Technology

62012 readers

5786 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each other!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

-21

Signal is just a company selling privacy (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

81 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Signal is a centralized app, run by a company. If they are offered enough money or legal threat they will sell out or close.

I am sure people will make an argument that its FOSS and people will just fork it if it goes bad, but a new fork will have 0 users and Signal will still have all of your old contacts. Why not make a switch now? Before it is even more popular and you have more reasons to stay? Why fork it if there are already decentralized apps that use same encryption, like XMPP apps?

Sure you can find flaws in every app, including XMPP implementations, but if we will have to write code for a new Signal fork, why not just fix whatever is that bugs you in XMPP clients?

If you want to use Matrix, that is fine as well, we can always bridge the two open protocols. But you cant bridge Signal if their company doesn't allow it.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

See the difference is, you need to convince non-technical people to use xmpp. Most of my non-technical friends already have Signal, no convincing required.

Combined with the fact that Signal has an extremely reduced risk profile in terms of data stored by Signal and the hassle of either setting up my own xmpp server or trying to vet one that is trustworthy for the increased amount of data that is entrusted to server operators with xmpp compared to signal just makes it a non-starter unless I want to use it with other techies who are already game.

Sure I could also convince all my non-techie friends, but that's a lot of work for practically very little privacy benefit.