David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Much as I like #Signal, threatening to leave a country if they pass laws banning end to end encryption demonstrates a weakness in the system. The Signal Foundation should not have the technical ability to 'leave' a country. At worst, they should be able to stop receiving donations from people in that country.
jwz@david_chisnall And this problem only exists because Signal chose the business model of being a growth-at-all-costs social network running in a closed data silo, no different from Facebook, instead of being a protocol and set of applications capable of meaningful federation. I am constantly [ Nathan Fillion Face ] at people's seemingly-intentional blindness to this. https://jwz.org/b/yjnA
Daniel LakelandIt's true, I'd love for Signal to be a federated protocol thing. But I do suspect that if it were such a thing, essentially no-one I know would be on it. I had my own Jabber server from around 2002-2012 or so, and basically it was just me and my wife... Now I have 40-50 contacts on Signal. So. I don't know what to think about that.
Helge Heß@dlakelan @jwz @david_chisnall Jabber was pretty big for a while, in part because Google chat was part of the deal and federated really well w/ it.
That was the promise yeah. So for like 10 years I had maybe 3 people I could talk to on Jabber and like 70 people who technically I could talk to on Google Talk if they actually knew how to use it but they didn't. And I didn't do txt messages because they were $0.10/ea and there were about 80M middle schoolers on AIM or ICQ or whatever crap chatting up a storm lk fr rls LOL.
Andres@dlakelan @jwz @david_chisnall I'm not sure they're comparable. Signal bootstrapped itself by piggybacking off of SMS (sometimes invasively), which worked given how popular SMS is. Jabber was always its own isolated network. For a brief period of time google played nicely with jabber, but then they stopped and it went back to being isolated.
Jabber could become popular if it piggybacked off an existing network; heck, I started using it again a few years ago due to SMS (jmp.chat).
Thomas Guyot-Sionnest@jwz @david_chisnall I think the issue has more to do with the current app distribution model. Most users will never install an app outside their phone vendor's app store, and in fact for iPhone it's almost impossible to do so. Even if Signal resisted or offered direct app downloads, blocking from the app stores would affect most users.
@dermoth @david_chisnall Everyone saying "but federation is hard" or "but people like app stores" is making the argument to just stay on Facebook forever and Never Try, and it is baffling to hear people making that argument on Mastodon.
AlexanderMars@dermoth @jwz @david_chisnall If Signal got blocked from the iOS store, it would be game over for the plebes. My aged mother couldn't handle switching to GrapheneOS, she'd tell me to go fuck myself.
This is why I think protocols like #veilid are the way forward. No centralised architecture, which in our current dystopia seems like a ridiculous failing of imagination from Signal. #sup may be interesting, but the encryption needs to be much more serious than current Fediverse platforms.
@AlexanderMars @jwz @david_chisnall That doesn't solve geo blocking, if one country forces Apple to remove all apps supporting a messaging protocol it doesn't matter how open it is, it won't be available for the masses.
@dermoth @jwz @david_chisnall Sure. This is exactly why I will never use Apple's hardware again.
I don't trust trust Apple or Google or use any of their services, not even for notifications. I only use FOSS software that I have an acceptable level of control over, GrapheneOS or an atomic Linux distro.
Everything else, I assume is fully comprised and unsafe.
Some of my friends think I'm crazy, but I think it's crazy to comply with the broligarch surveillance industrial complex.
Resist!
@dermoth @jwz @david_chisnall alternatively, Darkwire is a self-hostable encrypted chat web app. Be pretty hard for the authoritarian minded regimes to block this.
Could be hidden in plain sight for opsec.
krejgo@jwz @david_chisnall there are distributed alternatives to Signal, like @briar as one example but the take up those apps is even lower.
Who you gonna call? (signal noise)