And I am waiting for a way to use Signal without it ever touching a smartphone) Right now I have a Graphene phone so I can trust it (so Molly works), but before that my phone (like most phones) did not support any degoogled OS. While the laptop (like most laptops can) was running Linux easily. Yet, you have to either use an Android VM or a frustrating command-line client to register!
IDK if this has been fixed, but this summer I was unable to register - it was stuck in a loop warning about lacking Google services (even though it is supposed to work without them, so maybe a coincidence).
Also didn’t know about Guardian’s repo having it, that’s awesome!
Yeah. For me, Signal’s security benefits are counteracted by various other usability issues. Such as not being feature-complete on desktop and not even allowing registration there without workarounds - given that phones are very privacy-invasive by default and far from all can have a privacy-respecting OS installed (while Linux works on pretty much any random computer). Or even on mobile - pushing the user towards Google download with dark patterns, not being on F-Droid, or (at least in my experience) the official app not working at all on my Graphene device (Molly worked perfectly though). Also, from what I’ve seen, even if you don’t mind losing connectivity with other users and would only converse with people on your server anyway (like how I do with my family on XMPP), selfhosting Signal is really hard compared to XMPP, Simplex or even Matrix, even requiring modifying the client app.
Yeah, it absolutely is. But just being FOSS does not guarantee that its development would be forked in a sufficient way should something bad happen. Especially since they use Haskell, and I heard that it is not very common thus decreasing the survival chances. Sure hope it is cool enough to still warrant a fork, though.
What the hell did I just read.
I use Simplex and overall happy with it, but since it is so new, would rather not go all-in. It is VC-backed so might eventually enshittify to make a profit.
Yeah. If the contact would be installing a whole new client to communicate with you anyway, why not make it an XMPP one? I got my mom to use it like this.
I did hear that the implementation of the encryption isn’t as good as in Signal (and most clients also use an older version of it), but from my understanding - not in any way critically so.
It usually works great for me (and when it doesn’t - I help), but it obviously doesn’t work on downloads so I still have to skip some ads manually.
Why is he dressed so weirdly on the photo? That doesn’t look like a usual uniform…
After reading various news amd stories about phishing, I no longer think anyone is really “too smart to be phished”. Not the matter of “If”, but “Under what circumstances”.
Yeah, true! However, you also have to trust their server not to log what is available to them (including your whole social graph), while with XMPP you can SSH into your server and see that its retention is exactly as you expected. But yeah, the issue remains when interacting with other servers - tho even then there the data is more evenly distributed between different servers with different owners.