Your communications can’t be compromised if you don’t communicate lol
Having friends is bad OPSEC!
Supreme privacy. Two can only keep a secret if one of them is dead.
I have two contacts
all the ones I chat to are on Signal but i went through this years ago, every time a contact sent me a txt message i sent a link to Signal and said see you there.
Both are dead?
you’re not ungrateful and deceitful
so meta
I got all my friends to switch to signal!
I’m still working on that, but progress is happening
I just don’t have any friends
Nothing more private than that.
I started when it was still called TextSecure, I had precisely 1 contact (just my nerdy friend from uni) for the first 3 years. I then convinced my partner to install it, had 2 contacts for the next few years.
When it became Signal, a few more jumped on. Once I had kids; I bullied my family onto it, by refusing to send photos any other way.
I have 62 contacts now, the bulk of my digital communication is through either Signal, phone, email or Lemmy. There is a little SMS/RCS.
It has been a 15 year journey so far, for me. You will get there.
What if I’m in my 50s and i don’t have half that number of contacts anywhere. Will I still get there.
And if those 30ish contacts find me on signal, where am I supposed to go and hide next.
I’m sure some genius has made a texting protocol that requires installing Linux and can only be utilized by console with sudo access.
You can finally get some peace and quiet.
Except from fucking Phil. That guy is the worst.
I’ve 36 contacts. I started 3 years ago. In a country where people stare at me for solid 3-5 seconds before they utter a word when I tell them I don’t ise whatsapp. Love it.
We’ll get there.
OG here too. I remember when they first supported voice calls. It was a separate app called redphone.
Maybe all your contacts also value their privacy and therefore have not set signal to allow them to be discovered by their phone number
If that’s the case, then i would be more happier to get their usernames atleast. But the situation is way worse than that. They are deeply into whatsapp.
Do they have a need to communicate with you?
If so, you can just not install WhatsApp. Smartphones allow them to install multiple communicating apps, so your friends could remember to use signal when talking to you.
Actually, deletion of whatsapp and instagram drastically decreased my friend circle. Now i have more time for myself. I don’t think they have a reason to communicate with me. Anyway, am not installing whatsapp anymore.
I have notifications on when someone joins and maybe 75% of the time after I see the notification their account is “deleted” because they changed the privacy settings.
It’s not the end of the world but I do wish more people wouldn’t automatically pick the maximum privacy setting so that we could actually, yknow use it
Not picking the max privacy setting defeats the point of using it for privacy.
Classic catch 22!
Not really, it’s still encrypted. If you’re not a political dissident and just using Signal to chat with friends then it is helpful to make yourself available to said friends.
i’d say default to maximum and then opt in to less and less privacy
Guilty
So what? That’s peak privacy.
Technically correct ✅
The best kind of “correct”.
At least i got 3 people to install Signal just for me.
I got family, 2 friends and thats it.
And thats all you need. I also have family, 2 good friends and the rest are acquaintances
I made a stoat account to escape discord with a few friends and this image is exactly what happened. Majority of people we know aren’t inconvenienced enough to move on.
When I switched to Signal I enforced it hard. Refused to talk to anyone on another platform. If they texted me, I’d responed, but always add “I’d prefer if we discussed this over Signal.”
I had more success than I’d anticipated. About 90% of my family and 80% of my friends moved over.
My best piece of advice for this is to start new group chats - people want to be in the group chats, and if they believe Signal is where it’s all happening, they’ll join.
It was way easier to get converts when it still supported SMS/MMS
I’m on the receiving end of this from a friend and I didn’t even think twice about it. I think we’re all in a place now where being asked to install yet another app is pretty commonplace. Plus phone app stores make it relatively painless to do.
I literally got Signal because my sister told me to get on it. That’s the only contact I have on Signal.
When the Recent Fascist Takeover happened, an American friend asked me for app opinions - I told him Signal was great, aside of the fact that the desktop app keeps getting updated every femtosecond. …we’re still talking over Discord, sad to say.
Signal keeps suggesting I add a contact for my old boss. (Who was a cool guy, but not cool enough to keep in contact with years afterwards.) Actually, when I had an internship a few years afterwards, the new boss’s preferred app was Telegram, so, uh, a red flag? …Yeah, didn’t get that job.
I have a handful of friends and family that did actually switch, but I still have a few stubborn friends on Discord that do t see the point. Just waiting for Discord to fuck up badly enough…
I have 1 friend who I talk to exclusively over discord DMs.
The server went down for about 6 hours when we were chatting and he made a signal account.
Then he deleted it after the outage 😭
Discord not even letting me to creare an account. The OTP never get generated. And i believe that’s for good.
Many open-source developers also effectively using discord as a communication medium.
Discord is already a haven for groomers, zoosadists, and more. Not sure what levels of “fucking up” they’d need to do, to get normies to bail.
None of the things you said actually affect normal users. They don’t see them or interact with them. So they literally do not matter at fucking all.
To a normal person if something isn’t functionally punching them in the face actively right that second and causing them real physical pain and suffering.
It might as well not exist. No amounts of explanation, theoretically this or that, bad news or corruption. Makes anyone actually give two shits.
Those of us who actually care about things not actively hurting us in the moment. Are factually the out liers.
For as long as they type a message, hit send, and the other person receives, they’ll keep on using it no matter what Users are stubborn to change, they only really do when they can’t do the basic thing
They dont know about any of that stuff and they don’t wander in the public spaces of discord. I think forcing the ID on all users will do the trick. They just haven’t enforced it yet.
they don’t wander in the public spaces of discord
Which is very wise.
I use Discord for work, and I use it only to communicate with specific people about specific things. Absolutely no need to go exploring whatever drek inhabits the rest of the service.
It really, reaally depends what public spaces you look for, personally, i didn’t meet many strange people because i just keep myself away from those kind of spaces, though sometime you meet the wanky sheep but that’s normal like on every other social and here on lemmy too
So one’s friends become zoosadists - whatever that is - if they’re chatting via discord?
The argument that there’s creeps using a platform is moot if you’re using it to communicate with your friends. Which is what people do. It’s so weird to me, like, the same can be said about Signal etc etc but nooooo, there it’s only the good ones chatting. Get outta here with this shit.
So one’s friends become zoosadists - whatever that is - if they’re chatting via discord?
I honestly have no idea how you deduced that this was what I was saying.
How do I put this, the fact that a platform may be used by unsavory characters in some specific capacity and context does not affect normal people who use it to communicate with friends - which is what chat apps were designed to do. People use discord to talk to their friends while playing games. They use WhatsApp, signal, telegram and so on to text with friends. At least that’s the primary usage. Now if one were to venture out into the wild and start engaging with strange animal fuckers in obscure channels etc, that is something that doesn’t play into the average user experience.
Very private 💪
I have two contacts. My wife, who I text/communicate with more than anyone else, and a long distance friend.
It took begging and pleading for years to get my wife to agree to it. She finally agreed after it came out that the phone network was likely hacked by China.
I tried to get another friend to use it, at whick point he asked if that was the app at the center of whiskey leaks. He never installed it.
after it came out that the phone network was likely hacked by China.
You’re referring to the phone network in the USA, right? It blows my mind that more people don’t know about it. China (specifically, Salt Typhoon) infiltrated the USA phone network in 2022. The infiltration was only discovered in 2024, and China still has not been evicted. Apparently the eviction will not be complete until compromised Huawei network hardware is extirpated.
Considering that PRISM is a thing, I think people already assume that all usage of the phone network is non-private. What difference does it make if China is reading my messages, when the USA already is, and the USA can actually arrest or murder me unlike China.
Yes I’m referring to Salt Typhoon. It is bonkers that this way, basically any phone/text conversation can be surveiled by not only the NSA, but by a foreign government.
