What's a good alternative to messenger that I can plausibly convince friends to move to?
Knowing what a privacy nightmare all meta apps are, I'm wondering if there is an alternative option which is more privacy friendly but still has some of the ease and simplicity of some features such as messenger.
I already know there will be friends I can't convince and thats fine, I may just have to accept that. But if I could avoid using it as much, I'd really like to.
39 replies
Signal works quite well for me. I use it with most of my family members, though for some people I still have to resort to Whatsapp.
What has helped me convince my friends is to mention the features and not mention the privacy. Most people care about features and convenience but don't care at all about privacy. When I'm trying to convince my friends to switch to Signal, I usually say something along the lines of "it's like iMessage for Android" and give a small demonstration of the features.
You can say that shared photos are higher quality than SMS. That's how I got some of my friends to switch.
Unfortunately the main features aren't that good because the most important feature is to be able to communicate with others, and most people don't use signal yet. It's not really better than WhatsApp or messenger or iMessage or Google messages in any way, it's just got the privacy thing going for it.
I hope I'm wrong but that's why I haven't been able to switch.
I'd consider Signal to be the gold standard of secure communications.
You can describe it to them like WhatsApp, except it's private, secure, not Facebook-owned, nonprofit so it can't be bought or sold, etc.
Here's the blog post that I share with my friends comparing Signal to iMessage and WhatsApp when they ask me about it.
It usually answers most of their questions.
Signal’s good, it just behaves largely like WhatsApp. I find Telegram a bit crappy.
Telegram is not secure, never was meant to be. Their employees can read your messages in 99% of use cases.
Signal or Matrix are the only acceptable options I can think of off the top of my head.
I would not recommend Telegram or Whatsapp due to security concerns.
As a matrix user, I think it's a bit early for nontechnical crowds. Apparently big improvements are incoming though.
Whole family and all friends on Signal
It requires a phone number. I haven't got one. What else is there for people like me?
Matrix, SimpleX, XMPP
So, just the usual stuff. Cool.
Decent privacy focused messaging app isn't difficult. Signal and
Telegramare the biggest ones.Convincing people to join it is the hard part. There's no shortcut there.
Telegram is Russian spyware and has no security whatsoever by default.
Signal is good. Matrix is good.
*has no end-to-end encryption by default.
Also, they used to really suck at encryption back in the days, and haven't really earned my trust back.
... and no encryption of groups.
It's a huge Russian psy-op where they pretended Durov had to go into exile while he in reality cooperated with the regime.
I fully agree, but I would be extremely surprised if they didn't have transport encryption. Just no E2E, meaning that anyone who can get access to or impersonate the servers can read all your messages.
Signal no longer requires a phone number to sign up for.Also telegram really should not be recommended at all if the focus is on privacy.Update: I am wrong, signal does require a phone number.
Maybe try simplex as that doesn't require a phone number.
It does require a phone number. The option to generate a username is there if you want to chat with people on signal but don’t want to give out your phone number.
You still need a phone number to sign up.
I just tried installing Signal now and it's asking for a phone number with no way to skip
Yeah, it does actually require a phone number, though you can use a landline and you can also hide that number for people you chat with.
How does the landline option work? Do they call you to verify?
Yeah, I believe you'll receive an automated verification call.
Telegram isn't encrypted end-to-end by default; apparently if you do encrypt e2e you can't access chats from multiple devices.
Signal's protocol is widely understood to be the gold standard for security, which is one reason it's been adopted for multiple messengers. Telegram has a bespoke protocol which is not as well regarded.
What else uses signal's protocol out of curiosity
Wow I had no idea it's what WhatsApp, Messenger, and RCS all use.
Not end-to-end encrypted by default, ad-financed, stores data and ecryption keys centrally, analyzes messages while they're being typed etc. It isn't really any more secure than even something like Whatsapp.
Encryption sucks and used to be a complete joke when it started
Telegram is not secure, never was meant to be. Their employees can read your messages in 99% of use cases.
Signal is the way.
I love signal, but I would add to tell Android users NOT to let it replace their default text messaging app. They will have a Bad Time. Other than that, Signal’s great!
Don't think that's a thing since they dropped sms
Why not replace the default messaging app? Fossify has an open source messaging app, right?
To be clear, I didn’t say people shouldn’t replace the default messaging app, I said do use Signal to do it. Every time I’ve tried it’s a shit show.
Edit to add, since SMS was apparently dropped, it might be better. I take it nobody uses SMS anymore?
Matrix. Just use matrix.org unless you know of another server that would have you.
Matrix
KIK
WhatsApp, because people already have it