Telegram is giving away FREE Premium subscriptions! All they need from you is to use your cell phone as a relay to text out their OTP codes! And the recipient of the OTP sees your phone number! What could POSSIBLY go wrong with this deal?
PLEASE don’t use Telegram! I personally recommend Matrix as it’s totally FOSS, you can self host, there are tons of front end clients to choose from. Or even use Signal. I have my own issues with Signal, the fact they don’t allow third party clients, you can’t self-host, they have a proprietary shim in their stack that only they know what it does, they were pushing crypto, etc, but at least Signal is better than this garbage.
Wow, that’s super sketchy.
I’m trying to get my wife to use something decent, and I think Signal is the way to go. It’s focused on P2P communication so it’s a better replacement for SMS and whatnot, but it also has groups so it can also replace MMS. She likes Discord, but I don’t think she’ll be as keen to try out Matrix since she’ll just wonder why I don’t just use Discord.
Try Simplex Chat
Looks cool, thanks! I’m interested in P2P platforms in general, and this seems like an interesting middleground between P2P and centralized.
It is centralized but it does take security seriously
Yeah, it looks like a centralized service that behaves like a distributed one. I may even (re)learn Haskell to properly understand it.
It also looks like it’s intended to be used for applications, so that’s pretty cool too.
My wife and a few family members use telegram, it’s perfectly fine for using as just a regular chat app, you can join spam or sketchy groups but if you don’t join premium or enable contact access, and generally be smart about using it, etc you will be fine.
My wife knows that if she doesn’t use Session, she needs to call me and hope I pick up. Granted, she only uses it with me, but that’s already a win in my book.
IDK, forcing someone to use a certain app to contact you seems a bit extreme, and something that could cause conflict in a relationship. But that’s just me, I obviously don’t know your situation.
Could be the case. But we agree that she doesn’t have to use it if she doesn’t want to, and I don’t have to use any of the mainstream stuff if I don’t want to. We trust each other to no end, to the point that our biometrics are in each other’s devices, and we leave them laying around regularly. I can see how that could be a sure way to bring issues into a relationship, but thank God, that’s not our case. As for other people, I couldn’t care less. My kids have no access to devices yet (except their Linux PCs built by themselves), so all is great in my life.
My girlfriend said she prefers it knowing I couldn’t get other girls to talk with me over XMPP 😂
Smart girl, haha!
Cool. I mostly wanted to warn others in case they tried to do this without the proper consent.
My kids also only use Linux PCs (mine, they’ll likely get their own when they get older), have no personal devices, etc, though we’re getting close to the point where they’ll want them. I also refuse to use any of the mainstream stuff, and I try to persuade my wife to use it too.
I appreciate the thought. Each of us should do what we can while making sure it’s not detrimental to our lives in any way, shape or form. We’ve been married almost 14 years now, and I’ve been asked by some guys sometimes if she was my girlfriend by the way my wife and I treat each other. This comes from being fully open with each other, and both of us willing to go over every disagreement with research and evidence only. This has led to her moving her password manager to my self-hosted Vaultwarden, her getting Yubikeys and me having Signal on my phone’s secondary profile to send/receive messages and info to/from her side of the family. You have the right idea, probably more spot on than my ideas, for sure. From what you say, I think you’ve struck a better balance than I have. As for my kids (10 and 8 years old right now), my boy wanted a PC when he was 5 nearing his 6th birthday (2 years ago), he told me that he wanted his gift to be a PC. So we went out over the course of 2 months or so to buy each of the parts. The day before his BD, which was a Saturday, he had to put it all together (under my supervision and directions, of course). It took him 12 hours 😁. He chose ZorinOS (against my better judgment) as his OS, and I walked him through the whole process of installing, from downloading the ISO to final first boot (that was on his birthday, almost 4 more hours 🤣). Totally worth it. My daughter was 7 going in 8, and when she saw that she asked me for the same for her BD. Same process, only with her it took just short of 10 hours for the whole thing, and she chose PopOS. But in my boy’s defense, at those ages boys do tend to be lazier than girls, and take more breaks, plus he was 2 years younger. My mother-in-law wanted to murder me, saying it was abusive. But my kids now know the basics of building a PC. The gift is not the computer, but the knowledge. I think every nerd with children should do the same (keep the geek going for generations, lol).