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.
People in the privacy community need to get over the unrealistic dream that regular people will adopt Matrix when we can’t even get them to use Signal. The only way Matrix will have mass adoption is through getting a lot of corporate clients. Then the workers might choose to use it personally too after being familiar with it.
Matrix still doesn’t have a multi account client with threads.
I don’t mind Matrix, but every time I bring this up to a hard core Matrix defender to how the clients are lacking, they don’t have much to counter.
I’m writing a new Matrix client that’s focused specifically on being a Discord-like dead simple experience for professional people – it’s under GPLv3 and written in pure Dart
Probably will have the first actual release in one to two months – please tell me what you would like in terms of features so I can shove it into my already massive backlog
A client that is basically a ripoff of Telegram would be ideal for me, for what it’s worth
Main features I like are replies, reactions to messages (also double tap to react with a default emoji), and that view where you can open a chain of replies like it’s its own conversation (I’m assuming this is what is meant by “threading”/“threads”)
Lastly, maybe the uncompressed and compressed photo/video options if that’s not already a thing
If it had the above I would probably like Discord style too
Would quick circle video messages be possible to implement on the matrix?
Gajim, Dino, Conversations support multi-account clients. Threading doesn’t tend to work the same way tho.
Sometimes even anything other than SMS kn the US because ppl just assume everyone have iPhones
I imagine SMS authorisation texts are Telegrams biggest single expense, they are for Signal https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/
Telcos know that authentication is about the only remaining use case for SMS and are not going to turn down the revenue stream.
That said this idea from Telegram sounds absurd. Not least I expect most contracts prevent reselling free SMS’s like this. The security implications have got to be significant too.
Telcos know that authentication is about the only remaining use case for SMS and are not going to turn down the revenue stream.
And it can’t die fast enough, as it’s essentially the same as broadcasting your sensitive information over unencrypted radio.
Apart from security, phone number based user identification is such a half-assed approach and I still don’t get why Signal wants to die on that hill. It’s inconvenient, yet trivial, for anyone to register a second, third or tenth phone number. With a bit more knowledge and inconvenience, even anonymously. It adds so little.
It’s pretty drastically harder to register 100 phone numbers, especially in your target region, than 100 email addresses. Major spammers and such work with automation across many accounts, this isn’t designed around someone with 10 accounts.
Wow, that’s super sketchy.
I’m trying to get my wife to use something decent, and I think Signal is the way to go. It’s focused on P2P communication so it’s a better replacement for SMS and whatnot, but it also has groups so it can also replace MMS. She likes Discord, but I don’t think she’ll be as keen to try out Matrix since she’ll just wonder why I don’t just use Discord.
Looks cool, thanks! I’m interested in P2P platforms in general, and this seems like an interesting middleground between P2P and centralized.
My wife knows that if she doesn’t use Session, she needs to call me and hope I pick up. Granted, she only uses it with me, but that’s already a win in my book.
IDK, forcing someone to use a certain app to contact you seems a bit extreme, and something that could cause conflict in a relationship. But that’s just me, I obviously don’t know your situation.
Could be the case. But we agree that she doesn’t have to use it if she doesn’t want to, and I don’t have to use any of the mainstream stuff if I don’t want to. We trust each other to no end, to the point that our biometrics are in each other’s devices, and we leave them laying around regularly. I can see how that could be a sure way to bring issues into a relationship, but thank God, that’s not our case. As for other people, I couldn’t care less. My kids have no access to devices yet (except their Linux PCs built by themselves), so all is great in my life.
Man this is so scuffed! Offering free subscriptions in exchange for using your personal phone as a relay for OTP codes is a recipe for disaster.
Or good old XMPP!
XMPP doesn’t support modern features and the protocol is older than some of the people here
Define “modern features”?
HTTP is old too, what’s your point? It get’s constant updates via XEPS, and currently runs: WhatsApp, Messenger, Zoom, iMessage, and more. It’s perfectly capable. And offers federation out of the box.
The single reason XMPP died off in the tech crowd is that Signal killed it.
I was wondering about that the other day. Why did Jabber/xmpp not evolve further into the mainstream? For a while there were multiple good-enough clients and running ejabberd was not very difficult. I thought it would become ubiquitous (and in a way it has, just not interoperable), and the clients would evolve to become great. Instead it feels like the whole ecosystem kinda just faded away.
I remember why we switched away from Jabber (running ejabberd) in our company: the biggest issue was no server-side history, so using multiple clients on multiple devices was basically impossible, just like MUCs without history to browse and search were useless for our use cases. Has that gotten better over the last 10 years?
We switched to self-hosted Rocketchat, so which sucks in many, many ways but feature-wise it offers everything we were missing from xmpp.
