IT.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
Never heard of her.
she’s nice. You should check her out
This hurts me so much: it’s why I revert to text messaging because everyone has a phone number. The only downside is that you can’t add/remove numbers to existing groups, so it can get out of hand quickly with the number of group chats.
Just stop using the spyware ones?
That leaves you with element, signal and telegram?
Telegram and signal are both central points of failure. Signal can be used with other servers, but the server address is hard coded in the app, so you have to deploy your own app. Matrix servers can keep a channel going even if the channel’s home server goes down. The more home servers there are, the more mirrors of public channels there will be.
Oh, where to begin. Telegram is wild. It may not be spyware in the traditional sense, but they’ve already handed over data to the Indian government, left a telephone number scraping vulnerability open for the Iranian government, and gotten caught with “the most backdoor looking bug” with their unwisely handmade encryption algorithm.
Telegram’s backend is proprietary software and they (very similarly to Discord for example) can just decide to read your chats whenever they want. It’s even worse then WhatsApp in this sense (at least as long as you trust Facebook that they actually encrypt your chats, again, there is no way to know if it’s proprietary software).
And yet no one was able to crack it.
Okay just element and signal then?
In the meme, yeah. There are others though:
Matrix and bridges
Only if you tell your contacts about it, and explain to them what a bridge does
Why?
Take Signal to Matrix for example. They use different encryption protocols, which means a message sent from one end has to be decrypted, and then re-encrypted with the protocol of the recipient before they can actually receive it.
So basically, your encryption is not very e2e anymore, and the fact that someone can set this up, effectively giving encryption keys to a third party without their contacts being able to do anything about it is pretty fucked.
Oh, and different TOS between different services also come into play.
So if you do this, at least tell your contacts about it, so they can make an informed decision about whether or not that’s okay for them.
Just self host the bridges. I mean if you trust your phone more than your server, this won’t help.
Do whatever you want, but again, make sure your contacts can make an informed decision about it.
I bet none of my contacts made an informed decision about which chat app they are using. I don’t think that this really bothers one of them. Most of them do not know, what the difference between Insta-pms and Whatsapp even is, as far as security and privacy are concerned. And from my point of view I don’t know it detailed enough too. Making an informed decision about a closed source software and as a non technical person is not as easy as you may think. At least from my point of view.
You’re hitting the nail directly on the head.
Not knowing what’s going on being a bad thing is precisely my whole point
If I own the bridge, nobody but me is accessing the message.
XMPP & Gateways
I really miss how windows phone allowed other chat services to plug in to it, so that you could have a single chat app for all your contacts, but open the individual apps for advanced features.
Same went for Blackberry 10 and its Hub
I have all of them. Plus linkedin. This is madness
Don’t have friends. Problem solved.
I have a friend that will only chat with me on Instagram. I have his number, but he will never respond to text. He only engages in insta, it’s mildly infuriating.
…Have they ever explained why?
So glad everyone here just uses whatsapp. Yeah yeah, meta sucks and privacy is bad. I prefer the ease of use and being able to communicate though.
Am I too old that one of these should’ve been Skype?
I abandoned my chat to make a new one in Discord. Despite them complaining about Skype daily for years, suddenly they loved Skype.
Humans are silly. Either way, it’s been Discord, Snapchat, and regular text for half a decade now.
I literally had to bring all my group kicking and screaming onto discord literally within the year it launched. Same story, non stop bitching about Skype but all of a sudden nobody wanted to try discord. I straight up had to send a message to all of them saying I’m uninstalling and dropping my discord link if they wanted to play. Over the course of a month they all switched over, couldn’t be happier.
I didn’t known Skype still existed and i thought I was getting old.
Sorry dude.
/sad old man groans.
Email or text. Otherwise fuck off
Email encrypted with PGP keys?
Text over Internet protocol like XMPP or Matrix?
Right? Right?So the two least secure online communication methods possible?
Let’s find out, I’ll email a text to the pentagon
Let’s just go back to IRC and XMPP. The modern “chat” landscape is dismal.