This is why I use Telegram as a "good-enough" alternative to the tech monopolies. No, you don't get E2EE without opting in (and Secret Chats don't exist at all for groups) but it's one of those products that makes joy in the hearts of anyone, enthusiast or no, who uses it. Its clients are fully open-source and the man behind it, Pavel Durov, is truy a hero in my book for his consistent stance against big powers, from state actors to tech giants.

I also selfhost a Matrix homeserver and bridge all-the-things to it, possibly its finest feature but there's no way any of its client implementations is going to spark joy in the hearts of the mainstream.

It's important, much like in our politics, to find the fine line between the extremes so that we can leverage and exploit good-enough choices for more freedom for everyone. I use Linux but for most people it's enough to at least get them to consider some FOSS alternatives in their Windows or macOS environments. We can use these small victories to chip away at the mortar of surveillance.

I will never, ever, return to Facebook products. The global damage wrought by that company will go down in the history books, I'm sure. So let's pick those things that are "good enough" as our chisels for a better future for all.

EDIT: Telegram has a chat export feature if you're a WhatsApp user considering the switch [1].

[1] https://telegram.org/blog/move-history

I've used the chat export feature of Telegram before deleting my WhatsApp account. It works well and convinced me to use Telegram over Signal in cases where I had contacts on both platforms.

(Personally, I'm also bitter that Signal Android supports backup while Signal iOS doesn't...and transferring from one iOS device to another isn't considered backup).

Is IOS blocking the feature?

I've been looking at their GitHub trying to find answers, it sounds like it's not a priority for them, being on the feature roadmap since 2015.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/2542

>Pavel Durov, is truy a hero in my book for his consistent stance against big powers, from state actors to tech giants.

Oh yeah, especially the recent Smart Voting fiasco. A true hero.

So others who find this comment someday have the full story, Pavel wrote a defense here [1]. I don't really see how he had a choice with the boot heel of Apple and Google always at his neck.

[1] https://telegra.ph/Why-Telegram-had-to-follow-Apple-and-Goog...

telegram is certainly non a tech-giant with 500M users

Signal's refusal to allow me to export message backups is also unbelievably frustrating.

...on iOS that is? At least on Android, exporting backups seems to work fine (for me).

That's correct. I switched from iOS to Android, which means it still affects me as a now-Android user.

Can anyone explain to me the main obstacles for Signal to succeed ? I keep thinking about how strange is that we can maintain complex open-source projects like linux but we cannot join forces and create a good open-source messaging app, which is a thing almost everyone with a smartphone uses, I know its not the same thing and you need someone to take care of infrastructure etc, but I still think its strange.

Because getting to 1 billion users is hard. Google tried it.

Basically people have been using their favourite messaging apps for years now and if they're satisfied they aren't going to switch.

Lack of federation. Maybe "we" can maintain some complex free software, but it is them who cannot grow their userbase.

Basically this. Signal refuses to give up control (they've even shut down third-party clients) so they're a walled garden like WhatsApp.

Signal does have this feature. It's just that their mobile clients do not support it (as a "slave" device), from what I understand this is no different than WhatsApp multi device feature

This article is regarding a new beta feature in which you can have multiple "host" devices connected to the same WhatsApp account. It's not the same as the previous "WhatsApp Web"/"Signal desktop" experience.

> It's not the same as the previous "WhatsApp Web"/"Signal desktop" experience.

The traditional "WhatsApp Web" and "Signal desktop" are completely different experiences though.

Though the details differ, WhatsApp's new approach, outlined in this article, is much closer to what Signal has always been doing since it introduced Signal Desktop - which, once linked, functions independently of your phone.

This article specifically mentions "nonphone devices" which means it is not much (if at all) different from Signal desktop

But you can now use them even if the phone is turned off, unlike previously where the "web" devices just provided a view of data from the phone.

The Signal desktop client has always continued to work even when the phone was off.

Interesting, I wasn't aware that was supported. Thanks for the information

Yeah, the implementation described in the article seems almost exactly how I understand Signal has been doing it all along. It's purely a client software choice not to allow a phone to be a secondary device. There's a fork which adds this feature to the Android app, though I forget what it's called.

This comment proves that convenience trumps security and explains WhatsApp's success.

I also want to note that you can use them in parallel, no need to switch or convince other people to do so.

> convenience trumps security

Your comment implies that security is being traded off in favour of convenience. Could you explain how?

Facebook is not transparent about how data collected through WhatsApp is used (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/business/facebook-whatsap...).

WhatsApp "harvests “data linked to you,” including your device ID, for “developer’s advertising and marketing.” It also collects your contact info, user ID and device ID for ominously vague “other purposes.” (https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2021/03/06/stop-usin...)

It's true Facebook only collect metadata and can't read your actual messages normally, but that's still important. (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/why-metadata-matters)

Your user ID is your phone number. If Facebook has that there really is no need for nebulous ‘device IDs’.

It depends how you're assessing the need.

As an individual, no, there's no need, you can use your phone number as a user ID (although this comes up as a concern whenever Signal is mentioned as an alternative). There's also a practical factor - using device IDs allows end-to-end encryption to multiple devices without the user needing to manage keys themselves. (ie: WhatsApp can just create a new key pair for each device).

As Facebook however, there is a business need to be able to identify a single user across multiple devices in order to properly track them for marketing reasons.

If Facebook are unable to do this, then the business case for operating a free messaging service falls apart. Each individual needs to make their own decision as to whether they are prepared to pay the price of sharing the data that Facebook collects in exchange for simple, free-of-cost, international messaging. It's not an easy decision.

I'm confused by your post. I use signal seamlessly between my desktop, iphone, and ipad using the same account. I can take photos with my phone, post them to a chat, then go back to my desktop to type longer messages more easily.

Is your problem that a phone is required to be the primary device when doing this?

Then you clearly haven't read my post thoroughly. I repeatedly mentioned my issues being with Signal not allowing multiple instances on Android devices using the same account, while you're talking about Signal on Apple devices.

No need to be snarky. I didn’t say you were wrong, and clearly I don’t know about the problems with signal on android as I don’t have those devices.

You don't need to personally know about the problems with Signal on Android -- just need to read the parent post thoroughly.

His problem is that he has Android.

Its very hard to do this without opening up to a lot of potential fuckups and exploits.

The way e2e works is by exchanging public keys (kinda like a cryptographic username), imagine having multiple devices and verifying + keeping track of the keys from each device.

This is why im not surprised fb was the first to come out with this feature, you need fb level resources to get this out first and from a quick look at the article it seems like they're not using centralization to solve the problem.

"WhatsApp multi-device uses a client-fanout approach, where the WhatsApp client sending the message encrypts and transmits it N number of times to N number of different devices — those in the sender and receiver’s device lists."