So why didn’t [Signal make it easy to connect to alternate servers]?
Encouraging the use of alternate servers on which only a handful of people can communicate instead of everyone who uses Signal is probably a net loss. Having to connect to multiple servers or switch servers to communicate with everyone a user wants to talk to sounds like a pretty bad experience. That would be different if it was federated. Co-founder Moxie Marlinspike has argued that federation would make it harder to achieve Signal’s goals of bringing private communication to as many people as possible. I want him to be wrong about that, but my experiences with Matrix suggest he might not be.
they are in the eyeball monetization business or are gearing up to enter it
I don’t think so, in large part because they’re structured as a nonprofit and have enough funding to last a while. I would think that about a venture-backed startup under similar circumstances.
I don’t use Signal so I don’t understand what is supposed to be great about it
It’s just another messaging app in terms of UX. The value comes from:
- Many of my friends and family use it
- It’s familiar enough and reliable enough that if I ask someone who doesn’t already use it to move a conversation to Signal, I’m confident they won’t be mad at me for complicating their life
- It’s secure by default and difficult for users to accidentally make private information not-private (e.g. by saving media to device storage where other apps can access it without user confirmation)
- Its security and privacy have been inspected by a wider range of experts than most other options
- The organizational structure and funding model means it’s unlikely to be enshittified in the next decade
Nextcloud Talk doesn’t have end to end encryption. It’s experimental on Jitsi. It’s hard to justify not having that for a private messaging service in 2025.
solrize@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
Is there even a desktop client for Signal? The mobile app isn’t on F-droid so I can’t easily install it (I don’t use the Play store). Maybe i can get the APK from somewhere.
The other points are reasonably valid though the lack of end to end encryption is somewhat mitigated by self hosting.
I don’t understand why browser notifications are slower than other types of app notifications, but I’m not an Android wizard so maye there’s a reason. Does Signal require Google Play Services to get Firebase messages? I have that turned off too, so that’s another annoyance / privacy invasion that I’d have to enable.
I don’t particularly want Signal to be federated any more than I want all the world’s websites to be federated. I want a zillion separate non-federated servers, not like the tragic 1-way internet that we mostly have now. So your contacts file has something like email addresses in it, that tell the client what server to connect to for a given person.
Regardless of Signal’s financial intentions there’s no question that money and eyeballs hypnotize people and warps their minds. This happened to Wikipedia decades ago. They operate just like an internet startup where they obsess over user activity. They abandoned their vision of giving everyone in the world a free encyclopedia (i.e. every computer in the world has Wikipedia on its hard drive for completely private access) and instead focus on running a giant web site that constantly tracks people, gets censored, etc. They are swimming in money and are always asking for more anyway. I see Signal trying to reach a similar future.
Zak@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Yes. There’s also an experimental third-party client for desktop Linux called Flare. I’ve used Flare on some devices that the official client doesn’t support and found it adequate. With some more maturity, I’ll probably prefer it to the official client. Signal officially discourages third-party clients because it cannot guarantee their security but does not attempt to block them except in cases where specific clients are known to be compromised.
Account creation on the mobile app is recommended before using these as it relies on SMS verification. I don’t like that, but it probably cuts down on spam; I’ve received exactly one spam on Signal in over 10 years of use.
Signal encourages installing from Google Play and uses Firebase messages by default, but does work without them. Given your set of preferences, however, you would probably prefer the third-party client Molly, which is on F-Droid and supports UnifiedPush.
That sounds like it ends up with properties similar to federation, but the client has to do all the work. The client would also need some means of identifying itself to all those random servers where there’s a cost to creating new identities, or people would need to do key exchange when they exchange contact information. Without that, this proposed system would be overrun by spam as soon as it got popular.
Server-side federation solves a lot of problems. Why wouldn’t you want that?
You can do that. The download with images is over 100gb compressed, and it expands to several terabytes. It’s not hard to imagine why most people don’t want to use it that way.