I keep thinking about the best way to leave WhatsApp, which in practice means the best way to encourage my family and friends to try something else with me, or just send me SMS and that's it.
Although Signal is the most direct “translation” of WhatsApp (and I use it, and contribute to its funding), it is still a centralized service that requires a phone number.
So I'm thinking of asking them to try Element X instead. Do you agree or am I missing something?
[#]Element #Matrix #Signal #WhatsApp
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@icaria36 Signal doesn't require a phone number anymore. Now you just have a unique handle 😊
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@holii that is false! #Signal requires a phone number for registration, recently I re-installed Signal on Android to try that out because someone came with the exact same claim, it turned out to be false, it seems people are getting confused by a Signal blogpost about the new introduced aliases to hide your phone number? same feature that #Telegram has since ages, not for that it stops requiring phone number
@icaria36
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@adbenitez @holii @icaria36 Correct. The changes to the protocol that enabled the poorly named ‘usernames’ feature removed the need for a phone number, but Signal still uses it to rate limit account creation (as an anti-spam feature). It’s not a very satisfying design (and spam is only a problem because they conflate identifiers and capabilities, which could now be fixed with the protocol changes that enabled usernames).
The work at the protocol level to remove the phone number requirement is done, but that isn’t yet surfaced at the user level. That said, you need the phone number only for initial account creation. Once you have an account, you can throw away the SIM (make sure you set a PIN!).
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@david_chisnall @adbenitez @icaria36 @holii in the last year i've moved away from signal towards @delta (chat). the transition for most of my contacts have been easy. i do have a professional set of contacts who use signal so i keep it for this reason.
buy a cash sim, register to and go through the song and dance, pin-lock, and toss it in a safe. i'm not sure about tossing away the sim, since if uninstall signal or get a new phone you'll need to sim handy to re-confirm.
matrix is likely fine for a decentralized system, but i'd encourage you to try deltachat. there's many of us that run public chatservers so you can try it out. here's the default one if you'd like to give it a try https://nine.testrun.org/
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@ax3 @delta @adbenitez @icaria36 @holii I tried DeltaChat for a while. I found it quite clunky and the fallback to email, which I thought would be a selling point, just annoyed people. It was harder to get people to use than Signal. You needed to use the app to get the security benefits, and if you’re going to do that then you may as well ditch email.
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@david_chisnall @ax3 @delta @adbenitez @icaria36 @holii very fair experience David! I dont know if you did that before or after the introduction of chatmail servers but, in my experience, using delta chat only with chatmail servers is a much better experience
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@stillgreenmoss @delta @david_chisnall @adbenitez @icaria36 @holii
very fair experience David! I dont know if you did that before or after the introduction of chatmail servers but, in my experience, using delta chat only with chatmail servers is a much better experience
yes, this is fair. the chatmail servers make it pretty simple. what was clunky about it, david? and how recently did you try it?
as mentioned i still keep signal for professional contacts in my industry, but my colleagues and research group are using deltachat for a year now, with no issues. the only feedback i've seen is the deltachat client looking dated, which is not that important to me at least.
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@ax3 @delta @david_chisnall @adbenitez @holii @stillgreenmoss I learned about Delta Chat just today. I installed the app and created an account easily (on the default server). I read about the email part but it doesn't seem to work with Tuta, my provider, so I didn't try. I haven't any users to chat with yet 😉 but at least the installation and registration were fine.
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@icaria36 if you want you can join a small DC users community group (+100 members) here:
https://i.delta.chat/#6CBFF8FFD505C0FDEA20A66674F2916EA8FBEE99&a=invitebot%40nine.testrun.org&g=DC%20Community&x=y6dS91dlLLi&i=0bzEm4zAacX&s=GQQlKuqD-zH
@ax3 @delta @david_chisnall @holii @stillgreenmoss
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@icaria36 about #Tutanota, they don't allow their users to use 3rd party email clients, it seems they force you to use their custom email client, which kind of weakens one of the main advantages of #email, the ability for you and your contacts to use the email client they want to, not locked to an specific app of the service provider
@ax3 @delta @david_chisnall @holii @stillgreenmoss
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@ax3 @delta @adbenitez @icaria36 @holii @stillgreenmoss No, I don’t think so. It was just after the FOSDEM talk about COI. If I have to use someone else’s server, I’d rather just use Signal where the protocol is designed to make that safe.
If people need a new client and a different server, it’s a hard sell relative to Signal. I’ve posted at length about the many things I dislike about Signal, but at the moment none of the alternatives solve those problem and they also don’t solve the ones that Signal does solve.
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