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    wertigon I wish someone would rebase Discord into a QT based app or something. That makes it at least suck less. Discord has great backend plumbing as far as services go, but the frontend is just a horrible memory hog.

    The problem with communication is... That people seems to love their islands. Anyone outside their island can just be connected by telephone... Which is a service slowly disappearing across the world. I know people that have ditched their phone completely in favor of an unholy WhatsApp/FB Messenger/Discord trinity. Oh, sure, they still have a Cell phone, they just ditch the account for SMS and Voice, doing instead unlimited data, or even WiFi only and go off the grid when they leave home.

    I am hoping that all carriers band together and switch over to a binary equivalent to XMPP or something, but I'm not holding my breath. Everyone could agree on TCP/IP and HTTP, why not a Voice and Video protocol, perhaps with exchangable codecs?

    I'm not asking for much, I want:

    * Support for Federation at the protocol level
    * Support P2P voice/video streams (actually, generic Voice/Video/Data streams would be even nicer)
    * Base protocol should be an Open Standard

    Sadly, all three will be fought over tooth and nail and if one crumble all three crumble. Why can't we have Nice Things(tm)?
    tomman A year later... the situation has just turned to worse, sadly:

    - I've got forced (by family, no less!) to get Zucked, that is, WhatsFuckingCRAPP. Yeah, it's on a separate physical handset, with a separate phone line exclusively dedicated to it. I hate every single minute of it, and while I can't hate my family for being tech-illiterate (although that means I've been a failure as a CS engineer), it's extremely frustrating. Plus the app sucks balls, can't use it on Real Computers™ running the OS of my choice, etc, etc, etc. On the flip side, I guess Zuckerborg gets bored of my almost non-use of the crapp? (Spare me the "nobody at Farcebook can read your messages" crapola - if that were true, I have a couple rusty bridges for sale here. Also that's not my threat model!)

    - My dream setup, tdlib-purple, broke horrendously after I joined a local shopping/sales group (as MercadoLibre would like to have zero independent sellers instead these days with their selective application of asinine policies). Memory leaks so severe that either my machine gets sent to swap hell to never come back, or if I'm lucky, the OOM-killer will drop me back to a half-broken desktop. And every time someone joins/leaves the group (which happens several times per day as this is a mid-traffic city-wide group), the thing tries to rollback history, redownloading gigabytes of attachments AND leaking RAM like a monkey on crack. These seem to be well known issues, but nobody has the willpower (or the resources?) to fix them. So unfortunately that meant I had to stop using Telegram with Pidgin, and since I refuse to install the Electron pandemic here, it means my usage of Telegram has severely dropped :/

    - Speaking of Telegram, they have a serious problem with identity-theft scammers and buttcoin spam! Since I joined that local sales group, suddenly I get added to buttcoin scam groups at least once a week, or get attempts of infosucking by randoms just telling "Hi", followed by "Where you work?" and "how much do you earn?". Sadly WhatsFuckingCrapp has MUCH better control for spambots here, as I've yet to get those there.

    - Matrix is a lost cause. They should rename it to "Element", since all other clients not named Element are unusable dumpster fires, and that goes double for purple-matrix, which BARELY supports talking to other people! So yeah, nope, I can't recommend Matrix to either normies or even techies - it's a severe problem of shit UI/UX that nobody cares fixing other than "your browser is not supported because is not Chrome" and "Element is the reference client, powered by Electron".

    So in short, instant messaging went from "pretty much a solved problem" 15 years ago to "unusable dumpsterfires for braindamaged teenagers". So much for progress :/ We're doomed as a society, and it's our goddamned fault!
    desudesu
    Posted by tomman
    - WhatsFuckingCrapp is still the fucking king in Soviet Venezuela. Now even banks, teloos, and the communist state of Maduro is pushing for its increased use for communications to customers/The People™. WHY. Why Meth hasn't been forced yet to forcibly disconnect Soviet Venezuela if we're THAT evil? Also, the network effect is so strong that, short of a complete blockade/shutdown, looks like it is impossible to break the addiction here!

    It's the most popular here in the UK too. It's made funnier when people say 'fuck Facebook' and they migrate to WhatsArgh.

    Posted by tomman
    tl;dr: everything is terrible and it's only getting worse, because nobody gives a damn :/

    Pretty much.

    Posted by tomman
    The difference between IE and Chrome is that IE was actually horrible and nobody liked coding for it, but Chrome appeals to the new generations of hipster webshit, so developers embrace it with tons of love. And broken Javascripts that somehow work there.

    In other news, TIL Telegram has usernames

    Lol yeah, exactly. That, and it's always been hip to shit on Microsoft, no matter if they did anything good, but it's always been hip to spunk over Google for some reason... Oh, don't get me started on polyfills that are only tested in Chrome when the entire fucking point of a polyfill is to supplement support for WebComponents (which is also a piece of shit anyway intended to slow down non-Blink browsers).

    I'm also surprised you didn't know that. It's literally in the settings menu.

    Posted by wertigon

    FFS, the web is built on open standards (supposedly). By all means, recommend browsers but don't block the ones you do not support!

    The W3C is just a front for Google at this point. Also, bad copypaste 'web designers' will be bad copypaste 'web designers' who want to cram loads of crap into a page to show off to their other 'web designer' mates on whatever the current trendy messaging service of the day is. :x

    Thankfully it's not got to the point of blocking out even latest Gecko entirely and forcing Chrome as of yet on any website I've ever encountered except maybe MEGA (though lagging out anything that isn't latest Blink seems to be absolutely fine and in fact encouraged).

    ---

    Meanwhile, the rapid release cycle crap has created a reincarnation of the 'Opera 10' effect on user agent strings. Apparently some pretty big names such as Bethesda's site are breaking due to misreading 100 as 10.0, which is rather amusing.

    (Speaking of Opera, gotta love how they were the only semi-major browser to give a shit about the standards, and now they're just generic CCP 'Chrome clone with extra crap tacked on top' browser, it's one of the bigger blows to the European software industry and the 'beginning of the end' imo)
    tomman Status of the Messengers, year 2022:

    - WhatsFuckingCrapp is still the fucking king in Soviet Venezuela. Now even banks, teloos, and the communist state of Maduro is pushing for its increased use for communications to customers/The People™. WHY. Why Meth hasn't been forced yet to forcibly disconnect Soviet Venezuela if we're THAT evil? Also, the network effect is so strong that, short of a complete blockade/shutdown, looks like it is impossible to break the addiction here!

    - Telegram clings to life. Many installed the app during The Great WhatsApp Threat, but promptly forgot about it. My Telegram account sees little use, with sporadic messaging with only ONE user. Ironically, one of my uncles (which is a heavy WA user, as he even avoids doing phone calls/SMS these days) flat out refuses to install Telegram because "gotta avoid the Russians" (and better don't argue with people with politics background, unless you want to sever family ties for good). This one came out of the blue, but aside of that, Telegram's adoption in Soviet Venezuela is "meh".

    - Thankfully nobody ever talks about the assholeware known as Signal here, while Hackernews get their panties in a bunch at the mere mention of "YOU CAN'T HAVE MY PHONE NUMBER, MOXIE!!!"... despite being forced to use WhatsFuckingCrapp (which also relies on phone numbers) for family/work reasons. Seriously, what's the point of having a phone if you don't want to give out your number to people that might be interested into communicating with you, which is, like, the whole purpose of phones since Alexander Graham Bell made the first phone call centuries ago?! I get it, USAian telcos are terminal cancers, SIMswaps are a real threat model there, blah blah blah, but... why do you even have a phone in first place?! Look, as much as I hate proprietary software, Silicon Valley, and TLAs, I do not hate phones as a communications device!

    - Matrix continues to be a big fat zero outside (very niche) nerd circles (as most nerds these days hang out on fucking Discord, sadly). I've yet to find a client for my cellphone that isn't webshit (all of them are either Element -which is bloaty Electron-, Element clones, or Fluffychat which is the only one not built on Electron... instead it uses yet another hipster app framework from Google: Flutter, which seems to be more bloaty pseudo-native junk on Yet Another Hipster Programming Language, Dart), and the Pidgin plugin is buggy and often loses messages, while all other desktop apps I've tried that aren't Electron webshit (Nheko, and another Qt-based app I found on Debian repos) are even more unusable bugfests with round avatars and -in the case of Nheko- total UI/UX trainwrecks.

    tl;dr: everything is terrible and it's only getting worse, because nobody gives a damn :/
    CaptainJistuce
    Posted by tomman
    The difference between IE and Chrome is that IE was actually horrible and nobody liked coding for it, but Chrome appeals to the new generations of hipster webshit, so developers embrace it with tons of love.
    IE BECAME horrible with lack of updates. IE6 wasn't bad when it came out. It was bad when it was five years later and MS hadn't really done anything with it.
    tomman The difference between IE and Chrome is that IE was actually horrible and nobody liked coding for it, but Chrome appeals to the new generations of hipster webshit, so developers embrace it with tons of love. And broken Javascripts that somehow work there.

    In other news, TIL Telegram has usernames, so no need to disclose your phone number to random strangers if you don't really want! Except that "tomman" (and my other usual variations of it) were already taken! Fortunately, my backup nick ("dilworks") was not, so any username that is NOT that one is NOT ME!. This is not a problem on Matrix, because not only phone numbers are not needed, but they are completely unsupported! In fact, you don't even require a valid email, so write down that password safely! (Fortunately my nick wasn't in use on the homeserver I ended picking, the aptly named "nerdsin.space")
    CaptainJistuce
    Posted by wertigon
    Posted by tomman

    Of course Seamonkey is not Chrome or "latest Firefux"


    ... Wait, what is this, 2004 all over again? I thought The Powers That Be(tm) made a treaty that banned "browser only compatible with xxx" in 2005 specifically due to what happened in 2004?

    Everyone forgot their history.
    wertigon
    Posted by tomman

    Of course Seamonkey is not Chrome or "latest Firefux"


    ... Wait, what is this, 2004 all over again? I thought The Powers That Be(tm) made a treaty that banned "browser only compatible with xxx" in 2005 specifically due to what happened in 2004?

    For those who wonder; In 2004 IE6 was the browser to use, so many websites of course used JavaScript to inform users to only use IE6. Then came Firefox which was better in every way... Except these websites blocked it. Lovely.

    FFS, the web is built on open standards (supposedly). By all means, recommend browsers but don't block the ones you do not support!
    CaptainJistuce RIPx2 my granny.
    tomman I decided to register a Matrix account as a sort of "plan B C Z X", just in case I actually need to talk with other paranoid nutter nerds people not liking Telegram, and in hopes that someday someone comes up with a non-Electron cellphone client - the PC part will be served by purple-matrix, because Pidgin is the one and only IM client I need, present, past and future.

    Spoilers: Matrix failed the Granny Test™. HARD. Harder than Elon Musk crashing memecoins on a smug-powered Boeing.

    Step 0: install a client.
    There are no Debian .DEBs for purple-pidgin, and I'm not in the mood of the "make && make install" dance. Luckily purple-pidgin is on Ubuntu repos, so I took their source packages and rebuilt them on my Debian - easy as pie.

    Step 1: pick a homeserver.

    Since Matrix is fully decentralized and federated (unlike your average cellphone vomit), you need to bring your own "homeserver", There are a few lists online, and I ended picking one at random from this one. Of course your granny will stop right here, and stick to WA instead. One more thing: for now, choose your homeserver wisely, as you can't change it once registered (you'll have to dump your account and make a new one). From what I understood, "account portability" is on the TODO list for Matrix devs, so don't get your hopes high :/


    Step 2: make a new account.
    On nearly every PC application of yesteryesterday you just register an account at some website, then logon with that on your client. On cellphones, you need to give your crapp of choice your phone number, and you're done. On Matrix... oh boy. You're supposed to register either from your client or online. Guess what you can't do on Pidgin... that's right, it means you gotta use another client, or a web client. OK, fine, let's go the web client way---

    Your browser can't run Element

    Element uses many advanced browser features, some of which are not available or experimental in your current browser.

    Please install Chrome, Firefox, or Safari for the best experience.
    Use Element on mobile

    iOS (iPhone or iPad)

    Android

    Go to element.io

    FUCK THIS SHIT!
    Of course Seamonkey is not Chrome or "latest Firefux", so I'm navigator non grata, and since nearly every homeserver only offers Element, it means the web way is riiiight OUT. It also means at this stage I'm pretty much forced to register from another client, then dump it once I've got my account. This is LAME. After reviewing a list of clients and hearing some recommendations, turns out there is one on Debian repos fit for the task: nheko - it's native (Qt 5), even! At this stage my level of blood rage is rising fast to "boiling" levels. Your granny already died twice yet she is still firmly on WhatsApp. Oh, and even after resorting to nheko, I still got punished with hot ReCaptcha hell. Lovely.


    Step 3: Find some real people to talk with!
    Someone sent me a link to join a room. Those are unusable on Pidgin, instead you want the Room ID (a string that starts with "!" and may end with ":name.of.some.homeserver"). Except that the one I got didn't worked on Pidgin... and for that matter, neither did on nheko (I still haven't uninstalled it despite having braindamaged cellphone UI on desktop, for troubleshooting). Instead I had to be invited by someone else - the invite way works fine on Pidgin! Dunno why the room ID didn't work, and of course your granny won't be talking with anyone else anyway - she already died twice while trying to figure out Matrix!

    Long short story: Matrix is a disaster even among nerds, and fucking hopeless for normies.

    I guess I'll keep Telegram for normies, and Matrix for... who knows? At least it's awesome to be back on Pidgin... if only they had an Android version...
    creaothceann I've never been a fan of IRC, instant messaging etc, I prefer forums. Never used Discord either. I'm mostly active on certain subreddits these days (old.reddit.com of course).

    Where did I put my walking stick now...?
    tomman My few interactions with Discord communities thankfully have been through IRC, via dedicated bridge channels/bots.

    If your "server" doesn't offer a bridge, it doesn't exist to me.
    And of course, Discord still bans 3rd-party clients and forces you to use their bloaty webshit (complete with Electron abominations if you want "standalone" crapps), so yeah... nope. My sanity is worth way more than "being social".

    And yeah, pure IRC communities are largely dead by now. Rizon is a cemetery of dead channels, and the recent implosion of Freenode ("prince of Korea", HA!) basically killed the largest remaining dedicated IRC community (yes, there is Libera Chat, but... many people is never coming back)
    wertigon Yeah, the world sucks. Unfortunately I'm in the same boat and since IRC is pretty much dead now...

    I have resigned to use Discord. It's the one that works best as an alternative so far, would've preferred something based on an XMPP-based technology (decentralised and Open Source) but since XMPP also died a few years ago... Discord it is.

    At least it is possible to block the spam coming from channels and "servers", even though you can't do global settings. Can't say I'm happy with it though.
    tomman Whoever at Telegram had the great idea of putting those stupid moronic animations for braindamaged kids (read: "stickers") as the starting point for new chats ("type some text or touch the sticker to say something") should be sent to Siberia too.

    Knock off that shit, people. We're not preschoolers, "stickers" are nothing but useless noise! Thankfully this is a non-issue with Pidgin, as it doesn't support stickers, and will never support stickers (hopefully). They were a moronic idea back in the MSN Messenger era, and still remain so, 20 years later.

    Not everybody using a chat application is a deranged teenager girl, folks.

    Oh, cleaning up the contact list (because I totally need to talk to that TV repair guy again, that most likely even forgot that had Telegram installed) is of course undiscoverable mystery meat navigation. On the official/FOSS clients, you're supposed to open a chat, tap the profile picture, then look for the "Delete" option in the "three small dots, formerly known as hamburger" menu. Shit UI/UX everywere. GUD JORB, GUYZ!

    In the meanwhile, there are no non-Electron Matrix clients for Android, it seems. Looks like those guys really don't want other nerds (much less normal people) using their nerd-friendly network, of fucking course.
    tomman I'm now on Telegram. Kill me now.

    But at least I've installed the client from F-Droid, setup their 2FA (made a password), used this to add my account to Pidgin, and found that over half of my phone contacts are already there... including the TV repair guy I had visited ONCE.

    Sure, Put-it-in is watching my messages (in good companion with Xinnie and half of Silicon Valley), but my phone is assholeware-free, AND I can use my Real Computer™ running Third Party Native Applications™ on top of my cellphone.

    I'm zen... for now? Expect moar bitching to come Soon™!

    (insert preemptive "fuck you Moxie" here)
    tomman Nice list of apps you've got there. Now get my mom, my cousins, uncles, friends, random strangers selling totally not fake hard currency, the guy from that catalog website, and the shops where I buy my food to switch to those completely unknown, extremely paranoid-nutter-friendly apps that nobody but a couple nerds (and not even endangered journalists!) use.

    In other news, Signal is pivoting from assholeware factory to buttcoin scam startup ("scamtup"?):
    https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-payments-messaging-cryptocurrency/
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26713827
    https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/signal.html
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26724237

    What Could Go Wrong?™

    Uh, everything? But the reactions on it are funny as hell:
    - Half of the nerds are pissed that their Snowden-approved, quasi-proprietary, shit UX, beloved secure chat app of choice is deviating from the Troo UNIX® Way™, that is, "do one thing and do it well" (which is an arguable fact in the case of Signal, where backups are still seen as a bug and not as an feature)
    - The other half are pissed because Moxie went with some random guy and its shady buttcoin, instead of picking whatever popular shady buttcoin these specific nerds are vested into. You can even see how these nerds try to roast alive Moxie's partner-in-crime when the guy himself shows up on the HN's discussion threads, which is somewhat atypical for the place.
    - Oh, this is initially available on the UK (a country that has much better payment methods available), and it's specifically geoblocked in USA, because obvious buttcoin scams are, y'know, very illegal there... not to mention that they would have the SEC/IRS/FBI on their asses in no time.
    - But hey, the popular consensus among deranged nerds is that "we still need buttcoins to ensure freedom of speech", or some similar BS!
    - "What this chat app needs is a built-in way to send money to random strangers family and friends over the net", said nobody ever, except maybe for Xinnie the Pooh's CCP.

    In the meanwhile, Telegram remains as a serious contender (it's gaining a bit of popularity over here among news places, now that WhatsFuckingApp is quite crowded - the most popular local radio station now runs a Telegram group for news side by side with their Zuckerborg Networks groups). And Matrix will remain as a non-option for the People You Know for as long as it remains a nerd-friendly network, which is a sad fact of life, and one that feels like a rusty dagger through your hearth :/

    UPDATE: Oooooh, so Durov tried to pull the same shit with Telegram, just to get cockblocked by the SEC/IRS/FBI too! Man, what the hell is wrong with chat applications developers!? Users will NOT pay for chat apps, it's that simple. Either you give up and start asking for donations instead (where the same 3 nerds will pitch a few bucks a month), or you become Fuckbook and start milking your users' personal data, ensuring an eventual (if very delayed) death.
    MysticLord If you take a look at the link I posted earlier (which is a curated list of software designed to evade the PRISM surveillance system used by the NSA; hence PRISM Break) you'll see a number of links relevant to your interests. I'll post long-form, for my own use in the future.

    1. Briar, P2P messaging app.

    https://briarproject.org/
    Some sort of cell-phone based peer-to-peer mesh network(?) civil breakdown and anti-authority app. Works with Tor too.

    https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/wikis/home
    ^Technical details on their protocols and software stack.

    https://briarproject.org/how-it-works/
    ^Same as above, but quick rundown version with infographics.

    https://briarproject.org/about-us/
    ^People involved.

    2. Silence, encrypted text messaging app. Exactly what it says on the tin, with all the limitations (threat can see who, when, and how often you communicate even if they can't see the contents).

    https://silence.im/

    3. Psi, cross platform XMPP client. Skim the Psi wikipedia link below for a quick rundown, but I think it meets almost all your needs.

    https://psi-im.org/

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psi_%28instant_messaging_client%29

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP
    ^Has a ton of extensions, including connections to stuff like AIM and others. Worth a read.

    4. Conversations, Android XMPP client. Would work well with number three above since it doesn't have an Android app. Has recommendations on XMPP servers to run in the link below.

    https://github.com/iNPUTmice/Conversations

    5. Dino, XMPP client for Linux.

    https://dino.im/

    6. Retroshare, P2P communication and piracy filesharing software based on GNU Privacy Guard.

    https://retroshare.cc/

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroshare
    tomman The tl;dr version for that is "I don't want to talk to nobody that cares", and "I want to get added into a list".

    No, see, the goal is to talk to REAL PEOPLE, not other paranoid nutters and explicit criminals!

    Yes, I'm aware that Telegram is "not secure", but if Durov is on Putin's kill list, that's an issue that he and his team will eventually have to address, given the competition.

    In the meanwhile, no decision has been made, and I continue to be a social outcast :/
    MysticLord There's been a spate of literally autistic teenage boys in England being set up in absurd Kafka-esque "push the button to make the kitschy 1950s-style Nazi death ray fry London" entrapment plots. In one case, the police and prosecution were able to get every message this kid ever sent, and every message sent by the people he communicated with, on Telegram. So there is apparently a backdoor to Telegram somewhere.

    https://prism-break.org/en/all/#instant-messaging

    Looking at PRISM Break, there are a number of options you didn't mention.

    If I were you, I'd ask various dissident/criminal* communities about this, as they have the motivation to know best.

    I think Curtis Yarvin's Urbit is becoming a big deal among dissident Righties. Some of the more intellectual thinkers use it, as do old hats.

    I taught one of my cousins to buy insulin (and fentanyl test strips to make sure it wasn't cut with fentanyl, in true Chinese fashion and as they do with nootropics) from pharmacies in India. I'm considering buying permanent aromatase inhibitors and metformin from the same to lose lockdown weight and cope with decreasing fitness as I age. Good for cancer drugs too. I had to set up a tutanota email, buy a burner phone/sim, and get a fake ID to buy a private mailbox in case the FDA wants to violently sodomize me for importing stuff that is over the counter in nations that don't consider their populations cattle to be farmed for tax revenue.

    I2P is supposedly better than Tor as a platform for building anonymous private distributed network apps, but that's literally just something I read and I have no idea if this is true or not. Granted, the person who wrote it was someone who used to pull 500,000 a year in Silicon Valley, so I'll take his word for it.

    * In order of least to most risk: internet trolls, pirates, computer criminals (their instructions on messaging them to remove ransomware are informative), illicit pharmaceutical importers/distributors/buyers, Nazi/Antifa/Eco-Anarchist radicals that have successfully avoided arrest, people with porn habits that are varying levels of illegal (too many categories to count), actual zoosexuals/pedophiles, and so on. As long as you approach it in a neutral fashion they are usually very helpful, just follow all the usual precautions to prevent anything from being traced back to you - and make it very obvious that you're not one of them, just someone living in a nation that is being used as a political football by the powers that be and who needs some advice on laying low.
    KoiMaxx
    Posted by CaptainJistuce
    Posted by tomman


    ...or I can continue doing what I'm currently doing: talk to nobody and live at the margin of society :/
    An underappreciated option.

    Personally, I'm also partial to that option. Unfortunately, having family I still keep in touch with in entirely different countries makes it a bit less viable :/
      Main » Discussion » Instant messaging (cr)apps » New reply
      This does not actually go there and I regret nothing.