Understanding why those platforms are bad is another layer of thought that most people aren't capable or willing to engage in.
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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Privacy
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It's hard - give them a compelling reason to leave. I use Telegram, Signal, Discord and Session... Discord is rarely used - I use Telegram and Signal the most. Session is quite new.
But what we need is for someone like Mozilla to make a messaging app - someone with the users best interest at the heart, and who don't share anything with anyone else... And at a reasonable price... Privacy isn't free - if anyone should be in doubt.
What are your thoughts on the privacy of telegram? It has always seemed fishy to me (could just be the prevalent usage of it in conspiracy theory communities though)
I'd be thoroughly shocked if the FSB didn't have a backdoor for telegram.
No one can be sure that there isn't a backdoor for any app... Sorry to say, even open source have weaknesses...
Durov is an absolute scumbag though. Russian Elon Musk.
Telegram shouldnt even be in the conversation when there are alternatives like Signal.
I’m not using it to plan a coup, I’m using it mostly because it has first class bot support and decent clients.
I’ll look into signal again when they get bots
Well... I don't trust any companies that works for money - and that's all of them. Now I'm not in some group trying to overthrow the system, so I don't feel so vulnerable - but if I were, I wouldn't be using any app, on any phone.
Telegram is not 100 % safe, and you have to enable encryption too, if you want it. But is Signal safe? Google? Any other app? There's some that feel safer than others - and you have to come to terms with how safe you want to be. If you want to be as safe as possible, you have to do the encryption yourself, on a system that's not connected to the internet, before sending it to someone who can decrypt it themselves on a system not connected. Or you have to use pen and paper, and deliver it yourself - or just meet people and talk to them - without any devices in your pocket.
If you, like me, just want to be able to communicate with you kids, your friends, family and other loved ones, about trivial things - I think you can feel pretty safe with those I mentioned.
That Telegrams owners are Russian (in exile) doesn't matter to me. USA is the biggest spy and snoop on earth. No one is really much worse than the other. I guess it's more important for some, to argue about who is the worst snoop and privacy invasive company/nation/agency and so forth - instead of criticizing everyone who invades their privacy - even their own government.
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Tech illiteracy is the biggest reason.
These days people dont hardly know what IRC or a router is/does, theyre not going to change to any other application unless its DEAD easy.
Also I despise discord UI and always have. I must just be old, but its sucks and is horribly designed. Now it has built in ads so it really pisses me off. At least most of my friends moved on from Snapchat (literal Spyware).
It's Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp for me. I ditched the Facebook app a long time ago, but Messenger and Whatsapp remain on my device because no one wants to leave them. I try to keep my chats there as superficial as possible.
Also, this is my first comment ever on Lemmy, so hi everyone!
Welcome. A reminder for in case you don't know, if it starts to feel stale, then it's probably because of your viewing settings. If you switch it from Active (ironically, the least active), to Hot, 6 hours, Scaled, etc. after you've gone through all of the new to you posts, you'll see a lot more action.
Thanks for the tip!
All your chat history has been published to the fediverse now. Welcome to Lemmy.
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Totally get you. It's why I roll my eyes anytime someone say "Be the change you want to see" as if I wasn't trying to and also getting a burntout from doing so. Easier said than done.
Sadly, people are simply just so comfortable with whatever massaging & social media app they used that trying out other alternatives is immediately dismissed as a inconvenient before they even tried it. And also we are so used to corporation taking so many of our data that some are just numbed about it and see it as a losing battle or they don't know how much valuable their information is which you often get the infamous "I got nothing to hide" BS.
I have got few my friends to use Signal when I was about to delete my Instagram. Still in contact with them which is a small victory for me.
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I less have an issue with people getting trapped in software they understand is insecure, and more with people who will push shit like telegram and pretend its the most private and secure thing ever invented. If they want to use discord, sure, fine with me. As long as they know not to do their activist work on discord I'm fine with it. People doing activist work/planning over telegram will never make me not cringe.
Signal isn't something I personally want to use, but its tolerable, and it was doing a good job of replacing telegram in activist spaces I felt, but I've recently seen a few different groups using telegram again because they don't trust signal.
xmpp with omemo is what I wish I could get people to use but uh, well, that just will never happen.
How do you set up XMPP with OMEMO as anonymously as possible? My friend and I would love to video call each other, currently we're using SimpleX for this, but it's very buggy. We use Molly for calling and SimpleX for texting, both of us are switching to using Libreboot laptops with QubesOS to communicate :)
I love teaching my friend privacy. He's really gotten into it, I've done a good job making him just as paranoid as I am!
I'm gonna be honest, its been so long since I've actually had people to set it up and use it with that even I would need to spend a day and a half figuring out how to set it up again.
Asking people to leave things means they're losing a line of communication to friends, family, and interest groups who still use those things. It's probably more productive to ask people to add the services you prefer rather than leave the ones they're used to.
I've encountered some resistance from Americans who use iPhones and hate the idea of adding a third-party messaging app. None of them seem very interested in justifying that position.
I think for my friends it's just what we have been using for literally a decade since we were kids, combined with apathy towards privacy - although of my friends does use duckduckgo. I don't judge them for that since I've been pretty bad with privacy. I do worry if we get into more activism that we will need to secure our privacy
I'm personally trapped on Discord and Instagram.
Discord is required by my workplace, so no way of getting rid of it until everyone decides to move to something better. I have some friends on it too, but most of them also made Matrix accounts when I explained I won't be very reachable on Discord (I only open it when necessary; and it doesn'r run on my phone since they rewrote the app in JS). I have Instagram as a way to people I meet during travel or events to "add me" easily, and then we can figure out a good way to communicate afterward. I'm not too bothered by having it as I don't use it daily or anything.
You could at least move to Pixelfed.
I doubt your instagram following is enough to make a difference from what you'd get on Pixelfed.
It seems I didn't communicate my reason for having Instagram well enough. I don't have access to the "feed" or following people (it won't load unless I accept some terms, which I won't). I have an account with the messaging function bridged to my Matrix account, which lets me receive messages and (when it works) reply to them to organize moving to a better platform.
It's the best solution I found if I want to keep contact with people I meet when going out or traveling. Phone numbers barely work (I still can't call or message any German numbers, never found out why), and everyone I meet has Instagram. I just give them my username, they can add me easily, and then later over Instagram direct messages we figure out how to get them signed up for Matrix or Signal.
Many people probably follow artists on them that will never move to pixelfed so they stay here.
Good point. The "follower" mentality is still a foreign concept to me.
I don't think I'll ever be able to wrap my head around what goes through the average instagram user's mind. I forget that a lot of them are eager to follow instead of lead.
Discord is fairly unique, there isn't really a replacement for it that works well.
Networking effect
People use whatever is most popular even if its the shittest thing such as Facebook.
Only time people will care is when it personally and tangibly affects them.
For Facebook/whatsapp watomatic can be used to remind people you are leaving or such.
I remember when Snapchat was extremely popular for messaging. One of the worst apps I've ever used. Just an absolutely atrocious UI.
- move your closed source messengers to another phone
- keep it always turned off additionally with all the graphene features, always at home, somewhere inconvenient
- open it once a week, and you will see who needs to contact you will ask you for a better way to communicate
Discord is a hard one because it has some uniqueness to it.
It has bots, text channels, voice channels, and hundreds of thousands of people can join it if you need to.
A lot of my college clubs use it and there are a few thousand students in our biggest ones
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I have the same issue, but got 2 Discord users to try Jitsi Meet with me (a friend of mine on my Snikket server invited her friend). After a while, her friend asked me why it looked so much alike Discord and my friend agreed. I gave them a big smile and said, "because this is awesome".
Jitsi Meet + Snikket has been my saves since I deleted my Discord account during the pandemic.
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I don't have very many friends, although of the ones I do have the majority of them use Signal, or are terrified of recent politics and I'm trying to move them over currently. I'm not concerned about platform lock-in for communicating over proprietary platforms since if something happens we can just move, I am concerned about the security implications.
I convinced my friends to get Discord so we could communicate as a community without Facebook. Now I have figured out it is just as bad. I tried Matrix and couldn't figure out how to log in before I heard it's enshittification is underway.
Endhittification is often the result of an established centralized platform that got that way via giving unfairly good deals because they had a lot of investment becoming suddenly greedy and controlling to make that money back. Matrix, meanwhile, is just a protocol. It quite literally cannot be enshittified unless the protocol is updated to do something a certain way that benefits the developers over the users, because a user can simply switch providers. Even though the org that develops it is also a provider and I hear they're going freemium, that is a service that costs money to render. I'm not surprised they need more money to offer hosting and maintain the software behind it. Unless the protocol is being modified in a way that hinders or scams us or steals our data, saying matrix is enshittifying is like saying email or HTTP is enshittifying.
So then it is still worthwhile to try to host a matrix server? Cool. I guess I need to get the login part figured out so I can try it first. I think DBZer0 has one I can try. Thanks for explaining. I am in a hurry to try it now so my friends have yet somewhere else to go.
Not really. I have none of those apps or alternatives. and I don't know anyone I want to chat with on Discord, WhatsApp, Insta, or other. Not that I'm antisocial, I just have no interest. Lemmy is about as close as I want to get to anyone. Before, it was Reddit, but they have tanked as a place to search for knowledge.
Yeah, this is so fucking annoying. I've been banging on about Signal for years, but everyone except a small handful of my wisest friends insist upon using WhatsApp and Discord.
Almost everyone I know also uses Instagram, and no other social media. I am yet to meet someone in real life who even has Mastodon.
I have told people about Lemmy for a year now.
Why is it so hard to get friends to leave
I mean the reason is usually summed up with a single word when I make the suggestion: "Why?". People don't know and/or don't care. You try and explain it and they mock you and act like you're a paranoid conspiracy theorist.
what apps do you feel most trapped in?
Geeze, you name it. Right now I need a new job, and if you're not looking on Indeed, you're severely limiting your options. You can't see anything on Indeed without creating an account and turning over ALL of your personal details, much less actually submit an application. Not to mention the site itself is just horrendous to use. If we had some sort of technological standard protocol for submitting resumes ( so you could send them the same way you send contact info via .vcf), or even OCR that actually worked, it could be a lot easier, but we don't, so the alternative is going and typing in all of your information for every individual application, which simply doesn't work when you're submitting a couple dozen every day, on top of their meaningless personality quizzes and chatting endlessly with AI bots, and aptitude tests and video response interviews and and and...
I make a good % of my money for my business using FB and IG. Not through ads but just through networking. Although I'm about to close my doors (due to unrelated market circumstances), at which point I'll delete them. But then I will mostly lose access to all of the events that are shared exclusively on these platforms. I ask them to share them elsewhere but it's more of the same, mocking and asking why.
When it comes to open source, Discord and Reddit seem to be the platforms of choice. Usually this means I simply ignore otherwise-promising projects.
Fortunately almost no one has ever asked me to use WhatsApp. Usually only international travelers. I usually just decline and/or ask them to use Signal.
Network effect and the path of least resistance.
People usually resist change until there's a net and obvious gain, or when thing don't work as expected anymore.
And you need to consider that what's important in a messaging platform for someone, might be vastly different for another.
The inconvenience of switching and learning a new thing is the largest deterrent. People complain but don't care enough due to those reasons to switch.
I only text people on Signal, except the old grandparents or potential new friends that I will in time get to switch to Signal.
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These are just opinions, but here are the two I know about (I don't use WhatsApp)
Discord: It's not just you. You would have to get their other connections, all their servers, and all the connections from those servers to switch. Frankly speaking, Revolt isn't ready for that to happen. You are one person. I'm sorry, but if I have 1 friend vs. all of my servers and friends, I'm not going to make a meaningful change for the one person. And tbh I'm more likely to be the one than the many. What I would suggest is to try and put yourself between the two services, help to build the communities you want to see, then invite people over.
Instagram: Same issue as Discord. The fediverse doesn't have the variety of content, the wide range of users, or half the stuff to engage with.
I can't control my contacts. I can control what I do. I was personally getting annoyed enough with Discord that I uninstalled the thing and stopped visiting it on the web. My account still exists AFAIK. I didn't make a big production of it nor tell anyone; I simply left.
It was a bit of a sacrifice because I don't connect with an extremely rewarding community on there as much anymore. Thankfully they still host IRL meetups and I do go to those.
I'm opinionated about messaging apps but I don't try to convince anyone. Well, other than siblings and SOs. People who want to talk to me can find me on the apps I do hang out in. If they ask why I'm not on the big ones I will gladly tell them. But where they end up is their decision, not mine.