EngineerGaming
I'd bet most non-nerdy people would rather not upgrade their PCs at all. Upgrading is financially hard, while using an EOL OS in their eyes, especially if it is better than the new version, isn't bad. Maybe even good, because no sudden, annoying, unskippable updates would come anymore.
In this case, I think it matters that you can selfhost a server under your control. And to potentially have redundant servers. Maybe even disabling federation to be sure the big ones don't get the metadata.
Also while the court ordrs have shown that Signal doesn't collect much metadata now, it does not mean it is not capable of it - which is what matters in a life-threatening situation. Like, all the traffic goes through a single point - there is still trust involved.
Yeah, I agree it has some issues. Personally was fine verifying keys tho - either in-person or wherever I met them (usually IRC).
And yeah, the insistence on mobile in Signal bugs me a lot - a desktop is A LOT easier to make private (Linux runs on damn everything) while most phones won't allow making them not spy due to locked bootloader.
Yeah, but it is still just one account per number, so it would make managing alts annoying. Not only is the main client (as well as the major unofficial ones, haven't found one that doesn't do that) not support multiacc directly, forcing use of profiles or VMs, but you're also at risk of whoever rents the associated phone number after you deleting the account (that or you could pay a recurring fee just to retain the number, which is just wasteful).
I am really concerned about the dominance of the central instance on Matrix. It has visibility into pretty much every groupchat - if not in content because of encryption, then in all the metadata. I'd rather use another public homeserver.
I know I am just a normie who doesn't really know internal workings of them... But in my experience, XMPP is just easier to host, the servers are lighter, they don't store everything they touch forever like Matrix does, and OMEMO doesn't break like Matrix's encryption. Synapse would be probably impossible to run on my VPS, while Conduit and Dendrite are not as full-featured.
Molly also has some quality-of-life improvements - such as allowing to enter a device pairing link manually instead of scanning a QR code (thus allowing use in a VM for registration without a smartphone), or being able to use a generic Socks proxy instead of Signal's own solution. Not only does that allow running Signal over Tor without using Orbot as a "VPN", but is also more versatile (I wouldn't want to set up a separate proxy just for Signal, and also their implementation is apparently inferior to some advanced obfuscation solutions).
P.S. Also idk if this has been fixed, but Signal's app bugged out during registration and got stuck on "no google services" warning on my Graphene device, yet Molly went through flawlessly.
Yeah, true! However, you also have to trust their server not to log what is available to them (including your whole social graph), while with XMPP you can SSH into your server and see that its retention is exactly as you expected. But yeah, the issue remains when interacting with other servers - tho even then there the data is more evenly distributed between different servers with different owners.
And I am waiting for a way to use Signal without it ever touching a smartphone) Right now I have a Graphene phone so I can trust it (so Molly works), but before that my phone (like most phones) did not support any degoogled OS. While the laptop (like most laptops can) was running Linux easily. Yet, you have to either use an Android VM or a frustrating command-line client to register!
Here RCS is not even supported on most carriers, and aapparently on some phone models as well (some Chinaphones I think).
Kagi IS interested in AI tho, for example: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/kagi-ai.html; https://blog.kagi.com/announcing-assistant; https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search...