Telegram is giving away FREE Premium subscriptions! All they need from you is to use your cell phone as a relay to text out their OTP codes! And the recipient of the OTP sees your phone number! What could POSSIBLY go wrong with this deal?
PLEASE don’t use Telegram! I personally recommend Matrix as it’s totally FOSS, you can self host, there are tons of front end clients to choose from. Or even use Signal. I have my own issues with Signal, the fact they don’t allow third party clients, you can’t self-host, they have a proprietary shim in their stack that only they know what it does, they were pushing crypto, etc, but at least Signal is better than this garbage.
I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts about Signal and DeltaChat for messaging
Signal and DeltaChat, as well as Simplex and some others e2e communication solutions, are adequate from a technical point of view.
The main issue is always adoption. You can have the most convenient way to safely communicate with people, it’ll be useless if nobody you’re talking to wants to use it.
So, since Signal is very easy to set up and use as well as the most adopted, it’s currently the best pick for regular conversations.
Signal is pretty broken. A chat app shouldn’t require a SIM card & an iOS/Android device just to create & maintain an account (too bad Linux or KaiOS users or folks that otherwise don’t want a smart phone). Multi-devdice setups seem to have issues. The desktop app being Electron is a waste of resources. They still don’t want to support UnifiedPush while highly encouraging you download the app from the Google Play Store & send notification data thru Google-controlled FSM. There’s also the missing history of the server code which is probably has something to do with US intelligence injecting code.
Is it better than a lot of things, sure, but it should be put on a pedestal nor seen as exemplary for private chat in UI or philosophy.
Signal is fine for a drop-in WhatsApp replacement. I use it for chatting to my friends casually. For something you need more security for you could do encrypted emails as that doesn’t require exchanging phone numbers, or ideally just arrange to meet up in-person and discuss things so you don’t leave any kind of digital or paper trail.
Yes, meet up, place your phones on the table, and discuss 👍 Facebook ads won’t change at all 😉
Obviously you don’t have your phones on you. Otherwise what’s the point of meeting up in person.
