Because atm is the most adopted alternative but isn’t any better then SimpleX.

technically nothing but it serves as a privacy respecting alternative to meta/google controlled messengers.

things like mastodon and pixelfed are rather easy to wrap your head around and replace their big tech counterparts with if you are the average user.

there is no real replacement for an instant messaging/sms like experience. matrix is at the moment still a bit too complicated to get into if you have come to expect a workflow like: download an app -> write your phone contacts a message.

so although it is not federated it is the best we have got at the moment in my opinion

The post is really about abandoning the tech oligarchy more than specifically using federated technology.

Signal is hostile to third party clients like Molly.im as well

Yeah. I love Signal but it doesn’t belong in that list. Dansup (creator of loops and pixelfed) is apparently working on “Sup” that will be a decentralized alternative to whatsapp.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good

it’s decentralized

No it’s not. From literally your own comment:

Signal relies on centralized servers

For a decentralized messenger use delta.chat

Bro put citations in his lemmy comment 💀

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but I no longer believe that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.

The fact that we have a telephone system that works with separate providers contradicts this sentiment. If I want to pick up the phone and talk to my cousin’s puppy in New Zealand, I can do that without creating an account on his provider’s service.

I don’t understand why we’ve forgotten this as a society. Yes, it was difficult to upgrade the phone systems over the past century, but it’s worth it in my opinion. I really wish we’d start seeing government regulation that says “you should be able to talk to someone on a service without having to create an account on said service.” I thought the DMA would do this, but sadly, Whatsapp still requires an account to talk to people using that service. Very disappointing.

Yeah, Moxie has openly shot down the idea of adding federation to Signal, and I’ve never heard them claim Signal was decentralized.

Matrix is federated, distributed, and decentralized.

XMPP is federated and decentralized.

The app is really bare bones. It’s also not federated (yet, but use a product for what it is right now, not what it promises to be).

Has potential but also dansup keeps running head-first into controversial takes.

The app worked for me when I first downloaded it but hasn’t since

Also an entirely different thing, email is nothing alike to IMs.

To stop it, disable “Help share videos being played” in your options

They use a different protocol from the “fediverse”.

Bluesky isn’t federated as much as they pretend to be and say “they’re working on it”

It’s just another corporate social platform that will fall into the same thing

Signal is better than WA tho.

Could the software selection be more diverse?

Not if you want people to actually consider switching instead of feeling overwhelmed and confused.

I miss Jabber so much. There was a brief time where my one XMPP client and an easy to install server could let me chat with everyone I knew, whether they were on ICQ, Y!, gchat, MSN, IRC, or AIM. We fucking HAD interoperability.

Thank you. Please jump in faster with a tldr of this on other posts like this.

Apparently it makes a good RSS feed aggregator if nothing else.

Yes it’s excellent! Also noting for those that aren’t aware: Goodreads is owned by Amazon.

It could be but I find the android app buggy (this month I’ve been using bookwyrm, GR, Open Reads, and The Story Graph to compare them all and still nothing is as smooth as GR. Plus bookwyrm has no apple app. I love where Bookwyrm is going but right now the switch is not the best

Folks should also check out neodb.social . it’s good reads, letterboxd, and steam reviews all in one.

Yeah. This guide is going to make some rounds in my peer group. I’ve got a lot of dissatisfied friends who just need an easy guide to remind them what to try. Very cool!

Don’t worry, your successor isn’t offering anything big. You’ll still be around for many more days to come.

I don’t get the joke

Element/matrix aren’t part of the fediverse, either. It doesn’t speak AP.

Absolutely, signal isn’t federated, but I don’t want my messaging app to be federated. I want my social media to be federated. Lemmy is good because it’s open. Signal is good because it’s shut.

Don’t use Matrix the devs knew about sidechannel vulnerabilities and ignored them for years. This is peak negligence and should immediately disqualify you from touching anything security related.

No, Matrix is federated differently.

I think it’s just the colours for the peertube one. I like that it’s three individual play icons to signify the federation aspect, but the colours are just dull.

Unpopular opinion: your opinion is not unpopular at all.

I like the Lemmy one, but peertubes logo looks like it’s gonna stab my eyeballs in my sleep

The Lemmy logo always looks so sad or angry to me. Wished he could look happier.

The only ones on the right I really like are signal and friendica. (I had never seen the friendica logo before. This is really well done whoever designed that. Good job.)

All the big guys of course can afford graphic design teams and marketing/PR research.

The notable exception for me is mastodon. While I’m still not a big fan of that logo either, it certainly looks better than the X logo. I’m guessing Musk DOGE’d his design teams in favor of some yes-men.

They’re horrible

Lemmy is fine, just change the color of background.

Peertube is… well… needs improvement…

Mastodon seems to be filling this niche (professional networking and job seeking) at the moment. I’m curious if something more targeted is emerging yet as well.

But will it have the lunatics and toxic positivity?

Yes finding the right instance on peertube is a nightmare — and also the general lack of quality content, or subtitling, which makes it as good as useless for deaf people like me.

Have a look here for potential instances: lemmy.wtf/post/15816115 and also check these links out for channels to follow: lemmy.wtf/post/15810205 / peertube.wtf/home

It took a day before I got my activation email. There was no indication on the website it was gonna take that long, but I’m guessing it’s early enough that it might still require manual approval.

That said it’s still very much a ghost town

It’s meant to replace people’s text messaging apps with .i imal barriers to entry. People’s existing SMS/MMS contacts aren’t stored by user account names, but by phone number.

When I added Signal to my device, I was able to open up my existing contacts and go.

I’ll

That’s why Signal’s spreading and your not.

loops is still very early in development. people need to tamper their expectations.

Loops definitely needs more features but it’s early. I’ve enjoyed it.

It’s for short form videos, it’s mimicking its competitors UX right now (namely YouTube shorts, Instagram reels and TikTok). Neither has thumb down or show you how long a video is.

As for content… the users generate content, not the software. So… how many good videos have you uploaded?

Hear me out.

Creators should be hosting peer tubes. And they should host exclusively their own content. Fans of their can subscribe to whatever systems they want to pay and support.

For creators, it’s a backup for when YouTube the project inevitably fails. For fans as well. But it’s also a backup of their content.

A lot of youtubers make a living posting videos.

They dont have a good enough reason to risk going to a much smaller audience with no ads and no membership system

They also probably arent knowledgeable enough about computers to switch

You also can’t just switch from whatsapp to signal. I have hundreds of contacts on whatsapp that message me constantly there, and 2 on signal.

PipePipe is on F-Droid

For Mastodon, the people you follow will also need to switch. This is even harder than getting your friends to switch.

Well I switched from the birdsite to Mastodon because a) I like to shout in the void and b) see what other people are shouting into the void. Doesn’t really ultimately matter who’s doing the shouting. People who go to social media exclusively for news and updates are a bit strange when you really think about it. You’ve got to have the shout in you.

(I’m only being half facetious here)

Remember the early days of YouTube? When people made garage videos for fun? Remember Vines? When people were making videos instead of businesses making content?

That’s what Peertube is for. It’s to have fun. Showcase your high school band. Talk about your potted plants. Share your excitement about trains. It’s not to make money. It’s to live.

No, that’s anti-libre software.

Are the people I normally watch on YouTube unable to be seen on peertube?

Basically this. There are some creators that either switched or publish on both platforms, mainly from the Linux sphere (and, unfortunately, also some crackpots and/or scammers who got kicked from other platforms), but overall, it doesn’t have a lot of content, especially content that’s on a “professional” level.

It’s not an alternate way to view Youtube, it’s a totally separate service. You’re not missing anything, if no one’s using it to post content, then there’s no content. Youtube is a tough one to compete with because the infrastructure needed to host that much data and distribute it is insane. Peertube is super niche and not many know about it, but I do wonder how fast scaling would become a problem if it suddenly got an influx of new users.

Peertube is more like a “Proof Of Concept”. In reality, most content creators will not switch to it (or even care enough to learn about it).

This isn’t like the reddit --> Lemmy transition, where you switch from Stranger Group A to Stranger Group B. If creators aren’t moving, there will be no transition. And, unlike with social media posts that you can repost, you can’t even reupload Youtube videos because you’ll get copyright take down notices (that the instance owner will legally have to comply with).

Btw, Peertube federates with other Peertube instances, Peertube and Youtube does not federate with each other. And it’s not a front-end for Youtube either.

The app is not really that great yet. I suggest to check this page out for content creators on PeerTube: peertube.wtf/home and also this list: lemmy.wtf/post/15810205

If you are also looking for a PeerTube server to register on, I suggest you look here: lemmy.wtf/post/15816115

Im using it now. I never used tiktok but i can see the draw now.

Loops really isn’t ready for primetime. It’s too new and unpolished, and will need a bit more time.

I wonder if peertube can scale. YouTube has a whole sophisticated system for ingesting and transcoding videos into dozens of formats, with tradeoffs being made on computational complexity versus file size/bandwidth, which requires some projection on which videos will be downloaded the most times in the future (and by which types of clients, with support for which codecs, etc.). Doing this can require a lot of networking/computing/memory/storage resources, and I wonder if the software can scale.

Loops isnt even federated or open source yet. Deleted my account

Yeah it’s no where near ready for mass adoption. It’s made a couple improvements, but it crashes every time I try to leave a comment.

You need to sign up and wait for a beta invite. Took 15-30 days for me to get in. It’s not ready for primetime.

Loops is anti-libre software.

May I recommend NewPipe on android? It’s a proxy for YouTube/Bandcamp/Plus a bunch of other stuff including Peertube. As a creator, Peertube is nice, but yea, using it as a full time video watching platform just isn’t viable rn unfortunately.

Check out Circles

Loops will be open sourced later they say.

Is Loops open source? It will be! We plan on open sourcing the platform after it reaches a stable and easy to maintain state.

So Matrix it is?

Hidden inside the whatsapp->signal box in tiny faint font. I was wondering why there isn’t a big “Discord -> Matrix”

Right in the Signal box, it says “Or Matrix/XMPP”. It’s super tiny for some reason.

It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work; when you go to church; when you pay your taxes.

Protonmail aren’t necessarily worthy of the support, look up the recent news about them

Email is a shitty protocol we should abandon

It will. I did the same thing a couple years ago. Make sure you share links to things like articles, videos, news, from the fediverse to your contacts. That helps them switch, when they see the platform in their mobile browser.

No one pays for SMS.

Sms is bad if you care about privacy, but great for voyeurs.

I frequently send dick pics between two of my phone numbers with fake messages about selling drugs and blowing things up attached, triggering them for a manual review in the government/carrier’s office.

Signal is very useful for minorities and anyone who’s actually planning a terrorist attack.

SMS is so ass, I can’t even.

You can’t text abroad for free. I guess texting is fine if you only communicate within the country.

Any chance you’re American?

This does not help.

There is always SMS for these.

My trouble as well, I’d love to switch from Whatsapp, but literally every person I talk to and most people in my city/estate/country uses It.

There’s a “vendor lock” term, maybe this would be a “social lock”?

Same (Brazil), Whatsapp is pretty much a requirement and I hate that I’m forced to give Meta my information by using their shitty app.

I would say it’s a step by step work. I have moved my family from Whatsapp to Signal years ago and then to Matrix. I forced them in some way but I just said “sorry if you want to keep contact we will have to find another app, I don’t accept Whatsapp ToS.” It took some time but my close family and friends are there and I regularly get someone to join, friend or family. It’s still close circle but it’s also a good thing. Same went with work. Colleagues wanted to do a whatsapp group for a project and I basically said “No, best I can do is Signal.” and they went with it.

I got my family out after some high profile data breaches on WhatsApp. We feel a lot safer sharing personal info over Signal and the switchover was painless. Even the video calls are great on signal.

There’s inertia, for sure, but once you highlight that some evil corp isn’t the one handling grandma’s inheritance data, it makes for a compelling case.

We all still have WhatsApp because we need to talk to the others. But our family chat only exists on Signal now.

yeah I’ll be honest, peertube is nowhere near a youtube replacement

Check this list out: lemmy.wtf/post/15816115

Matrix isn’t fediverse though. It is Federated but uses its own protocol

The best number-free protocol is SimpleX atm

IRC?

Yes, there is Matrix

TeamSpeak is doing an overhaul to be similar to Discord. You can self host.

There are a few that I can’t recall off the top of my head

Matrix. Seems to be the hottest thing for group chats. Also what a lot of open source projects that used IRC before are switching to (or, if not switching, are providing a bridge for).

revolt.chat

Revolt is the way.

Mumble + Element (Matrix)

Zulip or Revolt

yo, fuck discord, this is by far the most important one to emulate for me.

guilded could be consider one but really matrix and revolt are the privacy ones

There is one ! I have downloaded the APK, but I think there is also a testflight for iOS

Yup, its just called Loops, there is a download link once you log in for the APK directly or to the iOS testflight. (On a related note why does everything keep like this picture keep calling it “Loops.video” when it is just called “Loops”? - we don’t call it “Lemmy.ml”, “Mastodon.social” or “Peertube.tv”)

I haven’t heard of it yet but it’s very interesting! link for those who struggle to find it among german search results

Is there only one website?

As software, PeerTube is great and there’s actually plenty of content to consume if you can find it. The more content creators we can get to use PeerTube, the more appealing PeerTube will also become.

Check this link out, if looking for content: peertube.wtf

[Signal] has contact discovery so it owns matrix and xmpp when compared to whatsapp

Can you please elaborate? Idk what this means

matrix too has contact discovery, if you add your phone number (or email). most users don’t, and that tells me something

It’s also a pretty rough experience tbh. It took about 2 days for me to gain access after signing up. Only usable via the Android sdk or iOS beta app. The infrastructure just isn’t there yet.

Damn

I’m having more trouble dropping Facebook messenger.

Pretty much everything “real life social” is organized through that. While I haven’t posted anything on Facebook for years, news from my local community, kids after school activities, birthday parties, etc are all organized through that.

It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing. If you have a decent ad blocker and don’t interact, even if you’re logged in, you’re already out of YouTube. Leave your interactions and uploads to Peertube.

I’ve removed yt from my phone and it was a positive change. I just watch stuff I get like sent or I search for. No more rabbit holes. Also no ads, background playback, playback with the phone locked… the only drawback is that closed captions don’t work full screen.

Sure, just give your data to China and get their ads, who cares.

I can not find its libre software licence text file.

“I’m sick of apps owned by American oligarchs who want to steal my data! This app owned by Chinese oligarchs will surely be a better experience”

Only ones I use are YouTube and fb marketplace because Craigslist is totally dead here, but it’s from an alt account I’ve never used for anything at all.

It’s funny how things work out.

I’ve spent years checking social media multiple times per day, and due to current (and not so current) events, I initially just deleted twitter. I tried mastodon, but it was a complete echo chamber. Twitter on the other hand was 25% bots and 50% porn, so I just deleted it. Turns out I didn’t miss it.

I recently did the same with Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat. Guess what, not missing those either.

Facebook messenger is tough to get rid of though. I have kids that attend after school activities, and there aren’t really any easy fixes. I doubt I can successfully persuade 100+ people to migrate to signal just because of my political crusade.

It’s not being helped by the fact that ~75% of the people here use iPhones, so most communication not going through messenger goes through iMessage. Last I checked I knew a total of 4 people on signal, despite having 50+ people i regularly communicate with over messenger or iMessage.

More recently I’ve felt like there’s issues with being completely disconnected from any sort of critical mass. If I wanted to join a protest in my local city, I have doubts any of the fringe social networks could organize that. I can do my part to try to get more people on there.

It’s part of why I joined BlueSky over X. It’s more popular, and issues be what they are, that counts for a lot.

It’s been here the a long time actually

Raccoon

Bookface replicates the Facebook UI in Friendica :)

I heard that it was one of the earliest Fediverse projects. It just hadn’t surged in popularity like Mastodon and Lemmy had after the Twitter and Reddit exodus.

Friendica was one of the very first fediverse platforms, and is over a decade old at this point. Hell, almost 2 decades old.

People only move to Bluesky because they don’t want to change their thinking (picking instances is hard!) and keep using “Twitter”.

I can vouch for Signal. I got my whole family out of facebook messenger to make a new place for family chat. Even my parents in their mid 60s had no problem changing.

no one was actually on it

It might feel that way at first, but my Mastodon feed is very robust nowadays. You just need to follow more people.

I’ve seen some authors I like on Mastodon, like William Gibson. It’s a quieter place but I like that about it, as someone who never used Twitter.

I can vouch for Matrix unfortunately it is not listed and instead they mentioned Signal which is further from the fediverse.

Depends on how many you follow. Lemmy is way more dead than Mastodon for me.

I’m on Mastodon and I see plenty of activity, I don’t miss twitter at all. I see less activity on Lemmy tbh

<img alt="Social media addiction" src="https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/265de530-15d4-4c78-9eda-a434c1cc8f58.jpeg"> From lemmy.ca

While not part of the fediverse if you want Twitter like activity I would suggest BlueSky. However I am also on Mastodon and I find it to have plenty of activity. It’s not the fire hose that Twitter is but to me that makes it much more manageable.

George Takei is active of mastodon. There are many journalists and scientists. Tons of developers. A few small celebs. Also, many people I don't want to be here are not here. That's a plus for me.

My first thought too.

It’s not federated, but it is an open source secure texting alternative.

Yeah it’s a bit off if we’re emphasizing a switch to fediverse specifically and not better alternatives in general.

It should be something like SimpleX

Unfortunately that does seem to be the way it’s going, I give Bluesky 8 years before it’s as bad as current day X.

Bluesky is just Twitter but with a different techbro in charge

Bluesky is a for profit company. Not the way to go.

Kinda feels like bluesky is already going to hell in a handbasket, so maybe not.

People moving from Xitter to Bluesky don’t understand why they moved. They have no clue.

We should stop being naive. Immersing ourselves as a society into facebook and twitter significantly contributed to the shit situation we are in now. Going to Signal seems like a short term solution. We should have some idea where to go on the long term.

Signal is open source. They absolutely do always comply with US warrants. They have never provided any information to US law enforcement, because they can’t access it. They literally have no way of accessing the information contained inside the texts. The most they could provide is metadata, but they currently aren’t collecting that. I also think if they started, it would not work well for their user base. You can see all their requests for information, and the responses they gave, here: signal.org/bigbrother/

Let’s say the US gov starts agressively prosecuting dissidents and certain minorities (they already do): can and should we still use signal in this case?

Definitely no. Russian government already is aggressively prosecuting dissidents and you can’t join Signal there. I don’t know whether it’s due to sanctions or if the government is blocking 2FA SMS messages. In either case, it is impossible to join without a phone number confirmation. At least I wasn’t able to. I don’t see the USA being that far off with all the recent TikTok drama.

Is Threema still a good option? Anyone know? I know it’s not a fediverse instance just a secure messaging platform. On that note though, can any federated platform really be used as secure messaging? Or is it too open?

There is also simplex chat

Jurisdiction is not that important. Even if it was in Switzerland it’d have to comply with international law enforcement and warrants. The key is that sure Signal is obliged to give out whatever data it has, but the point is that it doesn’t have much useful data to give. It’s the same as Mullvad, and a far smarter approach than “lol we just gonna ignore the warrant huhuhu look at us we host somewhere in Shitzerfuck” (oh btw “We are in X country which is not in N eyes” is just marketing).

Oh and btw the same goes for instances of the fediverse (which are ran by volunteers you need to trust), and if they don’t comply and the US government really wants to break into them they probably will find a way. Doesn’t even need some complicated backdoors or anything it just needs to find an OPSEC slip-up, do some social engineering, arrest someone or at worst find a bug to exploit, and I can guarantee that unless you have some serious security wizards running your instance you’re not beating the FBI there and if the FBI is really persistent and focused on you for some reason then the wizards won’t be enough you need state actors.

If your threat model actually includes the US government (aka you’re actually in danger and not some paranoia or just-in-case situation, be realistic with yourself) and there’s credible threats you may be targeted by it or other governments then you’re probably going to be using tor, briar, all that jazz, and wouldn’t be on lemmy. If you’re just some guy who just needs to message your family and shit Signal is perfectly fine, I can tell you that unless you’re a serious threat to the government they won’t waste resources cracking down ways to capture you via signal or whatever you use that is even somewhat secure (so no telegram, no WhatsApp, no messenger, etc), even if you’re a minority or activist, if not because you’re not important enough then because they have other easier ways to do it.

Edit: oh and btw Signal was banned in Ruzzia (a country way more authoritarian than the US currently is) because the FSB couldn’t crack it so that goes to show it is pretty secure.

Agreed as peertube is great the creators i enjoy to watch dont upload there

Youtube is the only one on this list that I use and I only use it with an ad blocker.

It feels pretty quiet here. At least going by active posts. They’re often the same for a while. New is a bit better. Unless it’s my expectations that are wrong?

no, there’s tons of furries, like the rest of the fediverse. >.>

Take a look at the 2 pinned posts in this community: lemmy.wtf/c/peertube

The UI is fucking awful and way too complex, so it’s difficult to get anything done. I’ve tried two different instances and found them both to be unusable.

It’s a shame because Friendica is way more powerful than most Fediverse platforms – they leverage way more of ActivityHub’s potential, such as a system for calendars + events. But the UI needs to get sorted out before it’s ready for mass adoption.

That’s ironic

Why do you think so?

So far I’m getting much more interaction on Mastodon than Bluesky