Comment on Time to get serious with E2E encrypted messaging

• cmhe@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Well, you can still insert client side decryption into the app.

  But it isn’t really about the messages, it is about the control of the servers and the accounts. You cannot easily move away from their servers, because you will lose your contacts. This gives the people controlling the servers power over you. A sort of vendor lockin.

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  • Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Well, you can still insert client side decryption into the app.

    That’s why all clients are fully open-source. You can also use a fork like Molly.

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    • cmhe@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      AFAIK, Signal does not want anyone to use alternative clients, has that changed?

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      • Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        As far as I know moxie, signals lead dev, considers only the use of the officially build and distributed client authorized to use their servers.

        Moxie has resigned a few years ago. The article you linked to is 9 years old, Signal leadership has changed a bunch of times since. Signal can’t detect that you’re running an alternative client, because that check would require them to include some new code in the official client. Even if they did this, they couldn’t just ban anyone who’s client doesn’t pass the check, since it could just be an older version of the official client. They could force everyone to use the official app, but they really have no reason to invest time and effort into enforcing this. Molly is only available for Android, and it isn’t even on the Play Store or the official F-Droid repo, so the user base naturally won’t be as big.

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  • MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    In the 1990s US ISPs would “give you” an e-mail account with their service: you@isp.com. Of course, this is insta-lockin for that e-mail address, you can never port it.

    Owning your own domain name and running e-mail service through that worked, for a few years, but the big players have made whitelist / blacklist such a frustrating whack-a-mole game in the e-mail space that running your own e-mail server quickly became impractical.

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    • cmhe@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      There are different degrees of vendor lock in. If you use email (or Matrix) with a domain, you have no control over, you are soft-locked it. You can buy a domain, self-host or pay for a managed service and inform everyone that you are now reachable over some other address, but nobody else has to change.

      If you use Signal (or Discord or whatever) and want to switch to a different domain. You cannot. If you switch to a different protocol, everyone in your contacts has to switch as well, or you lose that contact. The network effect forces you into the service of one provider. The only way out of there would be if the service get so bad, that a critical mass leaves, but you will have to deal with that bad service all the way.

      As long as financial interest are there, non-federated services will sooner or later start to enshittyfy. So if you choose a communication medium, choose something that leaves your options open. If you don’t like Matrix, try XMPP, it has come a long way as well.

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      • MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        This was outlined 50 years ago as part of Anarchist analysis of the system then. Not exactly an easy read, but “the second watershed” can be equated to “jumping the shark” or “enshittification” or whatever other term you want to apply to: a good thing gone bad due to the business owners switching from serving customers to enriching / empowering themselves:

        archive.org/details/illich-conviviality/…/1up

        The alternative proposed by Illich to “Radical Monopolies” are “Convivial Tools” which empower individuals instead of central decision makers.

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