Esra'a (@alshafei@mastodon.social)
mastodon.social
@evacide@hachyderm.io It gets a bit worse, Telegram has a long-standing relationship with a Saudi organization that's essentially a govt arm in Riyadh, working in direct partnership to analyze and monitor an obscene amount of user data: https://www.saudigazette.com.sa/article/641746/SAUDI-ARABIA/Etidal-Telegram-remove-over-16-million-extremist-contents-in-early-2024 They claim this only targets terrorist groups. I can verify that it absolutely impacts groups run by queer communities in the Gulf, because I was in one such group that was monitored and shut down by Etidal. Telegram can fuck off into the sunset.
    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
      1·
      10 months ago

      It never was secure.

      I think a huge part of this “enshittification” thing is that companies have finally realized that normies for fucking real don’t care what specialists say, like at all, in no situation they care. Between a cryptographer with an ugly photo and a cryptobro with a nice photo they’ll listen to the latter.

      10 years ago it was more of a compromise, now they realized that you can roll out something as “secure” as OSCAR over TLS to the server and say it’s secure and the absolute majority will just believe it if the advertising is good enough, no matter what specialists squeal.

      So now people compare Signal to Telegram as if these were comparable.

      It really sucks. Such a descent into stupidity and centralism together with AI poisoning just can’t avoid making our world more dystopian and genocidal.

  • sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al
    0·
    10 months ago

    You know what, in my head I think I want a whole new messenger.

    There’s an indexer that acts as a phone book, but at the same time, people can bypass that by directly adding contacts.

    All chat history and groups are peer 2 peer and are stored like torrents with the extended backup being self-hostable.

    Recent chat history (up to 30 days) can be stored on the indexer, though they’re encrypted and so the server is blind to what’s in them. They should explicitly be opt-in.

    Whenever a user adds a new client (device), all conversations recipients should have to approve in order for them to see the chat history.

    It should also have all the bells and whistles, like emoji, stickers, groups, channels, etc.

    • rdri@lemmy.world
      01·
      10 months ago

      Whenever a user adds a new client (device), all conversations recipients should have to approve in order for them to see the chat history.

      Why though? In case of a public chat or a chat with at least few dozens of users it’ll already be excessive if it could work at all.

      All chat history and groups are peer 2 peer

      Like really P2P or E2E? Because I know at least one chat app that is serverless but doesn’t involve E2E apparently - tox. E2E is an overkill for big group chats because it means you have to re-encrypt every message for every new user for them to see it. Else if you rely on just a fixed shared key it’s not E2E anymore (which will make some people sad and hate your app).

      • sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al
        0·
        10 months ago

        Why though? In case of a public chat or a chat with at least few dozens of users it’ll already be excessive if it could work at all.

        For public chats, you wouldn’t need to approve, only for private chat groups.

        Like really P2P or E2E?

        Yep real P2P. The design is inspired by BitTorrent.

        • rdri@lemmy.world
          01·
          10 months ago

          For public chats, you wouldn’t need to approve, only for private chat groups.

          I get that but it kind of defeats the purpose. If your group is so small that it’s worth it for every member to approve new ones then it probably doesn’t produce enough content for each new member to care about.