The best endorsement you could get for moving to Signal.
New certified Signal classic
Twitter should have been regulated as a common carrier and one rich asshole shouldn’t have been allowed to buy it, regardless of their politics
Most social media should be public domain or at least have standardised open APIs, it’s the logical way to go for a free society with healthy governments and institutions. As it is right now it’s like private companies owning the streets…
Honestly I feel all news and social messenging services would be better served if they were forced to be public owned.
Supposedly they’re unblocked again, but there’s been no explanation from Xitter about the issue. Definitely seems suspicious that this happened while DOGE is having trouble with whistleblowers using Signal, though.
Been using Signal for years. Love it.
Makes sense than an anti-free speech dipshit like Elon Musk would oppose it.
same. No stupid gimmicks and whatever. Just secured messaging.
It’s not easy to leave WhatsApp. I’ve transitioned to Signal a month ago and lost contact with a lot of people. My friends and family think I’m going crazy for attitudes like these. “You can’t change the world on your own”… like that was the plan 😅
Thanks Musk, that was the motivation I needed to keep away from WhatsApp.
Obviously not a X/Twitter user, I’m not a fkin idiot.
I managed to get my parents and brother to switch to signal two years ago, never switched back and it’s always working, very easy to use. I’m pretty sure whatsapp will enshitify at such a rate that signal will absorb the users.
It’s a slow and constant process of onboarding people to signal. I managed to onboard my local gaming group into using Signal after Trump got elected.
“You can check out any time you like… But you can never leeeave.”
Leaving is never really an option. But running the two apps side by side still works.
If someone is only willing to communicate with you through WhatsApp, they don’t value your friendship.
It varies, I guess. Some people might not be able to leave due to their job for example.
I left, it’s an option for me. And I’m not coming back, I don’t want to admit defeat.
I’m in an island now, it’s annoying how these companies penetrated our lives.
What about using Matrix?
I’m pretty sure that you can bridge Matrix with WhatsApp.
I’m check that out. Thanks!
You can’t change the world if you don’t try at all. What a braindead take…
And they wouldn’t be alone if their family came with them
Literally this
I would really like to know who is using ‘X’ now ? I mean apart from Musk and his bot army
Dude most European heads of state and institutions have Xitter accounts and just kept on using them… It’s a disgrace…
No one outside the USA cares about the politics of who owns what social network
Crazy I know
I am outside of the US, and I do care. Biggest army and economy and so on. Even if not, I would not want to be associated with, idk, Australian wannabe tyrants either.
What? I’m talking about ownership of a private company, not a country
Racists and other easily influenced weak-minded individuals.
A lot of people unfortunately. Specially people outside the US, I think mastodon is ready for people to switch, but nobody does, the most they do is switch to bluesky
Unfortunately fedverse isn’t really ready for the general population, it’s why so many people flocked to bluesky over mastodon. I know I prefer blueskys UI and features over what Mastodon has to offer.
Though Tumblr is planning to enter the fedverse so maybe that’ll help somehow.
Yeah idk, maybe I’m not that much of a micro blogger, i was never a twitter/tumblr user, so mastodon is kind of new to me, so I don’t miss any features. As far as UI, I believe most mastodon instances look pretty good, just not a twitter carbon copy like Bluesky, but that’s a matter of taste.
I believe the biggest problem is “clout” or following, with likes and boosts and stuff like that not being properly federated most of the time, people simply can not “grow”
Unfortunately, a lot of official government services and representatives are still using it. I saw someone reference a Twitter post about that Canadian plane crash, for instance.
A bunch of undecided voter types that pay zero attention to anything that isn’t their hobbies.
I’ve blocked Twitter on my Adguard Home DNS already last year, so no “X” shit in my house/our mobile devices anywhere.
I don’t think it is a good idea to block twitter completely. Some countries use twitter for official announcements, including emergency warning.
It’s always a good idea to block racist platforms lorded over by a troll who will delete comments that oppose him.
My country doesn’t and hopefully others will follow.
I hope so too, twitter is awful.
That’s a weird reason to keep using X. Hopefully these places also does other forms of communications, otherwise it’s a sad state of affairs.
@cyrano The “problem” (actually, the feature) with those censorship algorithms is that they rely a lot on the “exact contents” of the message (“Scunthorpe Problem”), so X is probably programmed to detect the Signal’s domain and block due to the presence of such link (similar to how Facebook was/is blocking links to the largest PixelFed instances, and then they also decided to block links to DistroWatch and official websites from various Linux distros), so it’s not programmed (yet) to censor just the “hexadecimal/base64/whatever” portion of the link alone. And there’s where Tox could shine: a handle is literally a hexadecimal sequence, without Tox’s domains, without URI Schemas, just a bunch of digits and letters from A to F.
I don’t know why Tox isn’t mentioned as a “instant messaging platform for whistleblowers”: it got Onion (Tor) tunneling possibility (as well as tunneling it through I2P outproxies because it actually accepts any kind of SOCKS5 proxy), it’s registration-less (even Matrix needs registration) so it’s effectively anonymous IMO.
SimpleX seems to be that, too, although I didn’t have the opportunity to use it more than I used Tox. But from the little I’ve used it, it’s similar to Signal in the sense that it’s a link (and a large link) and not simply a hash/hex sequence.
Tox is nice. My favourite flavour is qTox.
The typical pattern over here: if someone uses Signal, you guess they’re some military type (wants things to be secure, doesn’t care much about anonymity, wants things to work one way and simply).
If someone uses Tox, you guess they’re some hacker / anarchist type (wants things to be secure, but also anonymizable, wants things to be flexible, even if it can backfire).
Interesting, I did not know about that app https://tox.chat/index.html
Here are some workarounds:
- Don’t use Xitter
- Use your phone number
- Use a URL shortener
He’s not doing anything except getting more bad press for himself.
So what’s the opinion here between Signal and SimpleX?
Signal gets all the attention, and seems more approachable but ties to a phone number which can be a big deal.
SimpleX ties to nothing but I could absolutely see people I know fucking it up and wondering where their “account” went.
So, Signal as an common man’s adoptable compromise and SimpleX to nerd out with full “opsec” and disposability? That about right?
Signal has been under way more scrutiny than SimpleX. In both academic papers and security audits.
SimpleX sounds like herpes.
I’m trying to use simplex, mainly for the instance’s chat. 2 things to say:
- notifications work perfectly even without play store
- every device has a separate account - I can’t reuse the same one. Not the end of the world, but it’s really annoying
From the looks of it, the variety of ways you can purposefully or accidentally destroy your local database, and the strict limits on accessing your profile, really gives me the feeling SimpleX is intended to be extremely disposable and deniable.
After playing with it I just don’t see it being used for anything expected to be convenient or ongoing. Regarding the one device per account thing, I think the whole point is you just protect your one app, nobody is sneaking in your laptop or tablet, no remote leaks possible from a sync engine. On iOS you can link to a desktop app, but your phone must remain not just on, but in the app and on the pair screen. One twitch out, PC disconnects.
Feels like something for journalists, whistleblowers, protesters, and all the bad ones. It’s a burner app for your burner phone.
Only the cool kids know where to get FOSS.
Is signal foss?
It’s source-available
Yeah look: https://github.com/signalapp
Their backend is closed source.
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server
On Wikipedia it says the servers are open source but spam prevention is proprietary.
Thanks for the correction. That’s pretty rad. Now I’m wondering if that’s a wrong memory or if it was released in the last few years.
There was a fuss a while back since the released source appeared to be waaaay out of date compared to what was being used.
They came out and said that they wanted the usernames feature to be developed fully before it got pushed public. Which they then did.
It was never about free speech
Very free speech absolutist of him.
I was waiting for such endorsement, maybe my friends will switch now.
In kinda pissed with them not agreeing to the chat app interoperability protocolo though, i want to delete whatsapp so bad…
Agree this reinforce that signal is good for now.
