Convincing people to use apps such as Signal is hard work and most can’t be convinced. But with those you manage to convince, do you feel happy to talk to them on Signal?

The problem is these people use Signal on Android/IOS which can’t be trusted and IOS has recently been in the news for having a backdoor. And it has also been revealed that american feds are able to read everyone’s push notifications and they do this as mass surveillance.

So not only do you have to convince people to use Signal which is an incredibly difficult challenge. You also have to convince them to go into settings to disable message and sender being included in the push notifications. And then there’s the big question is the Android and IOS operating systems are doing mass surveillance anyway. And many people find it taking a lot of effort to type on the phone so they install Signal on the computer which is a mac or Windows OS.

So I don’t think I feel comfortable sending messages in Signal but it’s better than Whatsapp.

These were some thoughts to get the discussion started and set the context.

  • Autonomous User@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Why don’t you fork Signal? Then, you’ll know the glowies aren’t funding you. You know what libre software is?

    Also, you haven’t shown us which lines of it’s libre software source code are malicious.

      • Autonomous User@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Having trouble funding a fork?

        Will people read these and leave WhatsApp or will they stop caring about privacy?

    • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
      0·
      2 months ago

      Totally pointless since the chokepoint is Signal’s US-domiciled back-end server, and Signal doesn’t allow you to self-host it.

        • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
          0·
          2 months ago

          That says nothing about what they actually run on their server, or who they allow to look at their database. Most importantly, you can’t self-host signal anyway, so posting the source code for something you can’t verify that they even run, is pointless. They went a whole year one time without updating that repo, until the open source community made an uproar about it, and signal was forced to start updating it again.

            • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
              0·
              2 months ago

              You can’t self-host it. People asked for this feature, and were harshly turned down by the signal devs. If you don’t believe me, then try it yourself.

          • Autonomous User@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            That’s even worse. You should know better! I assume you want to same thing, people off proprietary software like WhatsApp to decentralised libre software like SimpleX or XMPP. Signal’s not perfect and no one said it was. Spreading funding or Signal FUD just make people apathetic to privacy.