signal requires a phone number and won’t even allow you to send sms to those that aren’t on signal.
its better, but still not great.
A truly ethical replacement would not need a phone number
And would have FOSS implementations of reference server & client + an openly specified protocol.
Like Matrix.
I like Signal. I even got all my close friends and family on it, specifically to message me because I won’t use whatsapp. The PIN reminders are annoying it enough to be legitimately holding it back from mass appeal imho
Turn them off
The fact that it’s opt-out is already a reason to push people away from the app
I think it was meant as a security feature in case someone picked up your unlocked phone. It perhaps someone cracked your front screen passcode. I know if you forget your password and have to reset it you lose all previous conversations. It’s very secure this way. Bit of a pain… but secure.
That’s not even what it is lol.
And as the other commenter alluded to, defaults matter. You’re not replacing the thing everyone is already using by pitching “here’s an alternative that is better in ways which don’t affect your usage at all, and also you have to dig into the settings to turn off the optional daily popups”
Proprietary servers is still proprietary software
Don’t let perfection stand in the way of good enough
It may not be the holy grail, but moving away from Meta-owned Whatsapp is already a pretty significant improvementI agree and it would be much better if people would use Signal instead of WhatsApp, but I think there’s still one problem.
Due to how messaging platforms work, every time you switch you lose pretty much everything (messages, media, etc) This makes switching very hard even for a nerd like me, because if Signal is not “perfect” it means that I will have to switch again at some point and lose everything again.
Be careful with that ol’ Chestnut. Circumstances may dictate perfection, where less than such may be catastrophic.
In that case it wouldn’t be “good enough”. But I don’t think this is such an all-or-nothing situation.
signal not being on fdroid is a strike against them
It is though. I currently use Signal installed through F-Droid. You just need to add a separate repository.
Fair. There is Molly on fdroid if you like.
Molly is great.
After Trump was elected and inaugurated, Signal has finally been gaining some steam here in the Netherlands.
It’s still an American company, so it’s not ideal. But it’s still significantly better better than letting a tech giant like Facebook have control over the most commonly used chat app.
WhatsApp needs to go and Signal is the most likely way in which we can achieve that. We can worry about the American elephant in the room later.
There is threema, a Swiss messenger that gained some popularity earlier since they had end to end encryption before whatsapp.
Unfortunately the source code is not open (even though they do get annual audits with public reports), and the client costs 3 EUR or something (once).
Yeah, but Threema has basically no momentum behind it at all at this point.
I’m putting my social capital behind the option that currently stands the most chance of beating out WhatsappThreema has a pretty big momentum in some countries.
Then by all means keep that momentum going. I’m just looking at this from a Dutch perspective, where Signal is seeing by far the most growth.
You can help making it stronger. That’s what I did in Germany: if people want to contact me, I usually give them my Threema ID first, everything else comes later.
But my goal is not to move to Threema, my goal is to move away from Whatsapp.
Signal fits the bill while expending far less social capital convincing people to use it.
Which?
Switzerland. ;-)
And Switzerlands records in terms of privacy sadly is far worse than most people think - even with the last attack being repelled.
Matrix (preferably on a non-matrix.org instance) currently is the preferable non US and privacy friendly way.
I don’t know - this hype about Matrix reminds me of XMPP which was similarly popular a decade ago. Today, nobody even remembers it anymore.
Which hype? Matrix as a protocol is used for a decade now, especially by various big governments (French, Luxembourg and German governmental messenger, various German states, German and Polish armed forces, German healthcare messenger, various smaller projects in Latin America), is bridgeable (I currently have it bridged to Whatsapp and Signal amongst others) but I really don’t see a hype - on the contrary I only see people predicting me the immediate apocalypse of Matrix for 5 years now, currently due to matrix.org (one of a hundred instances) introducing a premium account model for the most cost intensive (heavily media sharing)users. (See below for that).
Pepperidge farm remembers, and so do I. Lots of people I know use XMPP (Cheogram, Dino, etc).
They also offer Threema Libre on F-Droid for all us folks who degoogled their phone
Sadly many still don’t want to switch. My most active chats are in signal now but the large majority of chats are still on whatsapp
If you leave WhatsApp, your chats will usually follow.
Not all of them.
I have a non-official chat group with some colleagues, and a chat group for the neighbourhood that are not likely moving just because I am refusing to use Whatsapp. It would just result in me missing out on those chat groups.
Currently I just have both installed, and that is also how I try to convince people to install and try out Signal.
It’s ethical because it runs on donations and has a non-profit business model.
Meta likely spends at least $1 billion a year running WhatsApp.
Please donate to Signal if you use it.
How about matrix?
That blog post was my reason to double down on Matrix.
Why?
Overdramatic blog post,sorry. I can’t stand the whole “fremmium” crybabies that then literally recommend the next freemium or “non transparent funding model” service… And don’t understand the fundamental difference between the Protocol and one of its implementations.
Matrix as a protocol is solid and is used far beyond the Matrix messenger. (e.g. the French and German governmental messenger, the German healthcare messenger,various armies,etc.) With a lot of commits coming from there - but not enough funding,that is definitely an issue.
The current issue with Freemium is solely limited to the matrix.org instance. There are hundreds of federated instances out there that aren’t Freemium and won’t have the need to go that way as they are funded differently.(e.g. the Lemmy Instance I am currently writing from, feddit - we are financed through other means) As they are federated it doesn’t matter - and honestly, I personally tend to see this as a good thing - it will lead users away from matrix.org towards other instances, making the whole network more reliable and decentralized.
There are two other issues that are relevant, though: The way the foundation is run is not ideal, definitely - there are and were issues and I am not happy with some management decisions, but at least they are getting somewhat better recently (government board). The whole protocol does not evolve as fast as it should be and this is an issue,especially as a it also affects bug fixing. As an executive for a (much smaller) company myself I see management issues and infighting due to lack of leadership within the foundation and I am not happy with that. The second issue is Element as a company that does things companies do - focus on making money. This in theory would be a good thing if Element would send enough money AND effort upstream to seriously bring the whole project forward. For a long time this seemed to be the case,but licensing issues and the “stale” development off Element X(Matrix 2.0) has me questioning that as well - but recent changes show us hope in that regard. We also need to carefully reconsider if element is keeping too much"closed" source code for monetized features and what influence VC really has. In conclusion: We need better leadership for Matrix,more transparency and more funding.
The good news is: It doesn’t mattter too much - if the current foundation fucks up and goes belly up it is not the end of Matrix - the protocol is decentralized enough and the licencing of the core components permissive enough for another (better?) foundation to start over. There are dozends of clients available and we have alternative servers available by now.
The funding part nevertheless is my major pet peeve here. All around Europe governments try to get rid of US tech - and use Matrix protocol based products. But they hardly if ever fund that. If Germany, France, Poland and Luxembourg (the big users) would give 5€ per year for each client they implement all issues with funding would be gone, Matrix 2.0 would be available in a few months, VC could be pushed out of elements AND they could mandate more transparency.
The issue with funding is relevant for all NGOs and especially in tech. Running servers costs a fuckton of money.
Signal has a respectable amount of backers but is a centralized protocol and when Trump does something shady moneywise their infrastructure,money and possibly even people will be gone within 24 hours.
Threema has a more sustainable business model but Switzerland is,well, difficult, in terms of privacy and intelligence services overreach, especially towards traffic pointing to foreign servers or hosts.
Revolt is a centralized service with no federation,limited selfhosting capabilities,with unclear funding(we are waiting for a financial transparency report for ages now).
Polyproto is still not quite there feature wise and funding, etc. is unclear.
Delta Chat is indeed an option but has massive technical limitations.
That leaves XMPP as the sole big competition if you want non-centralised, non-US based, privacy friendly, messaging.
I don’t use Signal because they don’t release the app in F-Droid. Signal devs refuse to release the app outside of Google Play Store, which is very evil.
I don’t, the GrapheneOS folks say that F-Droid is a potential security catastrophe.
You can find Molly from Accrescent (and apparently also from F-Droid if you must use that), which is not so much a security catastrophe.
You can download the APK once from the website, after that it updates automatically. https://signal.org/android/apk/
You can use Molly from F-Droid. They even have a full FOSS version that you can set up a self hosted notification socket for, to avoid Google Firebase.
I use obtainium to install it and it works flawlessly. The reason they don’t publish it elsewhere is due to licences and push notifications iirc
Wasn’t WhatsApp essentially built from Signal’s base protocol anyway? Why use the meta clone when the original is right there?
No. WhatsApp came first, but later adopted Signal’s key exchange and encryption. WhatsApp was an independent company for years and had rejected several acquisition offers, but $19 billion is a big number.
One of WhatsApp’s founders is now chairman of the Signal Foundation and a major financial backer of the project.
Thanks!
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Signal has been a good option because you can get “normal” people to use it, which hasn’t been true for many of the alternatives (except Telegram, but that’s a mess).
The problem is that it was easier to get people to move to Telegram since it had an abundance of features compared to WhatsApp which was compelling for the average person that doesn’t care about encryption. Signal doesn’t have any of these features that make it enticing for the person.
Signal used to be the best answer to this conundrum, since it would use its own internal protocols if it could or fall back to SMS if it couldn’t, unfortunately they decided to drop SMS support a few years ago, citing users that sent sensitive information not realizing they were using SMS (that always felt kinda flimsy). I really disliked this change, because it raised the difficulty of adoption, from just getting people to replace their default app with Signal to making them manage multiple apps.
Now though, you basically need to advocate socially for the change you want to see in the world. Anecdotally, I started using Signal when they still supported SMS to talk with 1 friend group, and eventually convinced most of my closest family groups to also use it, many after SMS support was dropped. Apart from 1 tech illiterate elderly couple and 1 extended family member, I haven’t received any personal (non-company related) text messages in like 5 months.
The sad truth is that the majority of people are treating WhatsApp exactly as a social network. It is there to send memes and stickers. See what others are up to without having to interact. Then mindlessly scroll through reels. Ocassionally purchase something via chat with a corporate bot.
If you quickly uninstall it because you don’t know anyone using it it sounds like you’re part of the problem. If someone you know installs it to try it out that’s one less person they see as well. Personally I got the vast majority of my friend group to move to it years ago by just saying like “hey Facebook sucks we should move to signal”. If you don’t want to do that should at least leave it installed it’s not like it’s taking up much space
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i dont use whatsapp that much anyways
For now anyways lol
What does this mean
When you’ve been around a while, you begin to notice certain trends.
This particular trend being the one where the young, bright, ethical start-up turns into the sort of monster they originally rallied against, ensh*ttifying their product and spouting all the same reasons for it.
Signal is relatively young, bright and ethical. The cynic says “for now”.
Signal is very actively and directly working to pioneer a new financial model for long term software business stability that does not rely on surveillance capitalism. Your experience with young companies enshittifying into monsters is the natural cycle for the surveillance economy, and if Signal does eventually go that way it will be a profound disappointment, but I expect the foundation would rather die first. Check out this interview from last year with the president of the Signal Foundation for more depth on that.
That’s a risk, and a reason I’d like to see something federated succeed in this space. Unfortunately neither Matrix nor XMPP has managed to achieve quite the level of UX necessary for mainstream adoption, nor have the average person’s tech skills and comfort level improved.
Signal’s status as a well-funded nonprofit gives me hope that the current situation is reasonably stable.
That’s pretty much the only advantage of getting old.
