How have others gotten friends/family to make the switch? I’ve been doing a cleanup of my digital life over the last year or so and am trying to move to using more privacy friendly alternatives where possible.
example: I’d love to switch to Signal only but everyone I know only uses WhatsApp. I’ve mentioned switching to people in the past but it’s always the same response (I don’t have anything to hide)
Signal is not much better than WhatsApp or any other walled garden messenger without provider choice. Don’t waste your time and energy to move people to walled gardens. A better idea would be to use providers and apps that support the federated internet standard XMPP: https://joinjabber.org
Despite being around for a while, that project is incomplete and/or insecure depending on which encryption protocol you want to choose (the best one is still labeled with a warning that it is just experimental). And then you have to hunt down a client that supports the features you want, which is another headache…
Which encryption protocol is labeled with a warning? The link I posted makes choosing a client very easy.
The good one, aka OMEMO, which is mentioned on the site but not in the app recommendations
Yes, the XSF has a very high bar what a standard is and what not, so the many protocol extensions are labeled experimental. However that doesn’t mean implementations are “incomplete” or “insecure”. OMEMO has good support nowadays and the implementation in Conversations has been independently audited.
The Conversations Independent audit casually mentions forward secrecy was broken, and that the documentation itself was out of date… And that was at the time the audit was released. The website doesn’t mention if Conversations took these recommendations into account, either.
And that’s just if we assume users only want to use one device at a time, and they won’t touch a desktop.
It’s been 8 years, how regularly should I check back to see if OMEMO is accepted as a
standarddraft?How regularly should I check if Signal has become an interoperable internet standard?
Privacy does not necessarily mean interoperability. XMPP is trapped in the past because it cannot roll out changes, including privacy enhancements that Signal has delivered
Sorry but I’ve been burned by WhatsApp before. Not wasting time on moving my contacts to another walled garden again. XMPP is actively developed and has most privacy features Signal does + most providers don’t require a phone number and let you connect over Tor. Doing things properly and in an interoperable way takes more time but is absolutely worth it: https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/