And the phone number is shared with the provider and if I lose my phone number it can be a serious pain to recover stuff quickly. Signal, telegram and WhatsApp are abomignities. Matrix doesn't tie accounts to cellular numbers (God we still are in a world where those cellular are a requirement to sign up to most things). The matrix network is as transparent as it can be, Element is a decent client that runs on iOS, Android and a Web browser.
Element is such a good alternative that the app store appears to be stubly demoting it in the search result, and never seem to show it as a related messaging client. Strange world we live in.
Edit: furthermore, Matrix tech both for the server and clients is entirely open source, and one can spin up its own network.
Also, 1) you generally don't need end-to-end encryption with people you're afraid to share your phone number to, and 2) Signal is already working on usernames.
What I don't want is everyone in the school parents group to know my personal phone number thank you very much.
I don't care if the chat is encrypted or not, if some malicious actor intercepts our plans for the bake-sale I think we can live with the consequences.
Also like 95% of my Telegram group chats moved over from IRC, which also had zero encryption. What we wanted was feature parity (moderation and bots).
> What I don't want is everyone in the school parents group to know my personal phone number thank you very much.
The usernames are in the works.
>I don't care if the chat is encrypted or not, if some malicious actor intercepts our plans for the bake-sale I think we can live with the consequences.
Perhaps double check which historical figure said "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide".
Sure, you have nothing to hide, but don't expect others to not have anything to hide either. And realize when you're only reachable over Telegram, that forces other people to reach you over Telegram.
>What we wanted was feature parity (moderation and bots).
That's totally understandable, apps like Signal do support both however. The way I see it, is Telegram's TLS equivalent group encryption is like upgrading your 1988 IRC to 1995 Telegram. That's how old client-server encryption is. E2EE for 1:1 IMs are introduced by OTR in 2004, and roughly 2013, we get E2EE group chats with Signal.
>> What we wanted was feature parity (moderation and bots).
> That's totally understandable, apps like Signal do support both however.
Does Signal have a bot API, where? Like an API specifically to create utility bots for Signal, not a client API that can be used/exploited to create bot-like users?
But what's different is that Telegram doesn't share your phone number to everyone on the same group chat.