Hi,
I have just read this thread and discovered about olvid.io and Twin.me … what do you think about them? Are they a good solution for privacy?
Thank you in advance for your feedback
I think they are NOT a good solution as they are not opensource. You cannot tell what it is actually doing. There are several like that, eg chiffry, whistle, babel, hoccer. Mostly they work fine though, if you trust the developers behind the project.
Understood. Thank you for your feedback
Tremor is a messaging app like Signal.
I know Telegram or Threema (or Session), but never heard about Tremor. Where is the website for Tremor?
Question : how to convince grand parent, parents, cousins, brothers and sisters to change when you are the only one to use one private message app ?
To me, Whatsapp strenght is family use.
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I think he meant Threema.
Tremor doesn’t exist
There is no definitve way. It’s a good thing though to ask whatsapp users: Do you know Brian Acton? Answer is of course no, then you can explain: He was whatsapp co-founder, but whatsapp became so horrible (stealing personal data) that he left. Now he uses Signal (and he is the chairman of the foundation behind it).
There are not many other similar apps which are so easy to use. Wire does not work for me properly (notifications), have doubts about Telegram, Xmpp or element are a bit complicated, others like olvid, twinme are closed source.
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Unfortunatelly this is kind of the standard situation with standards:
To make it worse there isn’t even one single solution without at least some major drawbacks/controversial points/huge features missing (believe me, I have more IM apps installed than friends, or well, frequent contacts).
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how about bridges? If each messaging solution independently offers an API for its messaging service, those should be connectable right? Matrix is already doing quite a good job at this, even without everyone else’s cooperation — so if everyone would jump on the bandwagon, i think we’d get a long way.
Bridges and maybe some kind of general addressing would work to same extent and be great for solving this problem (just like email, how it’s be if you could get at Yahoo Mail only mails from Yahoo Mail users?!). The thing is that even matrix which I see most promising doesn’t have (at least for the main clients I’ve tested) basic stuff like saving chat history by itself.
true but I’m sure that’s an open issue that they are working on.
Weeeeell, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Even exporting a SINGLE chat is a feature that’s waiting since 2016, that’s for the kind of default/most posh client (but they’re probably too busy to re-brand themselves multiple times in the meantime). Just saving YOUR data on YOUR device, nah, that’s a feature that’s rejected immediately. In short there’s still a long way to have feature parity with something like Pidgin late 90s AND things don’t appear to be moving at all, not a good combination. See now why I have more IM clients than friends and still I don’t like any (of the clients I mean)?
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These still require accounts with the bridged services, therefore negating any benefit of using non-official clients. WhatsApp (ergo Facebook) will still hoover up your social graph.
not sure I agree with this, me personally i am fine with having all the different accounts, I just want one UI.
Not “any” benefits. It will be worse than just being able to address somebody @whatsapp.com (for example) but it’ll be better than running the official client that sucks your contacts database (or is VERY awkward to use and you need all kinds of workaround if you block its access to it), it’s impossible to backup in a sensible way (well, unless you give your data to Google too and actually still rely on Whatsapp to access it, because you can’t get at it yourself) and who knows what else does on your device. It won’t take us all the way but it’ll be a huge step forward.
For certain definitions of huge.
For me, nothing is worth creating an account on any Facebook owned service. I would like to be able to converse with its users whilst appearing as something of a black hole to WhatsApp. This is not and, almost certainly, never will be possible. Therefore, a unified client is something (which I proposed here Best All In One Messenger: Voice Calls, Video Facetime, Send Text & Attachments - #41 by Vaughan) whose benefit lies in its uptake by WhatsApp (and Telegram, Viber, WeChat, etc) users and their willingness to create accounts in it from non-invasive services (Matrix, xmpp, etc,) not in the willingness of users of the latter group to use it to create accounts with WhatsApp et al. After all, nobody here should forget the title of this thread 
Edit: Just to be clear, Matrix bridges are equivalent to people like me creating an invasive-service account in a unified client.
Well it depends what you mean a “black hole”, like all the non-Whatsapp users should appear as the same black hole for Whatsapp or you specifically as some kind of external user (think of it like email works)? Because the first isn’t happening indeed for sure, in theory we could have some onion routing for IMs in such a fashion that most intermediaries (or at least the first) doen’t know what’s the destination but not only it’ll be wildly inefficient and unreliable but also very hard to debug any problems and even if everything is solved it’ll have absolutely massive spam issues.
I meant something more like email. WhatsApp would see some address at some server outside of their control. They’d have no idea what else that user was doing, when they were online, who (outside of WA) they were talking to, etc. None of the walled gardens will allow anything like that, hence the proposed unified client. But to reiterate, even that would rely on WA users creating accounts on other services to make any progress towards freedom. It’s a Sisyphean task for sure.