5 ms·

I spent my entire youth convincing people to move to platforms like signal, and including signal, that would then be used by said people only to talk to me, unt

I spent my entire youth convincing people to move to platforms like signal, and including signal, that would then be used by said people only to talk to me, until they had some UX problem and I became tech support for them after many years of this I gave up and now I use the default: SMS life is too short for this

deleted 2y ago
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lxgr 2y ago
I don't doubt that, and have heard it several times from other people as well. Sometimes I think that keeping SMS and especially MMS ridiculously expensive was the greatest unintentional gift European mobile network operators could have ever given their customers: People now just accept OTT messaging as a fact of life, and enough people will be able to provide that type of tech support, just like they'd fix a parent's or friend's internet connection in case of problems.
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hot_gril 2y ago
Yeah, whoever pushes this is way more annoying than whoever makes the bubbles green. Just one group chat I'm in uses Signal for some reason. People often miss messages cause it silently deprecates old versions. And nobody has verified each others' secret numbers anyway, so after all that work someone did to secure our bar plans, we might be mitm'd anyway. E2EE apps have inherent UX problems. It's possible to do multi-device messaging with synchronized message history and a way to get in if you lose your codes, but it requires trusting the service and/or your cell carrier in some capacity. Something has to give if you want E2EE, usually it's the chat history or multi-device support.
- lxgr 2y ago
  > Something has to give if you want E2EE, usually it's the chat history or multi-device support. True, but then again, neither SMS nor RCS have server-side message history either. WhatsApp lets you backup your chat history to iCloud or Google Drive, optionally end-to-end encrypted using a passphrase.
  - hot_gril 2y ago
    WhatsApp didn't have multi-device support until mid 2023. I'd have to see exactly how it works now, cause it raises more questions. If you can rely on users remembering passphrases (no recovery mechanism), it makes chat history easier, even then I wonder if it knows how to merge divergent chat histories if one device misses messages. iCloud/GDrive storage is another moving part but also nice in case you want to download/copy it. Would be neat also if contacts could be stored that way, cause I ain't sending them to WhatsApp. The only major app I've seen handle everything 100% reliably is FB Messenger, since the start, which was easy because there was no e2ee. Just a server-side master with simple web and mobile clients using it. SMS is bad, but at least I can send/receive it on my Mac without my iPhone being online, idk how.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      > WhatsApp didn't have multi-device support until mid 2023. I think it was 2020, but in any case, it was very late. To be fair, it is quite hard to do securely and without compromising too much on usability with end-to-end encryption. > even then I wonder if it knows how to merge divergent chat histories if one device misses messages. There's one primary device (I think it has to be a phone) that maintains the "source of truth" message database and also does the backups, I believe. > SMS is bad, but at least I can send/receive it on my Mac without my iPhone being online, idk how. Are you sure? Does this work with the iPhone completely off (i.e. not just on mobile data, because it does proxy SMS to iMessage in that case)? I didn't think that was possible. Only very few operators even allow voice calls via FaceTime (without proxying the audio data through the iPhone via local Wi-Fi), but maybe they extended that to SMS over IMS recently. I can't test it with mine in any case, since my provider/plan is not on that short list.
JohnFen 2y ago
The problem with such messaging services is that they aren't universal. You have to find out and install what others are using, and then remember which service is used by which person. That's really the thing that makes OTT services undesirable to me. SMS/MMS, for all of its myriad faults, is something you know that everyone has.

deleted 2y ago

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lxgr 2y ago

I don't doubt that, and have heard it several times from other people as well. Sometimes I think that keeping SMS and especially MMS ridiculously expensive was the greatest unintentional gift European mobile network operators could have ever given their customers: People now just accept OTT messaging as a fact of life, and enough people will be able to provide that type of tech support, just like they'd fix a parent's or friend's internet connection in case of problems.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

hot_gril 2y ago

Yeah, whoever pushes this is way more annoying than whoever makes the bubbles green. Just one group chat I'm in uses Signal for some reason. People often miss messages cause it silently deprecates old versions. And nobody has verified each others' secret numbers anyway, so after all that work someone did to secure our bar plans, we might be mitm'd anyway. E2EE apps have inherent UX problems. It's possible to do multi-device messaging with synchronized message history and a way to get in if you lose your codes, but it requires trusting the service and/or your cell carrier in some capacity. Something has to give if you want E2EE, usually it's the chat history or multi-device support.

lxgr 2y ago
> Something has to give if you want E2EE, usually it's the chat history or multi-device support. True, but then again, neither SMS nor RCS have server-side message history either. WhatsApp lets you backup your chat history to iCloud or Google Drive, optionally end-to-end encrypted using a passphrase.
- hot_gril 2y ago
  WhatsApp didn't have multi-device support until mid 2023. I'd have to see exactly how it works now, cause it raises more questions. If you can rely on users remembering passphrases (no recovery mechanism), it makes chat history easier, even then I wonder if it knows how to merge divergent chat histories if one device misses messages. iCloud/GDrive storage is another moving part but also nice in case you want to download/copy it. Would be neat also if contacts could be stored that way, cause I ain't sending them to WhatsApp. The only major app I've seen handle everything 100% reliably is FB Messenger, since the start, which was easy because there was no e2ee. Just a server-side master with simple web and mobile clients using it. SMS is bad, but at least I can send/receive it on my Mac without my iPhone being online, idk how.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    > WhatsApp didn't have multi-device support until mid 2023. I think it was 2020, but in any case, it was very late. To be fair, it is quite hard to do securely and without compromising too much on usability with end-to-end encryption. > even then I wonder if it knows how to merge divergent chat histories if one device misses messages. There's one primary device (I think it has to be a phone) that maintains the "source of truth" message database and also does the backups, I believe. > SMS is bad, but at least I can send/receive it on my Mac without my iPhone being online, idk how. Are you sure? Does this work with the iPhone completely off (i.e. not just on mobile data, because it does proxy SMS to iMessage in that case)? I didn't think that was possible. Only very few operators even allow voice calls via FaceTime (without proxying the audio data through the iPhone via local Wi-Fi), but maybe they extended that to SMS over IMS recently. I can't test it with mine in any case, since my provider/plan is not on that short list.

JohnFen 2y ago

The problem with such messaging services is that they aren't universal. You have to find out and install what others are using, and then remember which service is used by which person. That's really the thing that makes OTT services undesirable to me. SMS/MMS, for all of its myriad faults, is something you know that everyone has.