Comment on John Oliver promoted alternatives to big tech in last night's episode, including Mastodon and Pixelfed

shortrounddev@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

• CarbonBasedNPU@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  My step dad actually got my family on signal YEARS ago and I will never be more thankful.

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• Pika@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I’ve never understood why people just can’t send messages through text. Like why do they need a special app in order to do it.

  I don’t use Facebook myself and my family members just started texting me and honestly it’s so much easier

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  • JustARegularNerd@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    SMS is incredibly antiquated as soon as you want to do anything multimedia, or heck sending an SMS longer than 144 characters.

    My mother received a video over SMS the other day and it legitimately looked like it was filmed on a Nokia 6310.

    I’ve encouraged my family to use Signal to replace SMS and it functions really well as an SMS upgrade. It’s more secure, private, supports sending decent quality multimedia, the interface is simplistic, it has formatting, does video calls well.

    From both a security and usability perspective, it wins out on SMS in my opinion.

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  • Alloi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    i imagine its because text messages are saved by your provider and can be used or accessed by law enforcement even if deleted. but that may or may not be an issue for most people swapping recipes or talking to their family about normal every day stuff.

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    • Pika@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Yeah I believe that, the people I have on my signal are generally ones that are worried that the cops are going to track them or something. I fully agree that privacy is important, unfortunately my family and the general public care is significantly less

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  • shortrounddev@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    SMS is a pain in the ass. iOS users aren’t using SMS, they’re using a proprietary system which is inaccessible to android users. Occasionally a 1-on-1 text works with RCS but it’s janky

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    • Pika@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      IOS has had native RCS since they launched IOS 18 back in like August/September-ish, I haven’t had much issue with support from IOS to Android RCS side, I have however had issues with communicating with my mom, but I believe it’s because she doesn’t understand that when she has RCS enabled, and she turns off data, it wants to try using RCS, then fails, and then falls-back to SMS, which for some reason Samsung Messages struggles with.

      Personally speaking though, my S20 hasen’t had any issues with RCS period, its always been other devices not actually sending proceeding to error and then the person not noticing it so therefore not retrying

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  • lunsjentilanette@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Maybe you want to communicate through an encrypted service?

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