Which funnily enough, has bridges to Signal, Whatsapp, Discord, Telegram and some more, meaning you wouldn’t have to have as many other clients installed to chat with contacts on those platforms
I remember looking into that a while ago, but it’s not like I can just instantly hook up my WhatsApp or Telegram account into that, right? I’d need a server to act as a bridge.
And I wouldn’t be so keen on giving that kind of access to a random server.
Yes your Matrix homeserver does have to run the bridges. So I agree with you - you have to somewhat trust the admins of your Homeserver, or host your own homeserver and bridges. But I understand that the latter is not for everyone.
Although official tg bridges are meh: they have trouble with sending/receiving pics and loose messages from time to time. Plus those work for chats only (AFAIK)
There is plenty to criticize about Apple when it comes to anti-consumer and anti-competitive business practices…
But if you’re gonna talk on the level of “evil” and “freedom”, Apple’s greatest sin is their supply chain.
And then there’s Google, whose evil I would place somewhere between [Apple’s] pseudo-monopoly and [Apple’s] pseudo-slavery. At least Apple is a tech company. Google is a surveillance company that just happens to make tech so they can monitor you more closely.
Working with the shared-space AR APIs in iOS and Android really drove home the difference in their priorities. The iOS SDK only allowed us to share AR data through a local, SDK-managed connection. The data is opaque, can’t be directly serialized, and doesn’t work anyway if you try to persist/distribute it yourself. Android, on the other hand… They wanted us to upload your AR data to Google-owned servers, where they could do Google-knows-what with the scans of your living room.
It’s sad that we’re at a point where you have to either pay for your privacy, or pay with your privacy. But we can at least not be naive about it. Android is more interoperable, more prolific, and more lenient with third-party code. And that’s because it’s a good strategy if you’re a surveillance giant. Not because it’s good for consumers.
Edit:
Got a couple of comments that are like “Um, actually, Apple is still subject to government surveillance and exploits”.
Let me be clear: You should not expect any off-the-shelf product to shield you from intelligence agencies and state-sponsored hackers. You will have to radically change your life to accomplish that, and “Apple or Google?” won’t even be a relevant question for you.
And I’m not saying Apple doesn’t do shady monitoring for their own commercial purposes.
All I’m saying is that Google’s core business model is shady monitoring, and that directly influences their decisions regarding Android. So painting it as the commoner’s hero against the greedy walled-garden warden is a dangerous proposition.
There are no good guys here.
There’s some hardware, SDKs, and back-end services that you can evaluate on their own merits if you’re capable.
But if you want to just look at business practices:
There’s one company that doesn’t want to integrate with anything outside of their own products – because that’s good for their bottom line.
And there’s one company that wants to integrate with anything and everything – because that’s good for their bottom line.
Back on reddit, there was a subreddit called non-golfers. It was created to poke fun at atheists, being a metaphor for a community around something they don’t like. It grew, with newcomers not understanding the joke and taking it seriously and unironically being a community about hating golf. (I was one of those people, I’m self aware now). It kinda strikes me as human nature, tribalism, rearing its ugly head once again. I’ll leave you with this relevant video, highly worth the watch.
It’s amazing how many subreddits fell victim to the satire to unironic hate club lifecycle. And that video was great. Especially the part at the end about how groups make their own totem/straw men to keep the anger up.
Yeah. For the most part those communities seemed to have not jumped to lemmy which I’m grateful for. I think hate is like the fast food of emotions, it’s addictive and we love it but it’s bad for you and eating nothing but that will fuck you up. That video really fundamentally changed how I view things on the internet and if there’s one thing I really wish I could expose more people to, that’s it.
Libpurple had constant breakage due to proprietary apps having no incentive to keep their protocols stable. A lot of it worked easier then since no one was using e2ee either. Newer gateways exist in the space but it’s a real shame since for a brief time the earlier 2010s, most chat applications were using the same protocol—until they realized it’s harder to capture profits when the garden walls are lowered.
Hahaha, SimpleX on Android is fine, the Desktop client is kinda incompatible with anything (no flatpak, the ubuntu version is kinda broken, no repo, their sync requires a random firewall port to be open)
Security is a compromise between convenience and safety.
However, simply using flatpaks isn’t inherently more secure than using a binary or compiling from source. But it can make it easier to be secure for people that don’t want to manage their own sandboxes.
It’s also easier for devs so they only have to make one version of their app which in theory should work on all systems. But in practice I find it doesn’t always work that way
The AUR is not verified or audited at all, isnt it? So you need to check every release if that script was modified to download something malicious. For sure this works somehow, but idk how.
And sandboxing… flatpak has GUI tooling unlike anything else. Bubblejail is usable.
From a maximum security perspective, you should be checking all the code you install on your computer. No matter if it is foss, audited by some group, or proprietary (if possible). What would stop a bad actor from auditing malicious code and approving it?
As for sandboxing, there’s multiple options, not the least of which is containerization.
Again, security is a compromise. More security normally comes at some cost just as less security does.
But back to the topic of the post. You are complaining that SimpleX doesn’t work when installed though a flatpak (because one doesn’t exist). So perhaps it’s not a good software to rely on flatpaks for. Unless you choose to only install software via flatpaks, to which I’d say that’s admirable but also perhaps needlessly limiting. Either way it’s your choice, but I would suggest some open mindedness of options that may let you use the software you want.
Yeah I tried the ubuntu version through Distrobox, which is way more secure. But they have no repo, and it broke apt lol.
Appimages are completely insecure, there are literally no updates. Its a random bundle of libraries, as old as possible to work on every old kernel, and they are just broken by design (see an old post of mine).
There is flatpak packaging work done and I want to learn that and help, as Flatpak is just the best.
Matrix with bridges can help consolidate them. Some managed versions exist like Beeper and Element. Been slowly moving to that. Will eventually self host.
One of the aspects that is glossed over in this doc however is the networking parts. There are many ways to setup your DNS, certificates, and ingress depending on how/where you are hosting the container.
dude discord has been one of the worst experiences for voip in gaming IME. I started using mumble SOLELY because discord was actually just disappointing. Though tbf maybe if i paid out the ass for nitro it’s better? I ain’t paying for that though.
Though yeah, for messaging, it’s dogshit, It’s a mess.
this is honestly the only good thing about discord, the krisp noise reduction is actually kind of good. It only took them like 3 years to implement it on the linux client. And we’ve only had system wide noise filtering since the dawn of time.
Although since we’re on the topic, discord manages input/output in the single most inconceivably stupid manner possible.
I really wanted to keep faith in it after the ui overhaul recently - VoIP performance was SO much better on Xbox, latency specifically. But good GOD the mobile app is just a pile of garbage nowdays. I have so many friends stuck on that platform, I still end up sharing links there to Lemmy memes and like 60% of the time when I share to the app it permenantly sticks on the splash screen??? 🙄 notifications are fucked these days too, myself & my friend group regularly miss messages entirely, even with direct @ mentions?!
Worse, I dropped a crap review and complained that function has dropped horribly since the update and the devs INSTANTLY replied like “Have you tried pretending you’re a beta tester for us? Do you mind doing a buncha troubleshooting you definitely haven’t already done?” (They wanted me to reinstall the app… Smh)
Anyway - fuck discord. I’m planning to shift to Revolt, but if anyone has better suggestions I’d be happy to try some!
im genuinely surprised discord even tries testing things on the two test branches they have. Yes, you heard me correctly, they have TWO separate testing branches. Bugs literally should not exist on the stable branch.
also when it comes to voip, i’ve enjoyed mumble, it’s pretty solid, minimal, configurable (highly integrated into games already, it’s old af though so maybe not new games) and works pretty well. Revolt seems alright, but it’s plagued with bugs, and weird issues, plus it’s self hosting is just, jank.
We could use a self hosted discord replacement tbh.
I have a friend that will only chat with me on Instagram. I have his number, but he will never respond to text. He only engages in insta, it’s mildly infuriating.
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