Telegram, Signal, Jami, Threema, or...?

I use it with four different e-mail accounts but did not have the problem. But you are right, it has its flaws. Just to mention that one Since lately I couldn't use DeltaChat no more with my /e/-account

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.

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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.

Ability to federate is my most important criterion. Important for helping to break through the big tech monopolies

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
  • The “nearby” function allows very precise tracking of your location (Report in German: https://www.heise.de/news/Telegrams-Nearby-Funktion-laesst-genauen-Standort-ermitteln-5004687.html)
  • They send contents of messages to the server before you press “send”
  • And they do read the content of your messages in unencrypted chats.

The last two items were tested using a honeypot URL (which was not known anywhere) which was pasted into a chat conversation (but no “send” was pressed yet). After a few seconds, the phone was put into airplane mode. Still, the URL was visited by a Telegram-related server just a little later. (Test performed by a writer of renowned German tech portal Heise, see https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Telegram-Chat-der-sichere-Datenschutz-Albtraum-eine-Analyse-und-ein-Kommentar-4965774.html)

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.

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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.

Thanks again.

  1. Including this article, this one, this one, these and many others.
  2. This article, pretty much sums up the conclusions I arrived at while researching this question.
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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.

Yes, this is the new name of riot.im (see https://element.io/blog/welcome-to-element/ ). Unfortunately, I can’t find the element app in eOS’ Apps.

It;s available in f-droid

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Nothing about Wire ?

I had a quick look but

  1. 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!
  2. It costs real money :slight_smile: 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!
  1. On their website, they say they are 100% open-source and the code is available on GitHub.
  2. 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 :frowning:
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 :wink: )

I use Wire for two years and liked it a lot. I could even convince many relatives to join me on Wire. It was a Swiss company and they advertised with the benefits of Swiss privacy laws. But only recently I read on wikipedia that Wire now belongs to a US company (since late 2019) and that minor changes were made to the privacy policy. The fact that users did not get informed about this at all doesn’t feel very comfortable unfortunately.

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Indeed, Element.io, the former Riot, based on a decentralised open protocol called matrix.org. I admit that I find it very charming, beautiful how such great tech is implemented, mostly hidden from the user. It just works. Install it on your mobile (Android, I’m not in the know how it would work on other mobile OSes), on your PC/laptop and connect to friends/colleagues, either in direct chats or group chats. On top you could form a community.

One of the amazing things is that it is decentralised in a very neat way. Basically you can one day set up your own server or migrate to one that is run by a party that you like.

All the other important aspects are covered I’d say.

So it works nicely for non-techies, just as an example: I’m currently in a group with parents from my kids school, and in several team groups with different projects, mostly non-tech.

Before I have been using Whatsapp, Telegram and Signal, and before that IRC and XMPP. But Matrix/Element combines all of that, and many aspects of Slack and similar.

If you don’t care about decentralisation, then Rocket.chat might also be a good option.

cheers!

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Thanks very much for that - very interesting. I also followed a link from that page to an article, by the same author which covers - very well IMHO - the issues behind choosing which messenger app to use. Well worth a read

Personally I think Signal is the easiest to use. Matrix is a good choice too. Wire works ok too. I do not like Telegram, but it’s easy to use as well. If anyone is interested, here is a description (has to be translated) of how telegram was hacked by state authorities in order to get the messages.

Someone mentioned twinme and the fact that it’s opensource. As far as I know it is NOT opensource.
I like Tox too but it’s not ready for not techy folks.

Yeah, Wire is available in F-Droid app if you add the Firefox F-Droid repo.