In my local community, we have a WhatsApp group for mutual help and services / goods exchange, the rule is no money, so it’s mostly populated by leftists more or less open to understand the problematics of internet privacy (for context). There are a bit more than 350 persons.
Today, someone sent a message telling everybody that he’s leaving Meta products for good, thus this group. A few other persons complained about meta, then I suggested that we could all leave WhatsApp and go on Signal and I briefly explained the network effect by saying that if no one uses signal because nobody is on it, then no one will ever use it if nobody takes the first step.
And this argument worked because an admin just created a signal group! More than 50 persons already switched!
Obviously the WhatsApp group will not be abandoned right away, but it has been decided that both groups will be used for now, then we’ll see at the end of the year which group we abandon.
I really see hope in that kind of events, because if I managed to make more than 50 people switch, a portion of them will do the same for their other groups and family / friends.
I plan on hosting little conferences with this group on the libre culture and the attention economics, so hopefully I’ll convince all of them that it’s the right thing to do!
I think that’s great, well done.
One thing which I’m curious about is that now Signal is proposing itself as a zoom replacement with call links and the ability to share a username rather than a phone number. This makes it interesting in a work setting, given that there is a desktop app too.
However, I have a possibly unique gripe with it: how do I manage my personal vs professional profile picture? Currently I have a profile picture which I’m using mostly for friends and family. But that is not ideal for a professional setting. And them maybe I’d like to join some online communities more anonymously. I don’t want to use the same profile picture for all 3 settings. I wish Signal would make it easier to manage the profile picture selectively and more granularly.
Anyone else within them same position?
I really wish Signal would have a “Pro” version. I would pay for that, but as it stands, there are many features missing which are needed in a business setting.
It’s great tech, but focused on the consumer space.
I think you should have 3 profiles for 3 settings, imo a personal phone number should not be used in a professional setting.
Unfortunately Signal doesn’t allow to create account without phone number, but there are other alternatives that should work in a professional setting.
I don’t think they will implement multi account support anytime soon. Right now Signal focus on private chats (i.e. family ones). For big work group chats like those found on whatsapp and telegram I feel like matrix is a better alternative, but yeah it’s not ready yet since it lacks the call features discord has.
I haven’t used Discord in years. What call features are you referring to?
Multiple people group calls with optional webcam and screensharing as well as the asymmetric conferences where there is a main speaker and people can request right to speak. Additionally Discord allows for multiple voice channels so you can have multiple such calls in parallel.
Basically the same features you have in teams, zoom, skype, etc. but I hate all of them. I wish I could find some open source alternative that is decent/known, matrix should implement those imo
I believe Matrix has this in beta, sometimes referred to as MatrixRTC or Element Call.
Edit: Recent status update here:
https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/#3-native-matrix-group-voip-video-matrixrtc
It is generally best to keep an entirely separate account for professional dealings so such things are segregated, at least that’s what I do
Signal as a zoom replacement would be great but a big part of the deal would be the necessity for hipaa compliance. I would imagine a huge part of what keeps zoom alive is financial injections from telehealth provides like myself that need a platform that is hipaa compliant that patients understand. EMR software often comes with a telehealth platform built in nowadays but it tends to not work as well and confuses the tech illiterate who got trained on zoom during COVID years.
I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff they have to do on their end to be hipaa compliant that I’m ignorant of but the primary thing is that they have to share a document called a business associate agreement (baa) with me that essentially says they will take meaningful steps to appropriately safeguard any protected health information and makes zoom liable if a breach of their systems exposes PHI.
This is why telehealth can’t (technically, people still do it) occur over teams, skype, discord, facetime, hangouts, etc. google, apple, microsoft, etc have no interest in taking on that liability.
The difficult piece will be challenging zooms pricing. They offer healthcare zoom for $15/mo with BAA. There are better deals though, doxy.me does it for free (they claim this is subsidized by paid account which I believe because they are substantially more than zoom starting at 35/mo).
Would be a great way to get them a revenue stream too. I don’t know anyone who practices heavily telemedicine that relies on free solutions; the only ones I know that utilize the bundled emr components or the free doxy.me service are clinicians that mostly practice in person and only do a small handful of telehealth sessions a month, like under 10% of their total billing. For people like me where it’s 50-100% of their billing it’s almost always a paid subscription. more reliable, tax deduction, and access to support
Jitsi works really well, and the developers seem to have made an effort to have it work well on any platform, even mobile browsers and PSTN. I’ve always found it the lowest friction teleconferencing method for all types of users.
It’s self-hostable, integrates with SIP, and 8x8’s commercial offering mentions HIPAA, BAA and GDPR.
Based on a very brief glance at this it looks like I would be reliant on self hosting it to circumvent the need for a BAA (although the hosting company may still need to provide one, unless I literally hosted it from my house or something?) not sure
Will investigate further, had not heard of this
8x8 is the commercialized version of Jitsi, and they’ll do a BAA. They’re mainly a voip provider, so jitsi is rolled in with many other items.
Oh I see, I just searched the forums and the info there is sparse
Thanks
https://jaas.8x8.vc/#/pricing
(I have never used their commercial offering).
I used Signal for virtual sessions during the pandemic (the law allowed it then), and I would absolutely pay them monthly if I could switch back. I even thought about emailing them to ask about a BAA- as far as I know, their model means that it’s only paperwork that has to be done to call it hipaa compliant
Yeah! One of my issues with Signal is how clunky it is to have several profiles - something I cannot imagine living without. Not only would you need separate phone numbers, but you’d also need separate clients (or separate profiles with the same app on mobile, or different users on desktop).
Once it gets a little bit more development work, you might have a look at SimpleX because it is stupid easy to do profiles on there, but at current it is not good for group calls. It does do group messages just fine, but the column functionality is not fully there yet.
SimpleX absolutely destroys battery life on older devices. Had to disable it.
I’m in one group of like 1,500 members and I’ve noticed it takes about 7% battery which compared to signal is a lot for certain but it’s not horrible. I use lineage OS with no Google Play Services, and I find that Google Play Services still ate more battery than SimpleX does.
What of the alternatives like Matrix or XMPP? I haven’t explored these well yet, is it easy to have multiple profiles with those?
The clients I tried for Matrix had similar trouble with multiacc, yeah. However, my XMPP clients do have a tab with accounts you can toggle on and off.
And yet again i feel like XMPP is the way to go, but depends on setting up a server and managing it, i for one don’t feel like managing servers in my free time, i do that at work all day 😅
If it’s a personal server, XMPP actually pretty botherless) Matrix did randomly break for me, though.
The “distro” I’ve been eyeing is Snikket since it’s all in one with batteries included, it’s only notorious lack is bridges which is the reason i didn’t jump into it right away when i saw it (LOTS of contacts on WhatsApp, some on other Zuckerberg properties, so will likely need to do it, let’s see if the recent EU legislation leads to force them into interoperativity)
Haven’t tried Snikket, but tried the software it is based on (Prosody). Works very well and is easy to set up, and heard good things about Snikket! If you go through - good luck with it)
I use a “work profile” on my android phone to install another instance of Signal. I registered it with an internet phone number. Not an ideal solution, but does what I need.