Normal people don’t care that much about privacy for a group chat between their room mates. They’re not and they shouldn’t have to go out of their way to fulfill your request for a privacy based platform for a single group chat.
Why should everyone use your recommended app tho? Try to look for a compromise. Yes privacy is important, but being that hard on yourself and others will make your life a lot less enjoyable.
I’ve grown up enough to understand that, but it still really bothers me how ignorant people are. You could go further: no curiosity, no adventure, no hobbies, and total lack of effort in almost every facet of life.
People just like to stagnate, and it shows in almost every situation. Not even technology related things, but everything.
My teenage little brother, as much as I love him, is kind of disappointing. He doesn’t do anything but play Roblox. When he is grounded (often) he elects to take pictures of his feet and say stupid things to his “friends” instead of holding real conversations.
I’ve never been able to get him interested in anything that requires a modicum of effort, except for modded Minecraft. He likes the machines, and has built cool things, so I know he has the smarts, but he doesn’t have the attention span or the patience to troubleshoot them if they don’t work the first time. He gives up and starts doom scrolling social media. He has expensive shoes, the latest iPhone, and perms his hair. My mother encouraged this vapid pretty boy personality he’s adopted, and I don’t know why, he wasn’t like that when he was younger.
He tries to make fun of me for having and Android phone and using Linux, and I explain to him that software development is what I do for a living and as a hobby. Look, I never ever ever see an ad, anywhere. He thinks AirPods sound good, and calls all earbuds “AirPods”.
And he’s not the only one, I’m tutoring a kid around his age for programming and math. This kid will answer “I don’t know” to every single question, and when I check every 5 minutes to make sure he follows, he is obviously preoccupied.
When I was their age, I hated school just as much as any other kid (and I still think it needs serious reform because it might cause this kind of damage that I’m describing) but I still spent all of my free time either outside trying to make explosives, reading, or programming.
As someone who did poorly in math and science classes because I spent all my free time reading Stephen King novels, binging horror movies on VHS, playing the original Final Fantasy, and walking around town aimlessly with my friends, I assure you we were there, and I knew people with even less motivation than myself.
I’m pretty sure I mindlessly checked out just as often. I cringe thinking about how I just used to watch TV ads without batting an eye. Imagine being numb to that.
I do understand the “lazy”, I saw them around me when I was a kid too.
It’s really simple: everyone is born curious, that’s how we learn to walk and talk, or the difference between sucking a thumb and chewing on sweets. Then, some get encouraged to keep being curious, while others get forced into strict rules and punished for any displays of curiosity, until they stop trying.
I almost got pushed over the line, was labeled a “bad kid” more than once for not following the rules, and just by a lucky twist of destiny, they couldn’t push me more into a mold. That lead to later rebellion, family conflicts, further attempts that completely backfired, and I ended up being one of the few weird kids in class who kept being curious. I still kind of envy some of the others, who instead of getting stifled, got truly encouraged in their curiosity, they’ve ended up much better later in life.
My point being, these people are not lazy, or like to stagnate, or like being ignorant. I’m sorry for your brother, it sounds like his curiosity has been beaten out of him into oblivion. You say your mother has encouraged it, and at the same time that he keeps getting grounded; that’s how the process works. If any time one tries to get out of the mold they get punished, while getting encouraged to stay safely inside, it leads to just giving up, at least until they get to live on their own, which prevents one from achieving their full potential.
As for the answering “I don’t know” to every question, I’ve seen it as a defense mechanism in people who got criticized/punished for every answer in an arbitrary manner, so they’d rather automatically pretend not to know, than risk thinking and saying the wrong thing. Not sure how you could help them, nothing of what I tried did work in that case. Hope you have more luck.
Everyone has a limited about of time, ability to learn, and executive function. It’s rational to be lazy about things that aren’t important to your well-being or interests.
That said, there does seem to be an issue where people are getting overly habituated to instant gratification and constant stimulation. Many valuable things don’t work that way.
I mean we all know, that modern social media overstimulates kids’ brains. But I think that they use it in the first place to cope stress, just as older people tend to smoke to cope stress.
What I hate about the person’s reply is that its not specific. There’s no opportunity for a counter argument or alternative option if the reason for not wanting to use something is that it “sucks”.
“I tried Signal five years ago and it was unreliable” would be a good justification, and there’s a good counter: its better now.
I think if you’re using on Android without Google cloud messaging, as many people in a privacy-oriented community might, delayed notifications are more likely. I’ve found that notifications are timely with cloud messaging using either MicroG or Google Play Services.
Please don’t do this. One of the best experiences about university is meeting new people. Don’t cut people out of your life because they use the wrong chat app.
I’ve met like 5 people more during my university studies, none of which I kept in touch with after graduating. I kinda regret it but I’m not really a person that makes friends easily (or at all), so whatever. I had different friends outside of that.
No, do that. Fully legitimate to choose friends with similar values. If privacy awareness is a big thing for you, do that, really. I survived college without installing Discord. It did bar me out of many groups, but I still had a fairly large circle of friends. I guess Germany is a bit different regarding privacy awareness among younger people, though.
I could not wait to end university, so that I can stop using big tech products. Unfortunately people only use products they are familiar with. If they are always on facebook, they use that for groups. Good luck finding a local community uses anything but facebook groups.
Edit: at university, many pieces of info reaches you informally. If you are not talking to classmates, you might miss important news as well.
This is the 2nd time I’ve seen “taking pics of their shoes/feet” as one of their defaults in text conversation–is this a trend? Any ideas or explanation where it came from?
Uhhh THAT’S a broad brush… I use it, and I’m as far lefty left as left liberal can be, and my family is the same. And none of us are pedophiles to my knowledge.
I can understand OP’s desire to not plaster one’s entire living situation on a public forum. The startling lack of privacy awareness among people in general is frightening. In the 60’s there were actual riots over wiretaps on public phones!
Now we ask the wiretaps that we pay to put in our homes: “hey Alexa, can cats eat pancakes?”
It was a good in between step for non technical users to use it as their singular texting app. So while they still SMS with the unwashed masses, they could still be convinced to do encrypted texts and group chats with others. Doing away with SMS forced all these people off Signal since they didn’t want to jump between 2 apps, it was a huge misstep by them that I think cost them their future.
It seems like everyone in my university uses discord for communication which is way more fitting imo, I cant imagine having a single group chat for everything
Discord is really the most feature rich and user friendly chat app available. If someone says they use Telegram or Signal, I generally raise an eyebrow.
Discord is not very privacy-oriented. We‘re in a privacy-oriented community here, so Discord should raise an eyebrow, not Signal, which is famously privacy-oriented.
I use Discord because that’s where everyone is. Signal and Telegram raise an eyebrow for their E2E encryption, which in practice, is marketing only. It’s a matter of time before E2E doesn’t cut it and law enforcement and governments possess keys. I don’t divulge personal information about myself over Discord, so there’s no data points to connect to a real person. Generally, the privacy focused folks use these other apps because it helps them coordinate certain political actions that I find repugnant. If I need to communicate privately, I speak in person. If I need to talk to someone digitally, I’ll email them.
This us silliness based around false notions about people who value privacy. It’s one step from saying “you have nothing to worry about if you’re nor doing anything wrong,” which is an absurd idea, especially now when we’ve seen firsthand the effects of social media disclosing information that leads to the prosecution of people who have abortions and the non-consensual outing of LGBT+ people.
Personally, I feel like there are more eyebrow-raising aspects about continuing to use apps like Facebook and Instagram when we know how hostile and intrusive they are to our personal data.
Moreover, it’s not just harmful groups that need privacy. Safe communication tools are also important for groups that seek positive change, such as BLM, LGBTQIA groups, and anti-fascists.
We are in a privacy community, or am I mistaken? All this is just privacy 101.
It’s a matter of time before E2E doesn’t cut it and law enforcement and governments possess keys.
That’s why you only use open-source E2EE like Signal. There’s no way to slip in a back door without a bunch of people noticing, sounding the alarm, and forking the project.
Telegram has plenty of features for larger groups, too. Easily enough for acquaintances and schoolmates. Considering how easy creating group chats is you don’t have to have a single one for everything.
If only my family actually listened to experts. Both me and my sister are in IT, and we use Signal to send to each other. But none of the rest even care to switch.
As someone who uses signal every day, signal does kinda suck for group chats. If we all stop simping for a moment and actually talk about its issues:
Maybe they’ve fixed it but from my experience individual chats in signal are fine but group chats can be pretty shit. If someone doesn’t have service and their message fails to send, when the message finally does send, it just inserts itself into the conversation at the current time instead of putting it in at the original time it tried to send. So it ends up being completely out of context.
I also have friends that have the iOS signal app and if they don’t open it for a while notifications stop working so they don’t see my messages and I have to text them instead.
Also the phone to PC link can be buggy as well with not all messages going through or getting transferred.
Devil’s advocate: if a delayed message is put far up the conversation history, it may not be seen when it finally goes through? Although notifications could mitigate that to some extent.
I don’t remember and can’t find a post I saw in the past recommending better video chat applications for more than two users. I believe one was Jitsi and another Wire. I just found another video conferencing application someone recommended online: MiroTalk. Different open source software excel in different areas.
Sorry, I just realized this post is about instant messaging platforms and not specifically their video chat features.
I like Element better because of its Markdown capabilities (though still very limited) and the ability to edit messages. I used element for my team coding projects in college, which worked very well and integrated nicely with our GitHub updates, but it sucked for video conferences. Signal barely holds up for two-user video chats, though that could be my internet or someone else’s.
I also want to self host my own XMPP server someday.
There is Revolt. Maybe younger people will like that more.
Getting my friends to use Jitsi was actually really easy, because Jitsi actually worked, and Google Meet didn’t (people’s voices were breaking up very very badly).
YMMV? I use Signal for a couple of group chats, people who have finally decided the extra security is worth everyone moving across from WhatsApp/Messenger for. Had no problems.
Then again, I’m not a big online-messaging-person generally so maybe there’s a lot of issues I don’t get round to seeing.
Oh trust me Instagram has so many features. They have stories and messages and group chats and stories but for texts, reels which are short form content like Tiktok etc etc etc. Everything that needs to exist in one app to get you addicted to the app and never leave it. I was there once and am never going back
XMPP did it to itself, it left stuff like file transfers, audio/video calls, custom emojis, all undefined in the standard and left for the clients to create their own extensions… which they made, incompatible between each other.
I paid for a Trillian license back in the day it made my life so much better. All my school friends were AIM, sports friends MSN, church friends mostly in Yahoo, internet friends on a mix. Trillian was an amazing find for me.
It is ironic that you call a Proprietary Data Harvester Platform User “Friendly”. Well forget users. Meta even collects data of non users to top off the grimness.
User friendliness =/= Privacy friendly. What I mean is that everybody there (aside from the linux kid) is comfortable with the app. More than goddamn signal…
I really do not see any logical basis that makes you separate privacy friendliness from User Friendliness. If a platform wishes to be user friendly, privacy is also one of the fundamental rights of a user the platform needs to take care of for it to be considered friendly to a user.
The fact that a lot of people, not ‘everybody’, are comfortable with Instagram has no strong points to consolidate your own position. It only describes how good the horrible marketting of Giant Tech Corporations is at entrapping millions of people into using it, generating life long addictions and the eventual wastage of time on degenerate culture. While the Corporations collect all that data available to them to further their own Capitalist interests.
Privacy does come at a cost and compromise. A slightly less funkier UI for a far more secure platform, for essentially 0 cost is a lot one could ask for, especially when you are comparing a Libre project made by a small organization to a proprietary project made by a Multi Billionaire MNC.
I will not be apologetic in saying that you are the child here who is tailing the mass of consumers without proper analysis.
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