My few friends and fam that are important to me are now on Signal, the rest of the family is on Whatsapp which I deleted years ago. Nice and quiet.
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
127 points (97.0% liked)
Solarpunk technology
2368 readers
1 users here now
Technology for a Solar-Punk future.
Airships and hydroponic farms...
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Personally since I read this, I stopped recommending Signal. In this article among other things they say:
To keep Signal a free global communication service without spam, we must depart from our totally-open posture and develop one piece of the server in private: a system for detecting and disrupting spam campaigns.
I also saw a video where Moxie was a speaker defending centralization not only for Signal, in general, and I don't agree with this approach. (I think it was this one 36c3 Moxie Marlinspike: The ecosystem is moving)
I see where this is coming from and I personally prefer Matrix because of that but I must recognize that while I disagree with Moxie on some things he has a more pragmatic approach that has merits and probably has this position for good reasons that do not come from an evil/corporate plan. He wants people to use secure communication and he proposes compromises between security and ease of use (without which no one will switch, making general communication worse).
I still recommend Signal. To my geekier friends I recommend Matrix. But all in all, I consider Signal is still fighting the good fight.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Signal is in the perfect niche of privacy and usability and, sadly, suffers for it. Privacy enthusiasts don't think it is private enough and "normies" (for lack of a better term off the top of my head) don't use it because there aren't enough people using it or it just isn't fun enough. Meanwhile, it's insanely trivially easy to install and register and it works like a normal message app.
Edit: ironic that I accidentally triple post a comment that starts with "I've said it before and I'll say it again"
I agree with you but I think that signal was built as to not trust the server either way.
That's what they like you to think yes. But it is only the message content and not the various forms of metadata that is protected by their encryption scheme.
It's also the metadata. Profile and contact discovery is also private. I don't think they have anything except your IP.
Seal sender is a nice idea, but since you can easily run timing attacks on centralised infrastructure it is pointless for Signal, or rather you have to trust them that their infrastructure is not compromised.
They also store device ids for push notifications via Google/Apple.
I run a signal proxy since the Iran revolution, but I had to tweak their project to make it run on rpi. Then I installed Molly and it doesn't support HTTPS porxy, only socks. So I rewrote it with caddy (which is a lot nicer) but now HTTPS doesn't work anymore. Not sure if I did something wrong.
In the end, I kept the nginx proxy for rhé others.
There is a better alternative in XMPP, which is an open source federated chap app. We even have a community on lemmy on this instance about it at !xmpp@slrpnk.net
better
Let’s not compare oranges to apples :P
Signal has a different threat model
xmpp is in another kind of “trust”
I cut down on signal usage since they removed SMS support. Everyone uses RCS chat by default now
“everyone” where? Worldwide it’s not true
It's deployed in all modern phones - 90% time I send SMS to literally anyone, it gets through RCS
Are you from the Us? It’s usually us people that speak about worldwide while talking about their country lol
Here in Italy WhatsApp reigns; also in most of Europe
Then there are WeChat, kakaotalk, telegram… Every of them has some country in which they rule
The blue bubble iPhone thing fixed by RCS is basically only us America from what I know
Are you from the Us?
No.
while talking about their country
I can only vouch for my own experience. Everyone I know, with one exception is using the default messaging service - which is SMS or RCS.
No.
my bad, sorry 🙊
Not in my fam. All Signal.