Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 27, 2025 17:54 UTC (Mon) by proski (subscriber, #104)
In reply to: Flee from Meta by dskoll
Parent article: Linux-related discussion as a cybersecurity threat

With Google Plus closed and Facebook banning Linux related discussions, what would be an alternative for open source developers?

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 27, 2025 18:03 UTC (Mon) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Mastodon, particularly instances focused on free software / open source, like fosstodon.org, though any Fediverse site will do.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 27, 2025 18:32 UTC (Mon) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link] (41 responses)

Alternative for what? I've been out of the loop for a while.
Last time I looked, facebook was used for

- sharing pictures with friends & family?
- scheduling events.
- advertising your small business?
- doom scrolling through misinformation?

I deleted Facebook years ago, have a private Instagram on life support.. and have a proton drive I use to actually use to share stuff. Email, calendar, and text are the tools I use for event coordination. I'm busy enough that I can get plenty misinformed via self-reinforcing internal feedback loops that sometimes seem to delete information on each loop, even with reliable sources, and have no need for advertising.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 27, 2025 21:32 UTC (Mon) by Klaasjan (subscriber, #4951) [Link] (39 responses)

An alternative for WhatsApp? (in EU)

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 27, 2025 23:43 UTC (Mon) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link] (12 responses)

Doesn't Signal work?

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 27, 2025 23:49 UTC (Mon) by Klaasjan (subscriber, #4951) [Link] (11 responses)

Signal should work, but my actual social network does not use it. In contrast, WhatsApp is pervasive where I live, both at home and at work.

Re: Getting off WhatsApp

Posted Jan 28, 2025 6:28 UTC (Tue) by Nemo_bis (guest, #88187) [Link]

Start by getting the 2-3 people you chat with the most out of WhatsApp.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 28, 2025 10:10 UTC (Tue) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (5 responses)

Interestingly, in the last week a group of non-technical people I work with started discussing switching to Signal. The whole "Facebook can use my data" wasn't enough after the EU put their foot down and prevented data sharing with the rest of Facebook.

Recent events have made a lot of people reconsider WhatsApp who wouldn't have before, which is impressive. It's pervasive in Europe, mainly because SMS was/is fricking expensive and doesn't work great across borders (of which we have many).

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 28, 2025 16:50 UTC (Tue) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

I made prediction market contracts on which of the big services that are currently end-to-end encrypted will give in:

So far Signal looks the strongest, at 14% compared to 56% for WhatsApp, which makes sense because the Signal Foundation doesn't have other businesses that a government could have easy leverage over.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 29, 2025 10:41 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

> mainly because SMS was/is fricking expensive and doesn't work great across borders (of which we have many).

IFF you're on contract, SMS is almost invariably free in the UK now - has been for a while. MMS, on the other hand, is still pricey.

So of course, Google decided to drop messenger, replace it with some other messaging app, and default it to using WiFi not SMS. And uncapped data plans are frigging expensive ...

Mind you, I've got one of the cheapest plans you can get, and careful monitoring of upgrade offers means I now normally start each month with (I think) 50GB of data allowance - 25GB per month plus the previous month rolled over.

Cheers.
Wol

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 30, 2025 10:01 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (2 responses)

> IFF you're on contract, SMS is almost invariably free in the UK now - has been for a while. MMS, on the other hand, is still pricey.

Within the UK it may be free, and now if you're in the EU then within the EU it will be within your bundle. But when WhatsApp started you paid through the nose if you happened to be outside the country and you wanted to SMS your friends at home. This was the killer feature that made WhatsApp popular. Skype could have captured this space, but it didn't. The fact you can send images for zero extra cost is just bonus. And the fact it works even if you have only Wifi.

And even today, sending SMSes to other countries is notoriously flaky. We often communicate with customers in other countries using Signal because SMSes just vanish (the lack to receipts doesn't help).

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 30, 2025 13:27 UTC (Thu) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164) [Link]

The other big thing that WhatsApp has (and Signal, and Telegram I suppose) and SMS not, is group chats. That makes it so much easier for setting up things to do together with family or friends, or even for casual conversation. Just for that reason, SMS is not in the same league, not even close. Email could in principle work too for that kind of use case, but WhatsApp et al. do these things with so much less friction.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 30, 2025 14:38 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

The other influence that led to WhatsApp being popular is that the EU in general had more of a bias towards pre-paid plans than the USA. This led to two interacting things that biased people towards messaging apps (BlackBerry Messenger, WhatsApp etc): first, you tended to pay less for your messaging if you bought data and used a separate service for messaging than if you bought SMS. Second, telcos offer pre-paid customers the opportunity to buy cheap bundles of service - 500 MB data to use up in 30 days, or 200 SMS to use in 60 days, for example - and because data is fungible between messaging, e-mail, web browsing etc, being able to push everything into a data bundle is easier than having to balance data bundles and SMS bundles separately.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 30, 2025 18:16 UTC (Thu) by hailfinger (subscriber, #76962) [Link] (3 responses)

I used to recommend Signal, but their target audience is people who value confidentiality over availability.

Signal does not have the ability to store received media files in the phone gallery or any other storage media easily backed up incrementally, you just have the option to back up the gigantic blob file created once per day as "backup". The ability to store media outside the Signal container has been requested repeatedly and denied repeatedly, usually with arguments along the lines of "you don't know if the sender would allow you to back up the media" and "you can export media files individually to phone storage, just not in bulk".

If you want to share pictures/videos in a way the receiver can benefit from automated off-device backups to avoid data loss, pretty much any non-Signal messenger is better. Signal-JW exists and claims to be Signal-compatible while allowing phone-managed storage of media, but that won't help your conversation partner recover their valuable family pictures.

If you're recommending a messenger to friends and family, be ready to explain why their data disappeared after a phone was stolen or damaged if the messenger doesn't support user-friendly automatic backups.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 31, 2025 8:29 UTC (Fri) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (2 responses)

> Signal does not have the ability to store received media files in the phone gallery or any other storage media easily backed up incrementally, you just have the option to back up the gigantic blob file created once per day as "backup"

When you recieve an image you can select it and ask to save to local storage (aka your phone gallery). Since most images I receive via Signal are memes anyway I don't mind this, I just need to remember to save the few photos that are interesting.

For the same reason I don't have every image in WhatsApp backed up to the cloud, that just wastes a ridiculous amount of space.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 31, 2025 10:20 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

This becomes a user-by-user thing; I back up all images I'm sent via WhatsApp, since virtually all of them are family pictures I want to keep. It's simpler to remove the 1% of images that are memes than to manually back up the 99% that are things I want.

Signal doesn't offer the choice - it insists that everyone has to work the way you do, not the way I do.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 31, 2025 12:43 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Signal doesn't offer the choice - it insists that everyone has to work the way you do, not the way I do.

What I would personally like is the ability to explicitly archive (and subsequently delete) some subset of the overall Signal message store.

There are conversations that _must_ be kept for various reasons but I don't want to waste a couple of GB of precious handheld space on them all the time.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 28, 2025 10:57 UTC (Tue) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (25 responses)

I use telegram with my family.

It's not perfect but the app isn't overflowing with ads like the facebook app at least.

Plus, no size limit on shared files.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 28, 2025 13:02 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (3 responses)

I would fear giving telegram to my kids, given the groups that are readily accessible via it. And then, once you join groups, you start to get the DMs for spam/scammers/groomers/etc. Even if you don't join groups, random guessing of usernames still means you may get inappropriate DMs.

I have given one kid Session (getsession.org) - a Signal fork, making it distributed and based around a cryptographic identity. It is effectively impossible for someone to randomly message my child. And groups are much more limited (just cause of the exclusivity factor). It's also not-completely-trivial to setup a group, and if you do those are not easy to discover - so the group issue should hopefully not go out of control as quickly.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 29, 2025 0:06 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (2 responses)

I get individual spam on Telegram (mostly since using a Google Voice number for it…I wonder where the leak is…). WhatsApp is *far* more spammy and "hey, we added you to a cryptocurrency pig butchering^W^Winvestment group". I just lurk and report them until somebody wakes up and does something about it.

Flee from Meta

Posted Feb 1, 2025 22:06 UTC (Sat) by mrugiero (guest, #153040) [Link] (1 responses)

Is this that common when you use it with known people only? I used to only use Telegram for personal use and didn't have that problem. Then I had to join groups related to crypto for $DAYJOB reasons and became flooded by scammers. I believe there is a correlation there, but maybe it's coincidence and the spam got worse just about the time I started using it for those groups?

Flee from Meta

Posted Feb 1, 2025 23:02 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I hadn't added a contact on Telegram for years prior (I had since joined a group, but the spam started before that). As for WhatsApp, I refuse to let it access my contacts, so I can't actually join any group or initiate a chat because that is locked behind a "use your contacts" workflow.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 28, 2025 17:45 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (15 responses)

Well, I guess I'm a dinosaur. I use mostly email to message family and friends (and it's self-hosted.) I rarely encrypt personal email because I see no point, but anything sensitive is encrypted with GnuPG.

With my daughter, I text or call.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 28, 2025 22:30 UTC (Tue) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (14 responses)

email is quite different. With a group chat you can just send a photo of wherever you are, so your family members are kept in the loop even while being thousands of km away.

It's also good to coordinate if you have to meet somewhere, you can share the current location in real time.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 28, 2025 23:36 UTC (Tue) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] (1 responses)

I guess I'm a dinosaur too. How does sending a photo make it different? I could attach a photo to an Email also. I do get that if you're trying to meet up with someone at a place you don't both know, it's helpful to interact in realtime.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 29, 2025 9:58 UTC (Wed) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link]

You can, but it gets seen a week later and it's no longer relevant really.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 29, 2025 2:10 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (11 responses)

I can attach photos to emails.

If it's really necessary, I can share my current location via email in essentially real-time (less than one minute of latency for sure.)

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 29, 2025 9:57 UTC (Wed) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (10 responses)

email is not a realtime protocol, so no you can't ensure there is less than 1 minute delay.

Having said that, it's much easier to have something in your pocket doing that, than having to constantly copy paste your coordinates into an email client, and require the other person to compare them to their own coordinates and direct.

Seeing some kind of map that automatically gets updated is easier, I assure you.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 29, 2025 13:41 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (9 responses)

No, email is not real-time and you cannot ensure less than 1 minute delay, but 99.9% of the time, it's the case.

If I need anything more immediate than that, I text or call. Remember when speaking on the phone was a thing?

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 29, 2025 13:42 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (4 responses)

"Remember when speaking on the phone was a thing?"

You mean last century? The late 1900s? :)

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 29, 2025 15:03 UTC (Wed) by laurent.pinchart (subscriber, #71290) [Link] (3 responses)

In the late 1900's it was even possible to meet somewhere in the real world without having to carry any electronic device on your way from home to the destination. I know stories of people who managed to find themselves in the same pre-agreed location at the same pre-agreed time without having to communicate with each other on the way. Crazy, right?

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 29, 2025 16:01 UTC (Wed) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (1 responses)

And do you know how many times my mum called the police because someone of us had missed the bus?

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 30, 2025 2:29 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

How many times?

My mom didn't start worrying until I was 2-3 hours late and hadn't called...

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 29, 2025 17:01 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

The joys of having to wait by a known, pre-arranged phone-box, for those cases where you /did/ you have to communicate along the way.

"Are they going to ring when they said or not?"

"Arg, someone else is using the phone box!"

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 29, 2025 15:35 UTC (Wed) by geert (subscriber, #98403) [Link] (1 responses)

Call is fine for immediate needs, text (SMS) is not, as QoS prioritizes calls over text.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 30, 2025 12:54 UTC (Thu) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

On the other hand texts are more likely to reach the person due to the lack of a requirement for both people to be available at exactly the same time.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 29, 2025 15:59 UTC (Wed) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (1 responses)

> If I need anything more immediate than that, I text or call. Remember when speaking on the phone was a thing?

Ah yes "I'm at coordinates four one three mark two!", that will work out nicely to find someone else in an unfamiliar place.

You could just say "I'm not in close contact with people who live very far away, and I never meet friends, so I don't have the use case" and that would be perfectly acceptable. But this is getting really ridiculous.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 29, 2025 18:27 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I can count the number of times I've arranged to meet people in a completely unfamiliar place that is impossible to describe using landmarks, intersection names, etc. on the fingers of zero hands.

I have no idea how I managed to meet friends during the period of 1976-1995 or so... it all magically worked, though.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 29, 2025 10:57 UTC (Wed) by chris_se (subscriber, #99706) [Link] (4 responses)

> I use telegram with my family.

Just a side note: from a data privacy perspective, most other apps available nowadays are better than Telegram. Telegram is **not** end-to-end encrypted by default. You can activate that in specific circumstances, but you have to do so for each individual conversation, and it's quite complicated.

Now in your specific use case, that might not be an issue, and you might be willing to sacrifice that for other features the app has, so please don't read my reply as a criticism.

But I wanted to make this clear, because Telegram is advertised as a secure messenger, when it is in fact by far the least secure of the mainstream messaging apps (if you ignore regular unencrypted SMS). If you care about data privacy and security, moving from WhatsApp to Telegram is actually a step down, not up.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 29, 2025 15:57 UTC (Wed) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (3 responses)

Telegram is easily available on computers. I know it's not e2ee, same goes for emails and every single proprietary application (even if they claim they are… unless they're open source it's just meaningless words).

I'm fully aware of it.

> moving from WhatsApp to Telegram is actually a step down, not up.

Very debatable. One has a closed source client and one has an open source client. One claims to be e2ee (but nobody knows), while one lets you see the code and make sure yourself.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 29, 2025 18:21 UTC (Wed) by hkario (subscriber, #94864) [Link] (2 responses)

Signal is available on computers too

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 29, 2025 22:34 UTC (Wed) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (1 responses)

It is available, but not "apt instal" available, having it on the pinephone or such devices is a major complication, while telegram just works.

Also the fact that very institutional USA players promote signal heavily makes me suspect it's not as safe as advertised. But that's just my paranoia. Not that telegram is safe at all.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 30, 2025 10:17 UTC (Thu) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

Yes, ironically Telegram _clients_ are more open and free software than Signal is. You can write your own Telegram client (and many have, thus you have native clients on different mobile Linux OSs) while Signal actively disallows third party clients. And you can install Telegram fork from F-Droid, etc.

Sure, Signal is e2e, but if exaggerating it's e2e in a bit similar sense than Whatsapp is. It has a long history of including proprietary binary blobs and being only available in proprietary stores (I mean places from where you also get automatic updates). Even though on the other hand there is work on reproducible builds, their actions drive people to actively install it from places like Google Play instead of something that community could more easily verify.

I do prefer Signal at the moment for its functionality and theoretically well proven security, but I've started to use Matrix more as well.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 28, 2025 7:15 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

Mastodon is an implementation of microblogging on top of a protocol called ActivityPub. ActivityPub nodes make the Fediverse.

There are several other microblogging servers out there. But there are also other things:

Picture sharing: Pixelfed
Video sharing: PeerTube
Scheduling events: Mobilizon

Doom scrolling for misinformation: Try to set up your own server, and look for nodes that are to be banned. There is indeed at least one alternative fediverse out there if that's your kick.