Chat Apps

Yeah, there was a nice period when Pidgin could easily handle all the chats. Then providers siloed their apps 🫤
- That was the time when all the apps were standard XMPP. It didn't have proper encryption back then. WhatsApp is still XMPP nowadays, but excluding federation and non-standard implementation on Meta servers and so on
  
  It didn't have proper encryption back then.
  OTR predates all the commercial platforms adopting XMPP, so that's not exactly true.
  
  Fun fact, iMessage is also XMPP based!
- You can bridge to all of the apps in the image from Matrix
  
  Or Slidge
- I actually tried pidgin maybe 6 months ago just for kicks if it could handle whatsapp, signal and telegram, and whaddaya know, it could. It was ugly as hell, but it could be done.
  
  For whatsapp, my experience with Pidgin was terrible. Stickers had to be downloaded as photos, group chats would only show up once someone sent a message, contacts would only show as the full international phone number, all existing chats were horizontal tabs, like a browser.

Just never interact with anyone. Christ, it's not that hard people! (This comment doesn't count.)
- We're all bots. You still haven't interacted with a person.
  
  Everyone on lemmy is a bot except for you.

i really fucking hate discord.
Why does EVERYTHING have to be proprietary. Fucking capitalism.
- Its pretty amazing for voice communication in gaming.
  As a messenging app? Meh
  
  i get much better call quality in telegram
  
  dude discord has been one of the worst experiences for voip in gaming IME. I started using mumble SOLELY because discord was actually just disappointing. Though tbf maybe if i paid out the ass for nitro it's better? I ain't paying for that though.
  Though yeah, for messaging, it's dogshit, It's a mess.
- I don't get why people like it either. It's a mess of chats.
  
  Gamers using it for gaming. In game Voice communication is trash
  
  Because it’s the standard for gaming. I use it and would drop it in a heartbeat if it wasn’t standard for every mmo out there.
- I really wanted to keep faith in it after the ui overhaul recently - VoIP performance was SO much better on Xbox, latency specifically. But good GOD the mobile app is just a pile of garbage nowdays. I have so many friends stuck on that platform, I still end up sharing links there to Lemmy memes and like 60% of the time when I share to the app it permenantly sticks on the splash screen??? 🙄 notifications are fucked these days too, myself & my friend group regularly miss messages entirely, even with direct @ mentions?!
  Worse, I dropped a crap review and complained that function has dropped horribly since the update and the devs INSTANTLY replied like "Have you tried pretending you're a beta tester for us? Do you mind doing a buncha troubleshooting you definitely haven't already done?" (They wanted me to reinstall the app... Smh)
  Anyway - fuck discord. I'm planning to shift to Revolt, but if anyone has better suggestions I'd be happy to try some!
  
  im genuinely surprised discord even tries testing things on the two test branches they have. Yes, you heard me correctly, they have TWO separate testing branches. Bugs literally should not exist on the stable branch.
  also when it comes to voip, i've enjoyed mumble, it's pretty solid, minimal, configurable (highly integrated into games already, it's old af though so maybe not new games) and works pretty well. Revolt seems alright, but it's plagued with bugs, and weird issues, plus it's self hosting is just, jank.
  We could use a self hosted discord replacement tbh.
- Don’t like it - don’t use it. It’s a free (capitalist) country.
  
  that's the cool thing, i dont, but you know who does? You, and you know how i would need to contact you? Through discord! Uh oh!

Friends don't make friends install chat apps (besides Signal)
- Not sure why you were downvoted. I've successfully made most of my friends, and my mom for that matter, talk to me on Signal.
  
  The comment implies Signal is peak chat when it’s flawed & other than maybe onboarding, isn’t superior to alternatives—with the phone number being a pro for onboarding is a con for privacy. It still requires you have an Android or iOS primary device (fueling that duopoly). They don’t want you installing it from a safer space like F-Droid. They still by default send notification metadata to Google & Apple (websocket support exists but drains a fair amount of battery & they refuse to support UnifiedPush). They still ship/use Apple emoji on Android & Linux. It’s still a centralized system you can’t self-host. They still have that missing part of the source code (where I would assume the feds planted something). It still isn’t a good space large chats. And the Electron desktop apps are far too bloated.
- Signal is the best, but no way I'm going to be able to get my wife, my friends, my parents and in-laws to use it.
  
  Have you considered emotional blackmail?
  
  Can't even get your wife on it? Damn..

I have 3/7 and I hate it. I wish signal never removed the ability to function as sms
- Even if it did, it didn't support rcs
  
  That's because Google is gatekeeping the android API for RCS
- 4/7 here. I'm fine with it. Though sms should be included.

Wait, do you guys have friends?

Spoken like a real android user. All my iPhone friends (and especially family) refuse to download any other app, they just complain that I physically can't download iChat.
- As an iPhone user, iChat is mid. I think it’s only in the Us that it is widely used.
  Embrace the beauty of Signal now
  
  I use signal as well, might be worth looking into these two links to better manage expectations.
  First here and second here.
  Related post by Matrix here

Yeah yeah we got it you have multiple friends quit bragging about it now

A chat app for every friend and a launcher for every game. We live in a utopia.

Matrix and bridges
- Only if you tell your contacts about it, and explain to them what a bridge does
  
  Why?
- XMPP & Gateways

Random hot take, I'm at least grateful that my wife and I use an app that none of our friends use. Removes the "oh shit did I send that to the wrong person" panic.
- Which app?

Remember E-Mail, everyone?
- A lot of people around me are genuinely confused when your email is not firstname.lastname@gmail.com, as they mostly just use it for confirming logins. That's how bad the situation is.
  
  I recently started using a + in my email address to make use-specific aliases, so I can more easily filter content from them or see if they're leaking my email.
  I signed up for a rewards program in person the other day and the strange look I got:
  Do you have an account with us?
  Idk
  I can look up your email
  Ok, it's foo@bar.com
  I don't see it, would you like to make an account?
  Yes, but instead of that email, make it foo+yourcompany@bar.com
  Uhhhhh.... Ok....
  Like "you don't have an account but you have an email specifically for our business? Sus AF"
  
  Having an untraditional gTLD like .xyz makes many confused as well, especially those not in IT.
  
  Damn I'm over here with like 4 emails
  Personal / gaming, the professional one with my name, my collage one, and the new one I made to make it harder to dox me
- Never heard of her.
  
  she's nice. You should check her out

I miss pidgin for the cross platform chat
- Anyone remember trillian?
- Libpurple had constant breakage due to proprietary apps having no incentive to keep their protocols stable. A lot of it worked easier then since no one was using e2ee either. Newer gateways exist in the space but it’s a real shame since for a brief time the earlier 2010s, most chat applications were using the same protocol—until they realized it’s harder to capture profits when the garden walls are lowered.
- i miss when using the internet gave you ptsd because of the actual things that you saw, rather than the software that you were using.
  
  I've only recently threatened to take my own life due to spam. Never thought that'd be my 13th reason.
- Try Matrix bridges or Beeper
- I miss pidgin so much. I tried to use it the other day with Discord and it was terrible. So God-awful.

I have a friend that will only chat with me on Instagram. I have his number, but he will never respond to text. He only engages in insta, it’s mildly infuriating.
- ...Have they ever explained why?

We need a new Trillian or Adium. Fucking anti-interop gatekeepers.
- Omg trillian immediately reminds me of ICQ and MSN Messenger

Literally me.. I've 5/7 of these installed and even have Threema in addition. I don't need more than one Meta Inc product in my life though
- I like Threema a lot, but it lacks basic features such as text editing, so I can't imagine recommending it to anyone.
  
  How many contacts do you have in Threema though?
  
  You mean text editing after sending? I would definitely not consider that a "basic" feature - we are talking about E2EE here, editing a message that you already encrypted locally and then sent on its way is by no means trivial - especially with the kind of E2EE that we have nowadays.

if you won't talk to me except through insta then you're not worth being friends with just fucking text me like a normal ass human.

I really miss how windows phone allowed other chat services to plug in to it, so that you could have a single chat app for all your contacts, but open the individual apps for advanced features.
- Same went for Blackberry 10 and its Hub

Just stop using the spyware ones?
- That leaves you with element, signal and telegram?
  
  Oh, where to begin. Telegram is wild. It may not be spyware in the traditional sense, but they've already handed over data to the Indian government, left a telephone number scraping vulnerability open for the Iranian government, and gotten caught with "the most backdoor looking bug" with their unwisely handmade encryption algorithm.
  
  Telegram and signal are both central points of failure. Signal can be used with other servers, but the server address is hard coded in the app, so you have to deploy your own app. Matrix servers can keep a channel going even if the channel's home server goes down. The more home servers there are, the more mirrors of public channels there will be.

Have friends
Talk to them.
- What kind of a take is this? What are you trying to say? "don't use messaging"? Amish take? Genuinely trying to understand

And if you have two phone numbers which you want to use for WhatsApp then you need to clone the damn app because they can't even make such basic functionality
- Shelter is a nice FOSS app.
  Samsungs also have Secure Folder...
  
  Samsung actually allows app cloning for multiple profiles without using secure folder.
  I'm not sure if it's a list of supported apps or any as I don't use the feature

Are you even a true nerd if you have so many friends?
- As long as those friends have strong and inflexible opinions about chat apps then yes.

After posting I realized an exported PNG is the same size and looks much better. Enjoy.
- You should be able to change the image after posting I think
  
  Interesting. I found the option but despite editing the post and uploading the higher quality image, nothing seems to have changed.

Am I too old that one of these should've been Skype?
I abandoned my chat to make a new one in Discord. Despite them complaining about Skype daily for years, suddenly they loved Skype.
Humans are silly. Either way, it's been Discord, Snapchat, and regular text for half a decade now.
- I didn't known Skype still existed and i thought I was getting old.
  Sorry dude.
  
  /sad old man groans.
- I literally had to bring all my group kicking and screaming onto discord literally within the year it launched. Same story, non stop bitching about Skype but all of a sudden nobody wanted to try discord. I straight up had to send a message to all of them saying I'm uninstalling and dropping my discord link if they wanted to play. Over the course of a month they all switched over, couldn't be happier.

Somebody please tell me what's wrong with just texting? Why did half the world decide MMS needed to be replaced with a proprietary app? It works, everyone has it and there's no confusion. Unless you are concerned about privacy or something, why not just text?
Edit: MMS not SMS. I didn't understand the difference.
- SMS doesn't handle pictures, videos, gifs, reactions, or group conversations. Things I use all the time. MMS handles some of that, but implementation varies greatly by carrier and device. If you want consistency of that functionality, you have to go with an app. Apple and Google have created replacements for SMS and MMS that could be the next version of "texting" but Apple refuses to let anyone else use theirs (iMessage) and Google has only half opened up theirs (RCS), so those don't really fix much.
  
  (I guess I don't know the difference between SMS and MMS.)
  I must be using MMS for texting. All of those features work for me and anyone I text with. The only issue I've ever had is imessage compressing videos to and from my android.
  I still don't get it
- It's unencrypted and we know with certainly that the messages are stored by federal agencies and cell carriers. It also requires giving out one's phone number which may be undesirable in some situations
- what’s wrong with just texting
  If you have friends in another country, it might cost a quarter every time you send a message.
  In regions of the world (e.g. Europe, and a lot of Asia) where some countries are the size of a large city (or perhaps the entire country is one city), that's a problem. You'd be sending international texts all day every day.
- Why did half the world decide SMS needed to be replaced with a proprietary app
  SMS is even worse in terms of openness. You won't find a modem that runs open source baseband firmware. It's because the radios are subject to several regulations which means customers can't be able to modify that firmware.
- Wait until everyone and their dogs gets back to MMS...
  You know how expensive they were during the upcoming of WhatsApp? Germany paid 0,80€ (at the time. Though the price is probably not much different during the early iPhone/Android 2.3 times) per picture. Compare that to the amount of stuff sent today and at the time you will probably pay 5€ per day just to get some things across.
  Source: https://www.derstandard.at/story/1747665/deutschland-hohe-preise-fuer-mms-verderben-das-geschaeft
  
  It's ironic that Europe adopted SMS years before we did in America because texting was absurdly expensive here. I remember paying $0.25/SMS back in 2003 or so (it dropped to a comparable bargain of $0.10/SMS after you sent 20 messages in a month), plus we had to pay to both send and receive them. I remember having to pay my parents $20/mo extra just to have unlimited SMS/MMS on my line only a couple years later once I was old enough to get a job.
  I'm surprised that Europe kept up per message charges for MMS so long, they were basically always billed at the same rate as SMS here.
  
  MMS is still 0.37€ for me right now (SMS is free though). Completely unacceptable.
- MMS doesn't have much bandwidth available and it'll just compress instead of failing to send, so even android to android if you send a long enough HD video the recipient will get compressed garbage. Then, of course, there's the fact any videos sent over MMS from android to an iPhone(and vice versa iirc) becomes compressed garbage no matter how long or HD the video was, but that's more Apple's fault than MMS directly.
- Imma be honest, half my communication involves emojis on discord. Jeb with his arms up is part of my personality now and I won't apologize. When I started seeing someone a few weeks ago I had to explain that he's missing out on half of my personality by texting. I substitute by jebbing in person but it's just not the same 😔
  (and yes, Jeb has become a verb)
- because cellular providers are actually criminals.
  Also sms (and mms, whatever the fuck else exists, it's all terrible, shits all packets flowing through the internet, it's the same shit) sucks, and is bad, and you shouldnt use it.

I remember when WebOS had unified messaging. Those were the days. 👴
- Don't make me cry. Android gets the job done but I miss WebOS so damn much
  
  We can cry together.

Don't have friends. Problem solved.

And other countries don't understand why US users stick to txt/mms.... Its convenient and built into the phone so everyone has it.

Element has bridges to some of the services

Your options are RCS, Signal, or Lemmy mentions. Or losing contact with me I guess but I'm irresistible
- "I only talk to other nerds" basically
  
  Nah everyone has RCS these days except people with old phones and iPhones, and even the iPhones are going to be rcs compatible soon
- So.... proprietary data collecting thing owned by Google, service that requires phone number to sign up, or service that does not even pretend to be E2EE and (worse) routes chat traffic through multiple potentially-adversary-controlled servers on its way to you?
  
  RCS is licensed GSMA, not owned by Google
  Signal requiring a phone number is a REALLY minor drawback
  Obviously lemmy mentions would not be for messages intended to be private, but for anyone to see, just like this one here.
  
  You know RCS is not proprietary, right
- RCS, Signal, or Lemmy
  I wish. But I don't know a single person that uses any of those.
  
  Most of my friends use Signal. Honestly hadn't heard of RCS till now. Either my phone only supports SMS or I'm too technologically incompetent to enable RCS.

I use telegram mostly because it have great features and its certainly better than any meta apps in privacy and private enough imo. It was easy to get my friends and family on telegram because they loved those features, signal is just... boring.
- Wdym "boring", what do you want a messenger app to do? It does what it's there for and it does it well.
  
  Sure, but we have to consider what other people wants too, and if they are getting alot of feature in a single app without any big compromise, they would prefer that and thats perfectly logical.
- Sometimes boring is better, sticking to the fundamentals. I didn't like when signal tried to mix crypto into it.
- interestingly it's worse than whatsapp regarding privacy
  
  and how? dont send me a decade old audit on the protocol which telegram abandoned around the same time.

Matrix with bridges can help consolidate them. Some managed versions exist like Beeper and Element. Been slowly moving to that. Will eventually self host.
- Yeah... This 1000 times... It DOES bother me to install all that shit. What doesn't bother me? Installing a bridge on Matrix and having everything in one place. Hell I've even started adding matrix to my linux scripts. I get notifications about script status in dedicated spaces on my single chat window.
  I'm literally SMS away from doing 100% of the chat clients I use for personal usage... And seriously debating on bridging teams for work usage.
  I've even gotten my wife onboard. That, to me, speaks about how frustrated normal people are with having many different apps as well.
- they are beasts to set up self host. I'm going to do it one day
  
  Matrix via docker is pretty simple actually.
  Took me like 30 mins to set it up exactly like I wanted on my kubernetes cluster.
- Used a self hosted matrix with element for years now it's solid. Have a friend group who uses it for everything with dedicated channels etc.

You can just use Matrix with bridges
- You got a guide? I have not been able to setup the thing
  
  Easiest way to get going: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Too much relatable
- No SimpleX??

I have all of them. Plus linkedin. This is madness

Beeper!

Let's just go back to IRC and XMPP. The modern "chat" landscape is dismal.

What is the middle one?
- Element. It's a popular client for Matrix, which is a federated messaging platform (similar to lemmy and mastodon) with different instances.
  
  Which funnily enough, has bridges to Signal, Whatsapp, Discord, Telegram and some more, meaning you wouldn't have to have as many other clients installed to chat with contacts on those platforms
  
  Is it cross platform with other major messagers?
- Element.io apparently. I've never heard of it before

What's the app in the middle? Never seen that logo
- Thats the app Element for the Matrix network
  
  Thanks. Today I learned: a network called Matrix exists IRL
- Element, one of the few (only?) entirely open source, encrypted, and federated chat platforms out there.

Schildichat > Element
- Yeah I'm using Schildi at the moment as well. Thought since it's a fork of Element, and most people recognize its logo, I featured it instead.
- I have to try that again. Last one I tried it it had some issues.
  KDE's NeoChat is pretty solid too

Am I the only one who agrees with this non ironically?
I like how my notifications are segregated by friend lol.
- You're probably in the minority, but probably not the only one.

Wait a moment it is actually march. How about the DSA against Gatekeepers from the EU? I thought we are all able to communicate to every messenger from the messenger we chose.
- Gatekeepers like WhatsApp need to open their platform, but the other app developers need to attach to those provided connections. And so far Signal and Threema already announced that they will not use the opportunity.

I only use two of these (signal/molly and discord/aliucord/webcord)
Edit: oo element is on there. I also use that lol.
- I use Discord and WhatsApp

This hurts me so much: it's why I revert to text messaging because everyone has a phone number. The only downside is that you can't add/remove numbers to existing groups, so it can get out of hand quickly with the number of group chats.

Element is okay, but I really wish Matrix had better clients on iOS. If Cinny put out an iOS app or got the web app working better on mobile, I’d be way more willing to start using Matrix more.
- Element sucks but the fact that it uses Matrix makes it really good.
  
  Unable to decrypt message

Fuck, I actually do have all of them.
- I have 2 more :(

Add SimpleX and Conversations-i2p
- Yep SimpleX works great. Although every time I read the name I think of herpes.
  
  Hahaha, SimpleX on Android is fine, the Desktop client is kinda incompatible with anything (no flatpak, the ubuntu version is kinda broken, no repo, their sync requires a random firewall port to be open)

Hey what's the app tho?
- From left to right we have instagram, signal, whatsapp, element, discord, telegram, and messenger
  
  Isn't Instagram the same as messanger?

Everybody’s got email. Just saying.
- I work on email systems everyday.
  Please don't let this protocol survive.
  Forget emails that is functionally a terrible communication tool.
  You never know if it will be received by the recipient. There is always false positive false negative classification in spam.
  SMTP is an outdated protocol that needs to die.
  
  It sounds like your problem is with the way providers handle email and not email itself. Email is actually a really nice protocol. It’s got so much fault tolerance built into it. I could take my servers down for 24 hours, and none of my customers would miss an email.
  Yes, there is definitely a spam problem, but overzealous spam filters are not the fault of email, they are the fault of email providers.
  As much as I hate Gmail, at least they are pushing for everyone being required to use SPF and DKIM. That alone will eliminate a huge portion of the spam problem.
  Also, email isn’t the only protocol with a spam problem. I get so many spam messages on SMS, Facebook (back when I used it), Telegram, etc. Basically anything that allows someone to send a message without two-party consent first (like scanning each other’s QR codes) is going to have a spam problem if it’s popular enough.
- Everyone can read your emails, just saying.
  
  Maybe they can but I never do
  
  Well, I run my own email service.
  
  GPG S/MIME are still a thing...

What happened to "Diversity is good"?
- Diversity in software, not protocols
- Diversity, not 10 incompatible apps that work the same, look the same and sometimes even are made by the same company.

I'ma just use my smart phone to, make a call. Or send a letter in the mail. I'm not about to do this lol.

- i use aliucord on my phone, it has plugins, the old ui, and no telemetry

Family abroad uses viber🤦

Wait you guys use Signal? Idk a single Canadian that uses it we all use Discord, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, WeChat, and Snapchat depending on the person. The reason why I put WeChat there because I had to use it in university because at the time we had a lot of Chinese international students so had no choice

Give Beeper a try! It consolidates all the listed apps into one texting app.
- Tried it, its bloated and battery hungry. It isn't also clear how beeper saves and uses/handles your messages.
  
  People really need to consider the pedigree of the guy who created this company and how willing he is to walk away from a company when it becomes unprofitable. Eric Migicovsky sold Pebble when it became unprofitable, promised that people would still have their jobs as devs, and at the last minute, the sale didn't include their jobs, so everyone was left fucked out of luck and with no job. Also, the fact that he has zero long term plans for how to keep fighting Apple for iMessage access after he used a teenagers reverse-engineered code to make a standalone Beeper iMessage app which Apple promptly broke after only days. If that's as far ahead as he was able to "plan" in regards to that, it speaks to his weakness on having a long-term business plan. Lack of realistic long-term business plan coupled with how badly he fucked over the developers when he bounced from Pebble screams "Don't trust this."
- Beeper is just paying someone else to maintain Matrix bridges for you.
  
  And that's a bad thing ?
- Beeper is great
- Seconded. Good support team too