this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025

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Privacy

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218

Signal – an ethical replacement for WhatsApp (greenstarsproject.org)

submitted 1 day ago by Sunshine to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 34 minutes ago

https://community.signalusers.org/t/groups-on-signal-are-not-conducive-for-community-building/46933

Telegram and Whatsapp have topics/communities to organize conversations within a group. As long as Signal doesn't have that, they can't compete.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

this was pretty hilarious from a few days ago:

"Mansplaining Audacity": President of Signal Watches in Bemusement as Random Man Explains Her Company's AI Strategy to Her

https://futurism.com/president-signal-mansplain-ai

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Signal Devs. Please add bookmarks option. It would make my life a lot easier. 🙏

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Bookmarks? Do you mean bookmarking a spot in a conversation?

Though the search function is surprisingly fast. My wife has gotten into the habbit of adding keywords if she suspects she might want to get to something later.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

Yeah exactly. But sometimes you forget to search or forget the right words. The bookmark can be used as a sort of “I’m gonna forget about this, but I wanna look at it again so I’ll bookmark it”.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Use simpleX

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

Irrelevant if nobody else uses it. It's partly because techies can never agree on a single alternative that we're still stuck with WhatsZuck.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 hours ago

with that attitude yeah, lol. all my people use it. Also never agreeing on anything is not a techie specific quality, that's just humans in general lol

[–] [email protected] -3 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

First, signal doesn't come anywhere close in feature parity.

Second, the CEO (disingenuously) stated they dropped SMS support because of engineering costs - , I don't trust them.

There are free SMS apps, because your app hasn't handled SMS ever, you just use the SMS API. Android itself handles it all - as of about 2012, all apps were required to use a single SMS database.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 minutes ago

I thought they removed SMS so as to not give the impression that SMS is at all private or secure

[–] [email protected] 11 points 21 hours ago

SMS? Outside the USA it's used for almost nothing but 2FA codes at this point.

[+] [email protected] -46 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Or just don't use either.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 day ago

Better yet, throw your computer into the sea

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 day ago (5 children)

what's the beef with signal?

[–] Sunshine 28 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It’s centralized but I consider it the baseline for privacy.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago (4 children)

You are definitely right but it's probably almost right at the sweet spot. Decentralization/federation is great for privacy, but think about what most non-technical people can handle. With federation alone, practically all non-tech people would even fail (or be confused by) the first step, namely to find an instance.

So are there more privacy friendly options than Signal? Definitely. But are those user friendly enough most people could use it? I can't think of one, but would live to hear some alternatives that are simple enough my mom could use it.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Not everything has to be federated anyway, it's not inherently better for privacy by default, because you are putting your trust in more people. Signal can be audited easier than 1000 people hosting their own servers.

Signal isn't perfect, but it's the best option we have that everyone can understand to use.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

We get no privacy when the only server rug pulls.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

Then we move on. There's always a fork or alternative waiting.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You think you have privacy with buttfuckers6969 running your server? Reddit and Lemmy never cease to amaze me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Never heard of end-to-end encryption?

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Jesus Christ 🤦‍♂️ you really do.

I'm not sure what I expected.

[–] perslue 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

On the user friendly note... The unfortunate part is that I'd love to use Signal, but there is no one on it. And I don't mean that millions of people use it is today, but there isn't a single person in my circle that uses it. Even if i started today and convinced one person, to use it, it wouldn't be something that I would default to because the non privacy focused apps are just easier.

So my arguement is there are no simple alternatives because every alternative still hasn't solved the population/popularity issue. I need one of these apps to be able to import ongoing groups and conversations that people can just immediately pick up in signal when I abandon whatsapp or whatever.... That's before I start using it, let alone my mom.

I do hope they get there though

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

I did the same what @warm said and I don't even have WhatsApp. If someone needs something from me they have to write on Signal (or SMS 🤣).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

That issue is down to you. To us.

Convincing people is hard and some might never move away from what they have.

I managed to convince my family and friends, they still use WhatsApp to talk to some people, but otherwise they use Signal.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I mean, people understand mails alright, which is fairly similar to the fediverde. They get very enthousiastic about AI and don't know anything about how it works.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

But to be fair Mail is pretty centralized too nowadays for most people @gmail and @outlook. Of course there are others but my point is that there a a hand full of providers up to a point that it's almost unfeasible to maintain and run you own mailserver because there is a high chance that those large providers will flag your mail as spam because it's rare to see a "wild" mailserver.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

It's because they think AI will make them rich somehow and Signal is just a "boring" chat app.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Nothing like a mall, and your examples don't affect usability.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Your Mom could use https://simplex.chat/ I bet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

I'm pretty sure she couldn't. She would wonder why she couldn't contact anyone from her contact list. Sending individual links to probably hundreds of people without knowing if they use Simplex is completely unfeasible. Signal and WhatsApp you just open the app, immediately see who else uses it and can start texting. No multiple profiles, no meeting to scan QR codes or sending links, which is especially ironic because she would probably send that via Signal or WhatsApp 🤣

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Not OP, but I don’t like that it has a crypto wallet in it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Signal? What? Where? Are you sure you don't mean Brave?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago

Signal has a “MobileCoin” wallet in it.

Brave is also awful.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 23 hours ago

Second, the CEO (disingenuously) stated they dropped SMS support because of engineering costs - , I don't trust them.

There are free SMS apps, because your app hasn't handled SMS ever, you just use the SMS API. Android itself handles it all - as of about 2012, all apps were required to use a single SMS database

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

U.S. based. Not a great premise.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

So, like, talk to other people verbally? No thank you.