I can’t even get people to USE telegram, which they have already installed, let alone get them to understand, subscribe and install a federated messaging app. it seems like it’s whatsapp or back to the trained pigeons.
Basically the bridge listens for new posts on both services and copies them as needed. Think of it like a bot on Reddit or lemmy that automatically posts stuff on behalf of someone else.
I've been hearing about this "bridging" thing. Is it possible to bridge into an IRC network that hasn't been bridged yet? My options seem to be "OFTC, Snoonet, W3C" but I want to bridge to another network, and I don't know if I even can or if I have to be a server admin or something.
Yes, it's possible but you either have to host your own server, have to be on a server where the IRC bridge is installed and can be used by anyone or use a service like Beeper that takes care of it for you.
Nobody should use Telegram, in my opinion. It's run by a shady company that doesn't even disclose the inner workings of their service properly, uses a non-standard encryption protocol and doesn't even encrypt chats by default. The only thing I like about Telegram is the fact that you don't have to expose your phone number to use it.
One thing they really have going for them is timely delivery of image data.
When I detect motion in my driveway I send them the JPEG through their API, without skipping a beat I get the image on all of my devices including my watch.
I tried email, discord, SMS, slack, pushbullet. Stuff either takes a long time to come through or comes through missing an image. I honestly hope they never shut down the service because I cannot find another service that runs as well. Fortunately for my needs I don't care and the least about encryption.
I got a small team in school to all adopt my self hosted Matrix as a chat solution for a project we were working on throughout the year. It was great. Everyone jumped back to Discord after we graduated though.
I've gotten a few people on element and some of them even use it to varying degrees! Don't bother with the "federation" thing, just let them go with matrix.org or tell them what server to use and how to make element use it on sign up, even better if you can say "lemme see that phone real fast" and hand it back saying "type a username and pass, don't lose the pass!"
My issue is the IOS client for element won't let people sign up without email AND removes the "email notifications for this acct" tic box thingy, so you need to use a junk email or sign in on the pc client (or web client) and then check that box which works acct wide. I use GrapheneOS but for my IOS friends it is a pain during sign up, and they never want to give it the ability to notify (which imo is pretty important in a chat application), I just don't get iphone users tbh.