Comment on How Signal walks the line between anarchism and pragmatism
s38b35M5@lemmy.world 1 year ago
If you are willing to use Signal, you already don’t mind a tiny userbase, so why not use Session (or maybe Matrix) and enjoy privacy, security, AND anonymity?
Signal has always been clear that privacy!=anonymity and regards people who want both as both stupid and unusual. Its always been a weird dance to watch.
I haven’t done any Signal app recruiting in my circle of contacts (in fact, I don’t think I’ve talked to anyone about it) and I have 14 contacts that have it installed at the very least. I don’t think it would be a huge push to make Signal more prevalent.
The uphill battle is making a dent in iMessage adoption, which seems to be deeper and deeper entrenched every day.
Signal is by far much easier to get family/friends to use than Matrix or Session. Downloaded it to my parents phone and told them this is how you contact me.
this is exactly what I did to my mother
(this sentences sounds so scary out of context)
They dropped the native sms integration. IMO, that was the best tool for adoption. Make it seamless for people to move over from their native SMS messenger and people will use it. Going full closed, only signal to signal, meant I needed to use multiple messaging apps for different people. And I had to remember who is on which. It’s been a headache.
I needed to use multiple messaging apps for different people
Beeper is a lifesaver: www.beeper.com
You can self-host if you prefer: github.com/beeper/self-host
Well this is interesting. I hadn’t heard of Beeper before. Many years ago I used Trillion (I think it was) as a chat aggregator. It fell apart pretty quickly, but Beeper looks promising. I signed up for their wait-list. We’ll see what happens.
Signed up for the waitlist. Thank you!
They dropped the native sms integration. IMO, that was the best tool for adoption.
Depends on the market. In Europe SMS has become a separate, mostly read-only medium. We use it as a sort of notification channel for doctor appointments, due bills, online tickets, payment confirmations etc. Mixing this channel into a general purpose messenger app would actually hurt its adoption IMO.
A friend used it. Once he didnt had data. He only got his sms notifications as soon he got data back. It was an interesting feature, but seems a bit bugged to me.
Because you want to use it to talk to your friends, who know who you are anyway? I don't get this need to wipe yourself completely from the face of the Earth.
IMO the issue with Signal’s lack of anonymity isn’t that your friends know who you are; it’s that Signal itself can build a graph of everybody’s contacts.
The concern with Session is that theyre based in Australia, a country that is in the 5 eyes, and their government passed a bill forces companies to provide a backdoor when ordered to, the company cannot deny to create this, and they can’t declose that they got ordered to ether. [A great video talking about said bill] While the Session devs say their services are resilient to these threats, [see their FAQ] it’s best to remain cautious.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): piped.video/r2h3iSA-Vac
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
SimpleX is also a good alternative, though a bit immature still.
I just checked, there are 97 signal contacts on my phone.
You, friend, are fortunate. I have about 20, but only three that could get Signal working again without me.
I use Session because it doesn’t require a phone number.
Because the UX is horrible and they (especially matrix) have a ton of privacy/security issues that Signal doesn’t have
Session is pretty slow in my experience, since it — as I understand it — works in a similar way to Tor. Images and videos are especially bad
Matrix is hella buggy, Session part of the lokinet weird ancap crypto scheme, XMPP is god tier
Briar, now that’s a thingy
eating3645@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Because the ux for signal is superior and I don’t care about anonymity when I’m communicating with friends and family.
The right tool for the right job, and signal is the right tool for general communication, but I wouldn’t use it for my virtual pals.
Essentially, I see entirely different use cases for decentralized options like matrix, session, xmpp.