I’m looking for something to share images and videos between small family group. We use mix of android and apple. Text messages are terrible for images and videos.
We were using telegram, now I want to see what lemmy has to offer. Thank you in advance.
Signal ?
Thanks, I’ll check this out!
Signal is likely the best and easiest drop in.
Signal, hello?
So it seems.
Signal.
Thanks
Signal!
Thanks
nothing better than Signal
Seems like it.
Not looking for discord type feel. Looking for easy set up and communicating with older people and able to share videos and images.
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/
signal, simplex
Thanks I’ll check it out
I’d recommend Threema. It’s privacy focused, based in Switzerland. You don’t even need a phone number to create an account, they collect no data on you (claimed, but haven’t checked) and the code is open source, under A-GPL 3 license.
There’s a build for Apple and Android, for which you pay once.
I use this to talk with important family members.
Looking for a free solution.
I forgot to mention, it’s easy to use, as it’s similar to every other messenger app, so even not so techy members can use it.
I’ve been using Delta Chat for the last few weeks, its very similar to WhatsApp, but decentralised… Works very well, available on android & ios, definitely worth a look, as it could be good for your use case…
Nah, use Signal. It just works
Don’t you need to use your phone number to sign up?
For signal, yes.
No phone number required for DeltaChat.
It packetises and encrypts chats, using email(SMTP) as the transport medium. Can send downsampled pics, videos or Push-to-talk audio. Can send full quality pics, videos, or attachments too.
It’s on F-Droid, and you can use a seperate free email address(100MB limit) for the SMTP backend (from https://nine.testrun.org/ ), or use your own existing email address.
Elegant and robust.
Signal
Removed by mod
I’ll check it out.
I just got to know about Delta Chat which sounds fantastic as it basically uses your email but wrapped as chat.
XMPP and Matrix are other good options too, although these require creating an account (Delta Chat can work with your normal email account).
The good thing about these last 2 is that they have calls and all that stuff.
What’s missing from the text and photos functionality of text messaging, that you need from this app?
Photo/video sharing will undergo re-encoding under some circumstances, like mixed Andoir/iOS groups
How can you even do mixed Android/iOS groups right now from iOS? I keep seeing people refer to that, but before I installed the iOS 18 Beta that added RCS, I tried and non-iMessage “group chats” were essentially just a broadcast list where the recipients just saw it as coming from me.
I’m in a couple. They’re not behaving as you’ve described, but I’m in an iPhone 11, so there’s that.
I think that only happens when one of the phones doesn’t support MMS (which afaik is pretty much just ancient flip phones unless your carrier doesn’t support it for some reason). Otherwise group chats work “fine” but with terrible image/photo quality
They all should, they’re relatively recent phones and at least one of them I’ve sent MMS images to and the other one is on the same carrier as me.
Maybe group chats is just something carriers in Germany don’t support. Nobody in their right mind here sends MMS anyway, it still costs 36 cents or so to send one, for me at least. Pretty much a straight up scam.
Text messages drop quality of images and videos are terrible. Can’t do anything over 10 seconds.
I’ll be different and say Session.
I run my own XMPP server. https://joinjabber.org/ has some introductory information Snickket is a all in one service you can host or your can pay them to host https://snikket.org/start/
XMPP servers and clients are a lot lighter weight than matrix, though I think matrix has more fancy features.
They’re both self hostable and are federated to share the costs of running the network.
With signal there’s a non-profit that needs some pretty steam funding to stay in business. (Though they’re popular so maybe they can get it) https://www.pcmag.com/news/want-to-run-an-encrypted-chat-app-youll-need-50-million-signal-says
