Mastodawn

Hoping someone out there can help me understand what's happening with Signal and its desktop implementations. Trying it out on phone with my partner as we de-bigtech and the reviews on flathub are brutal. But also from a while back. 1. Is plaintext passwords on desktop still the issue, 2. Are there workarounds? 3. How bad is the issue at all? For our personal stuff fine to stay on phone, but there's a big picture plan to move some professional work off WhatsApp to signal. #linux #fedora #signal

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lorenzo 22h ago

Look at #xmpp :)

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Phalanx

15h ago

@lorenzo @davidmaddock How exactly is that comment helpful? Especially since XMPP is a protocol, not an application.

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DM54 14h ago

@phalanx @lorenzo it made me go and read what xmpp is. And I maybe kinda learned something. That's about it. hence the oof. Translate "oof" in this case to: Signal appears to sit in the middle ground, along with things like Proton, where they're better/more secure/private/user controlled than WhatsApp/meta/google/MS etc, but that there is a whole world out there of obscure options and that I could choose to go down a rabbit hole on and be completely self hosted/data sovereign etc etc, but also communicating with 3 people via the equivalent of morse code. 🤷‍♂️ Brave new world for me. (Further comment from someone else re a couple of steps to take on linux to improve things is more actionable.)

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Phalanx

@davidmaddock @lorenzo That may be true, but I find it quite annoying if someone asks a very specific question about a product and then someone recommends a totally different product instead of answering that question. In this case without even addressing the issue in question.

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lorenzo 13h ago

but there's a big picture plan to move some professional work off WhatsApp
I was pointing xmpp as WA alternative. And yes, you can have mobile and desktop client too.

Just this. Sorry, didn't intend to start a war :)

Have a good day

CC: @[email protected]

it's all chill.

@phalanx @lorenzo fair. I guess in the grand scheme of responses you can get on social media, brief obscure suggestions get a shrug. Could be a lot worse.

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Debacle 3h ago

@phalanx @davidmaddock @lorenzo

There is a tiny trigger in the original post, that is hard to ignore, though: The words "de-bigtech" and Signal together 😉

Signal is (according to themselves) inextricable from AWS and Google. It depends on #bigTech. That shouldn't be an excuse to derail questions, but it needs self-discipline 🙂

That being said, #Jabber/#XMPP might be a solution for the Signal desktop use case, with a (self-hosted?) #slidge gateway. Probably not easy.

https://slidge.im/

slidge.im — Gateways from XMPP to Other Networks

Slidge is a chat gateway library for XMPP built in Python, and a set of gateways for other networks.

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DM54 24m ago

@debacle @phalanx @lorenzo I mean good to know, but for now I just have to file it away. In my experience there just has to be a pragmatic don't let perfect be the enemy of good approach. I'm still trying to get good friends to stop sending me facebook and insta links for crying out loud. Heck, my day job is 100% MS/Windows for a NFP and even the CRM chosen, which is a "little local NFP" type as well, heavily relies on AWS.