Discord has been rolling out terrible features lately instead of improving the already existing ones. Messages still aren’t E2EE and third-party clients are against TOS.
Discord has some shady shit in its privacy policy, and one of their largest investors is Tencent. Discord is one of my top targets for replacement, but none of my friends are all that interested in trying Matrix
I recently came across pixelfed.org for an Instagram replacement. I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but it looks promising. Seems like a federated platform like Lemmy/Mastodon that’s geared towards photo sharing.
You’d need to create another account, pixelfed is currently working on a “login with mastodon” feature that will probably be released pretty soon, but even with that you’re still technically creating another account, you’ll just be able to log into it using a mastodon account and copy your bio, profile pic, follows, and things like that if you want.
Mastodon (specifically mstdn.ca). Lemmy.ca, pixelated (though I rarely use it like I should) and I’m hoping to soon get a tilvids account to document my progress modelling for X-plane and creating the assets for my own computer board game.
I’m waiting for the Discord <-> Matrix bridges to get better. Mautrix for instance lets you control your Discord presence straight from Matrix: github.com/mautrix/discord/blob/main/ROADMAP.md
Being careful of CP is a danger you take in most sites, especially the ones that don’t have a lot of users. I’ve stumbled on jailbait instances here… it’s fucking everywhere.
I’ve been on curated internet too long. Randomly stumbling into CP wasn’t something I expected to see outside of the dark web since the main Internet got so tame during the late 2000’s through the 2010’s.
The main internet didn’t get tame, they just got better at hiding it. But that’s the point. There’s more cp on the clear web than dark web because the clear web is much much larger than the dark web, and the dark web is more heavily tracked with a large FBI presence.
Reddit had and still has issues with CP, weird threads with numbers and hash codes? Very likely some kind of downloading ring. There’s still “sink” threads on places like 4chan where a user posts an innocuous image, but upon closer inspection a single image file is way larger than it should be, meaning they injected the file with more files, by exploiting the metadata to turn an image file into essentially a zip folder. Isis used to use that method to recruit new members on twitter, out in the open they’d post a picture of some isis soldiers and if you extracted the files within the image you got recruitment docs and instructions on how to leave your country and fight with isis.
It’s owned by Facebook and isn’t open source. There’s no verifiable way to say for sure that Facebook doesn’t have a master key to read everything you send on it. Compare to say, Signal, which is open source and can be verified to be secure.
None of the messaging metadata is encrypted. They use that metadata to build profiles of people who aren’t Facebook or Instagram users that interact with Facebook and Instagram users. If you care about profiling for the sake of avoiding social engineering attacks, it’s one of your worst choices. If all you care about is protecting the contents of your messages, yeah, it’s pretty okay
No disagreement there. I could have clarified, my comment was in regard to message content only. I didn’t realize that about metadata and certainly am not defending Meta. I’d prefer Signal over anything else but as others have mentioned, getting friends and family to adopt is painful.
Lol no it’s not. Meta can and WILL decrypt it. They have decrypted messages for police requests numerous times, and not necessarily under court order, just police asking. I support decryption under court order, but these weren’t court ordered. Thinking anything owned by Meta is secure is ridiculous.
Then this is false advertising and a class-action lawsuit that should have already happened.
This Arstechnica article seems to confirm that they can’t decrypt without user intervention and that they have only ever supplied metadata to law enforcement. I’m no fan of Meta but do you have sources that they have in fact decrypted actual message content at the request of law enforcement?
the only thjng good is the messages and calls are alledgely encrypted, literally every other detail they know. live location? entire contact list? how frequently you text someone? etc etc
It's still part of the Meta platform so not completely independent.
What information does WhatsApp share with the Meta Companies?
WhatsApp currently shares certain categories of information with Meta Companies. The information we share with the other Meta Companies includes your account registration information (such as your phone number), transaction data (for example, if you use Facebook Pay or Shops in WhatsApp), service-related information, information on how you interact with businesses when using our Services, mobile device information, your IP address, and may include other information identified in the Privacy Policy section entitled ‘Information We Collect’ or obtained upon notice to you or based on your consent.
Around 2005 Europeans used SMS quite often while the US didn’t seem to use it at all. Then a few years later it was all done by WhatsApp since it was more or less for free. And now we’re having blue/green bubble discussions.
Have we gone full circle and are using actual SMS again?
ive had this discussion with a few different people actually, and at least from where im standing, it does seem like sms is making a comeback. i have to admit i prefer it when it comes to messaging people i know irl
Even if someone got into my messages, I wouldn’t be hurt by it. Not like I’m trying to overthrow a government or do crime or anything. They might see my butthole. Good for them, I say. More people should be looking at my butthole.
Do you guys also get super paranoid about being recorded when out in public? “We can’t talk here! They have eyes and ears everywhere!” Just what are you talking about where you need everything to be encrypted? 🤨
I agree with that last part; but why would someone be trying to get my text messages in the first place? There’s nothing there. I’m not holding any secrets of value to anyone for any reason. So there’s no reason for me to have crazy levels of security.
It doesn’t matter if you think a thing holds no value or not. You might be doing something that is currently legal and socially accepted, that on a whim could turn into the worst crime ever. Why would you give Facebook or whoever information that you did it? Why do they need to know? E2EE is obviously something that is doing its job in keeping people free from surveillance or otherwise governments wouldn’t try to ban it.
TL;DR: You are better off keeping as much as possible to yourself in general.
TL;DR: You’re better off leaving behind a thinner data trail than not.
This is a valid argument, but then again the same could be said of much of any other data collection done by big tech companies.
The value isn’t so much as in individual pieces of data or even in an individual person’s data but rather the aggregation of many individuals’ data in order to make maybe a pointed marketing campaign, sell such data to shady advertisers and scammers, or stuff it into some AI model.
I would think in specific situations, the data of an individual person may matter. Like when the government asks a tech company for data whether with good or bad intentions. But that one seems to happen less often as far as I’m aware.
Overall, you can think of it as risk management. It’s hard to know all the situations in which the data you leave behind would be relevant. But one thing we can know is that for some reason, these huge corporations are spending billions of dollars a year in order to collect it, and lots of it. If it wasn’t a viable strategy, they probably would’ve stopped a while ago.
ideally id be using signal but hardly anyone is willing to use it because most people don't care. between sms & something owned by meta, for example, im not entirely sure which is less bad
How would you describe counter.social? I read through their home page and like a lot of what they’re saying but im not sure if its like Discord or Twitter or something more akin to Lemmy? I’d rather follow communities over individuals and it kind of looks like you follow people but I can’t be sure.
To be honest, I don't really know much about the people behind either of these sites. That being said, Jester is pretty active on CoSo. I originally gave CoSo a try because Twitter was beginning to go downhill and I was looking for an alternative. I tried a few, CoSo had a lot of neat features and impressed me enough that I was even willing to pay the 4.99/month for the "Pro Account".
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As for this site (kbin.social), I was looking for a Reddit alternative. This site reminds me of what Reddit used to be and, for that reason, looked better than Reddit does these days. I known nothing of Lemmy and had never even heard of it (him?) before finding this site.
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In both cases, you just don't see the bot-farm-generated trolling that loads up the mainstream sites. The stuff that's just out there to get us arguing with each other. Also nice to not see endless ads. Maybe not completely free of trolls, etc., but, since it's not as prevalent, it's easier to filter out.
Same. I've stopped with Reddit since I've never posted there with my real name. No one knew me personally, and I didnt know anyone personally, so my switch to kbin was easy.
My real-life family and friends use Discord, Instagram, Messenger, Twitter, Viber, and WhatsApp, so I'll continue to at least have accounts on those.
I’ve been using Mastodon even if I was never a Twitter user. (Or at least, not a serious user. I had an account some time ago, as I was dating a girl who posted there often and she insisted that I should use it.)
I’ve been trying to convince people to migrate from Whatsapp to Signal. Easier said than done due to network effect.
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