To be honest at this point Signal is the worst solution

Presumably you meant not the worst solution

An embedded video not hosted you-know-where. Congrats.

For a successful community, this one (which I also lurk in) is oddly topic-specific. They must be doing something right. Copy them!

This is not a “YSK”, it’s just yet another post about (US…) politics.

Seriously, this problem ruined !showerthoughts@lemmy.world and it’s ruining this community too.

PS: very pertinent ongoing discussion

Indeed, and this is the heart of issue. The network problem means that it ultimately makes no sense to have multiple IM systems, just we don’t have multiple telephone systems. I believe we need to get our act together, pick the winner of this battle and commit to it. As far as I can see the winner has been clear for years now: Matrix. And yet we’re not committing to its, we’re still talking interminably about the relative merits of all the also-rans.

It’s reminiscent of (among other examples) USB. If the EU hadn’t stepped in and mandated USB, we’d still be arguing about the relative merits of different cable standards. This is the problem of having no central authority.

Personally, like a few million others (here in Europe), I convinced a small handful of Whatsapp-addicted normies to also use Signal. I’m not doing that again until the FOSS replacement for Signal is usable, reliable, and definitive. DeltaChat does not meet those criteria so I’ll be sticking with Signal. Unfortunately.

It’s not a grudge. I said I think DeltaChat is a good intermediate solution. I just can’t believe in 2026 we still don’t have a protocol-based open standard designed specifically for the communication paradigm of IM as we’ve had for the paradigm of e-letters for many decades. Or rather, AFAICT we do have it but we’re not committing to it.

Anyway, your technical arguments are persuasive enough to convince me that DeltaChat is better than Signal as an intermediate solution. If not sufficiently better to warrant switching.

To be clear for anyone who’s not clear about this, DeltaChat is a shoehorning of E2E encrypted IM into a protocol (IMAP) designed for something very different (email). The privacy argument is that the infrastructure (IMAP servers) is decentralized and already exists. Fair enough, but it’s still a hack and so it can only be at best an intermediate solution. Like Signal. There’s no reason IM can’t stand on its own at last, with its own protocol and competing software that uses it. Personally I don’t plan to tackle the massive task of moving my contacts until that definitive solution is ready.

My position remains that we should just pick the option which is closest to achieving IM open-standard status and is generally agreed to have a modern codebase (so not XMPP), that option is Matrix, and then get on with fixing all these problems that Matrix supposedly has. Instead of this interminable shopping around, as if somehow a perfect alternative is miraculously going be invented one day in a finished state.

Example of issues I faced recently

A couple of comments. Signal is not going to cave to chat control, that just will not happen. DeltaChat is an interesting project but it’s a hack. I used it for a while years ago and it kept getting me locked out of my GMX mail account for spam violation. That was an edge case but hardly surprising given the hacky nature of its concept. At best it’s an intermediate solution.

It’s high time we all agreed that Matrix is the official winner of this absurd struggle. That way developers and funders can know where to focus their efforts. The corporate giants are going nowhere and network effects are a massive barrier. There just aren’t enough users for lots of good FOSS encrypted messengers. We need to stop wasting time and pick a single protocol to become the official new open standard for IM, like POP and SMTP are for email. Matrix has been the obvious solution for a decade.

This does not mean that other messengers can’t exist too.

Yeah, true and true.

Just installed it (it’s even in the Debian-Ubuntu repo) and it’s an obvious improvement! Thanks for the tip.

Good news. These e-motos masquerading as bicycles are tarring cycling as a hobby and a mode of transport.

What I find interesting is that the first thing that comes to mind in “survival” is always hunting. Our closest animal relatives hardly hunt at all, and somehow still survive.

Excellent question. You may find the answers disappointing. Personally I use xournal for pasting signatures (sigh) into PDFs. UX is rubbish but it works. I do a bunch of other stuff to PDFs with command-line tools, which is extremely efficient and fast once it’s set up. Doubtful this will fit your requirements, alas.

As I understand it, most French-looking names in English originate either from the Norman invasion (typically aristocrats) or the Huguenot immigration of the 17th century. It’s possible that a random German immigrant would Frenchify their name to sound posher but doesn’t seem like the most obvious explanation.

A spicier take still: I personally have found DDG’s AI summaries useful even without further clicking. When one’s query is purely technical (vs politics or whatever), I don’t see any need to click dutifully.

Translated it into… French. Hmm.

Compare with Eliminate Sparrows campaign, where there was no “cobra effect”, but:

The campaign led to surging insect populations and poor harvests, and was one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine

This is what RSS was invented for. Sigh.

PS: https://rssbox.us-west-2.elasticbeanstalk.com/

Another example of Wikipedia’s “2010 bias”.