The Signal messenger and protocol. @lemmy.ml mulcahey @lemmy.world 1y ago

Why not Signal?

github.com /dessalines/essays/blob/master/why_not_signal.md

To be clear: I am avidly pro-Signal. I think this piece makes interesting arguments. Would love to hear what the community thinks

5 comments

Are you looking for arguments against Signal?

I think the biggest one everyone will find and is very difficult to overcome is "My friends aren't there".

Other arguments like "it's centralized", "It's in the US", "It doesn't have feature X", "The client app doesn't have fancy stickers" are workable, have explanations or are a matter of time.

Thos saying "It needs to support SMS", are americans that weren't really using signal, but a glorified text app.
- Thos saying “It needs to support SMS”, are americans that weren’t really using signal, but a glorified text app.
  
  People in the US aren't the only people wanting support for SMS. I'm in New Zealand where using data STILL isn't always reliable. SMS is often still necessary for messaging. And there's plenty other countries besides that are the same. Mobile data connection just isn't always feasible.
  
  Yes, there are absolutely issues with SMS such as being able to track your location but at least with E2EE, the big bads won't be able to see the contents of those SMS messages.
  
  No to mention, for probably the majority of people, all they need is a text app. What's wrong with wanting nothing more than text messaging but with privacy baked in?
  
  I'm confused, did you think Signal's SMS were E2EE? They were just regular SMS, identical in any way to how they were sent outside of signal. There was zero privacy advantage in sending an SMS from a signal client compared to another client.
It's irrelevant to this community which is pro signal.

Signal provides a user experience comparable to iMessage in terms of features and ease of use, but with the big plus of cross platform compatibility.
That may not be what you personally are after, but it's what 99.99% of potential Signal users are after.

Signal tieing into the social graph we already have on our phones as user identifiers is a big win for 99.99% of users.
Signal being run through a centralised location is a big win for the 99.99% of users who don't want to host their own servers, or find someone to do it for them.
Signal attempting to earn income through things like money transfer is a good thing for the 99.99% of users who don't want to have themselves monetized in a different way (such as through showing users ads).

If a nation state wants to spy on you, you better be important enough to a different nation state that they protect you.
Because choosing to send GPG encrypted messages over XMPP isn't going to help you.