A communications tool must have censorship resistance (decentralization), anonymous signup without requiring a phone, and have an official way to obtain binaries signed by the community instead of by corpos that can be forced to insert backdoors.
Signal fails on every single one of these criteria and that is why we must stop recommending it to our friends and family who have a very limited tolerance for technology changes.
Choose decentralization.
Use matrix, or make something better.
@lrvick I would love to use matrix everywhere, but last time I tried, I got the dreaded "unable to decrypt message" and could not read messages from my friend anymore. That's intolerable UX :(. I've been waiting too long for matrix to get good.
Signal is centralized, but has better security and apps you actually want to use.
@vitSkalicky You would rather have a central party have control of the network and binaries to thus have total access to your messages and metadata in plain text, so long as it never has bugs?
I maybe get "unable to decrypt message" about once a month these days, as a power user, and then I just refresh and when their client is online to re-sync keys again later, it works again.
Decentralized protocols take the most time to mature and update but they are worth it, always.
@lrvick Signal is using reproducible builds, so you can verify that the binaries match the source code. And I rather have my messages properly encrypted on a centralized server than using a decentralized network that leaks my messages to hackers because of a bug.
As I said, I'm big fan of decentralized protocols (email, XMPP, Matrix) but they need to work. Matrix does not :(.
@vitSkalicky Signal disabled those reproducible builds for a year so they could work on mobilecoin secretly, and no one noticed. They also mandate you get signed binaries from google play or the app store. They can easily ship you a binary different from the reproducible one.
Also I send end to end encrypted messages to my firends and family directly and via group chats every day. It has been my exclusive personal messaging system in my circles for years.
What does not work exactly for you?
@lrvick Let me check those reproducible builds... I don't get why they would need to disable them for mobile coin...
Element X is getting better now, but it is still a bit clumsy. I was chatting with my friend when suddenly none of us could decrypt each other's messages. If it was a chat between my mom and and granpa, they would have no idea what to do and they would go back to WhatsApp :( unacceptable.
Also Element Desktop is warning about some problem with libsecret every time I start it :(
@vitSkalicky Signal silently stopped pushing code to their public repos for a year and was effectively closed source so they could secretly add mobilecoin support.
Naturally moxie was a paid adviser on the MobileCoin board and it was a pre-mine coin so he made bank by abusing his power over a non-profit chat app to add support for a cryptocoin he was invested in.
Shady shit like that, and their refusal to support community builds or servers are major red flags.
Lance R. Vick
Vít Skalický 