Comment on Under Meredith Whittaker, Signal Is Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong

solrize@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Why isn’t it on F-droid if it’s FOSS?

  That got me interested and apparently, they fear forks running out of date.

  Concerning F-Droid, we already providing an auto-updating APK directly from our site, and we really don’t want forked versions of the app maintained by other parties connecting to our servers. Not only could the users using the forked version have a subpar experience, but the people they’re talking to (using official clients) could also have a subpar experience (for example, an official client could try to send a new kind of message that the fork, having fallen out of date, doesn’t support). I know you say you’d advocate for a build expiry, but you know how things go. Of course you have our full support if you’d like to fork Signal, name it something else, and use your own servers.

  While that statement got plenty of thumbs down, I hate to admit that F-Droid is indeed out of date quite often. I currently can’t find a source for this but I once read this has something to do with their signing process.

  source

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yes, they manually sign every package.

    But they could easily have their own F-Droid repository, I have repositories for FUTO apps like Grayjay and their keyboard, Bitwarden, and Newpipe, among others. Those are run by the projects themselves, so they’re in charge of how often they update it, as well as how they sign it. So if they have issues with the “official” F-Droid repositories, they can always host their own. I honestly prefer projects that host their own repos precisely because they should, in theory, update faster.

    source

    • Laborer3652@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yeah this is what Bitwarden ended up doing. They didn’t want to be on F-Droid for very similar reasons; eventually they started hosting their own repo and its been gravey ever since. Highly recommend this option.

      source
  • solrize@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Hmm, ok, thanks. But I’m kind of tired of version churn: who needs to keep changing a chat program? IRC has been around since the 1980s or so and still works fine.

    source

    • noodlejetski@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      who needs to keep changing a chat program? IRC has been around since the 1980s or so and still works fine.

      some people like texting their family who doesn’t use IRC, and they’d rather not send messages in plain text for one reason or another.

      source

      • solrize@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I get that IRC is old school and encryption is important. My question is why the program has to keep changing. If the task is simple enough, there shouldn’t be incompetible changes required if there are new versions at all.

        source

        • -> View More Comments
• dubyakay@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It’s more like WhatsApp or messenger (pick your poison on which one I am referring). Fairly lightweight. No useless features. And I think there’s an F-Droid version, running as Molly.

  source

  • solrize@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Interesting, it looks like molly.im has its own f-droid repo, but there is nothing about Molly in the regular f-droid repo. Thanks though. I guess I should look into this a bit more. I’m way out of date with phone stuff.

    source

    • vii@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Molly allows you to use alternative push servers (instead of Google’s), amongst other things.

      source

      • EngineerGaming@feddit.nl ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        And (what is important to me now) allows using any Socks proxy instead of only Signal’s own censorship-bypassing solutions. This is a weird decision on Signal’s part, because in places like this, you might need to switch between various protocols when the old ones stop working. And for Signal, developing censorship evasion is not the primary task so naturally they would not be as advanced and quickly-evolving as the communities dedicated to it.

        source
      • solrize@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Oh interesting, yeah I saw some reference to Signal relying on some kind of Google service. I figure I would want to self-host anything I was serious about. It also looks like these things do video chat, so they’re much more elaborate (perhaps unnecessarily) than IRC, which is text-only. I’ve never used Whatsapp and am not even sure what it is, except that for a while I confused it with Instagram.

        I’ve installed GNU Jami and that seems like enough for video chat? I just haven’t had occasion to actually use it. I’m not a video guy and frankly am usually happy with email. PGP from the 1980s still works fine, if anyone cares.

        source

        • -> View More Comments