Signal coupling always worked for me here ; the key point I think is more the fact that Signal actually is developed with the idea that it is associated to a phone number. They go to impressive extents to demonstrate that they themselves cannot know your phone # while being capable to safely connect it, and that indeed is an impressive achevement.
But your Signal instance is basically related to your phone. You couldn’t have Signal without a phone.
Now, Signal installs in an extremely simple way, it sports a really large range of features (including videoconferencing!), it’s open source and developed by German credible guys… that’s a lot of convincing features!
I am on Signal, and while in the beginning I really only used it for very specific conversations (some important foreign customers, my elected administrator in the large company I work in), I discover that more and more of my correspondents and friends progressively appear to install it. So, there is a small bur real progressive adoption.
Jami, a Canadian open source development, is to me “technically the next convincing step” : to Signal privacy it adds the independence from a central server : not only nobody could “kill” the service by banning the server, but compared to Signal where nobody can know what you say but some can see who you are calling, Jami prevents such a detection by design.
So it is the next step in safety and in privacy.
In addition Jami is not requiring a phone number, indeed you can have a Windows Jami, a Linux Jami, and Android Jami instance, all separate or all sharing the same identity.
I think this is safer and simpler. But for groups that use to call each other primarily on GSMs this shouldn’t count much.
I come to the nasty feature just at the end : installing Jami is a bit more complicated that Signal.
Indeed it’s (only) like facebook & all : you must create an identity, in various steps, which results in a specific ‘signature file’ only present on your machine.
Actually the steps are reasonable (for instance on a phone the said signature file won’t even appear to you if you dont’ look for it, it’s transparent), but probably these steps will look annoying, and maybe more prone to errors in the setting up.
I’m on Jami too, definitely appreciate it, but have really few correspondents.
When you run Delta for the first time it asks for Email address and existing password. If I do that giving my main email address and password then I get an error message saying
Configuration failed. Error: could not find your mail server
Please check your internet connection
I think that the problem is that my everyday email server is not on the same domain as my email address (though it does work if I use my e.email address, where the server domain is not the same as the email domain, so maybe it’s a different problem )
Telegram (if I remember correctly - I don’t want to uninstall then install again just to check) just asks you for your mobile number, sends a verification text, and you are up and running. No idea how Signal works first time, because I’ve not tried it and because Telegram looks like it fits the bill.
The show stopper with Delta Chat for these groups is that it works via email, and at least two group members don’t have email!
Apart from that I see what you mean. Recommending Delta Chat to someone who does not want/have an e-mail account is like recommending a messenger app to somebody who has a phone but does not want to have a smartphone.
Apart from that I really like the fact that there are tools that appear to fit the needs of all scenarios discussed in this forum.
I can second the use of delta-chat. But be aware how the sausage is made: it is smtp transport, it will land in your mailbox shared with other Emailclients, so best use a dedicated alias if you can. An aggressive spam filter could cause havok for first time users. The client has to move the DC messages into DeltaChat/ to build its message threads. Recorded voice & video chat messages - but not calls. For this you would need a separate jitsi instance or anything else to do realtime communication. Haven’t tried group messages yet. Disappearing messages is voluntarily done by the client.
The power of DeltaChat is really: a good client user experience can go a long way, irrespective of transport. It is yet another layer bolted onto 30 year old mail and it surprisingly works well. But it’s PGP-encrypted Email in the end with all the things that its entails (private key leak discloses all past messages sent). I applaud them for the second take on mail and am a happy user. It receives some funding so long-term development is attainable.
Jami as a former SIP client with Hashtable discovery added later is still a good SIP client, but I had difficulties when testing voice calls with the other party hearing the sending voice. Didn’t debug further. Messaging itself was fine.
You should be aware the privacy-wise, Telegram is worse than WhatsApp in some ways. The only way it’s “better” is because someone besides Facebook is getting the data (but who that is is unknown)
By default, Telegram chats are not end-to-end encrypted. You have to start a “secret chat” to have end-to-end encryption. Since it’s an extra step, and secret chats are a little less convenient to use, most communication in Telegram is readable by the Telegram servers
My verdict: If you think about using Telegram, rather stay with WhatsApp. If you care about privacy, good options have been discussed here and elsewhere.
Thanks for your input, but I’m afraid I disagree with your argument and some of your conclusions.
You are of course entitled to your opinion that Telegram is worse than WhatsApp. From my perspective, the key thing is that any data that Telegram may or may not collect and store is not shared with Facebook. I whole-heartedly disapprove of how Facebook operate: how they scrape data from everywhere they can and how they sell services based on that data.
I only started using WhatsApp a couple of years ago, but I failed to do enough research into what data they share with their parent company. The recent change in WhatsApp’s T&Cs prompted me to dig a bit more, and to decide to stop using WhatsApp. Had I done that research earlier, I would not have started using WhatsApp when I did. On the upside, by leaving now, after having used WhatsApp for a couple of years, I have been able to persuade several other users to leave also, doing my bit - clearly very small but it’s a start - to reduce Facebook’s reach and value.
I’m not an absolutist when it comes to privacy - if I were, I would probably move to one of the serverless services mentioned in this thread. I don’t mind sharing my data with companies which provide me with a service, so long as I am relaxed about what they are doing, or are likely to do, with that data. What I have read[1] about Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov, and his interactions with the Russian government, make me much happier to trust his company’s software with any data it may collect.
As I said, much of this is personal opinion and I’m not going to get into any arguments - here or elsewhere - about it, but I will continue to encourage people I know to stop using Facebook’s products and services.
Based on the articles, I can see how Telegram might be able to preserve independence on a technical level. But it’s hard to imagine the Russian government would be unable to put pressure on Durov’s family or friends on a more personal level. I believe that Telegram didn’t hand over the contents of encrypted messages to Russian agencies like they promised, but I didn’t see any other promises regarding other data. And since unlike WhatsApp, chats are unencrypted by default, we’re talking lots of data here.
I guess it’s a case of the devil that you know vs the one you don’t…
Hello! I use both Signal and Telegram. It seems to me that Signal is more suited to my needs, is easy to use and works well.
Element I’ve used it for several months too, but it’s only used by anarchists and people who have an interest in open source. I have not found any personal contacts.
It is proprietary and closed source, so it’s hard to tell whether their claims for security and privacy are true. (Of course this is true for Telegram as well.) My preference will normally be for FOSS software. Actually it is FOSS and the code is available on github - sorry!
It costs real money I’m not keen on paying for software when there are good, free alternatives They do offer a free tier, but it’s not clear from their app information how you go about getting that. Sorry again!
On their website, they say they are 100% open-source and the code is available on GitHub.
It’s a surprise for me as I use a free account but I didn’t find any link on the website.
Anyway it is possible to create a free personal account from apps (I just did it for testing).
It is open source on server as well as on user side that is great. But they are not actively promoting the fact that it can be signed up to for free. The button to get the software is the “Download” link on the bottom of the website (https://wire.com/en/download/).
The main reason why I stopped using it, I consider it not being reliable to ring on my mobile phone when s.o. wanted to get in touch with me (or the other way around).
Thanks for pointing that out: I didn’t spot it, and I will edit my post
And they do mention it in the small print of their Play Store / Aurora Store information …
Wire offers a free version for external business partners or friends and family use.
… but I didn’t spot that either
I wonder why, as their client does appear to be FOSS, it’s not available through F-Droid. (I have searched a couple of times, and couldn’t find it. On current from somebody will post a link to ‘Wire on F-Droid’ soon after I post this comment )
)
I’m not keen on paying for software when there are good, free alternatives
)