I don’t know if I’m opening a can of worms here, and I’m still trying to backtrack a lot of history where I was tuning everything out. I keep seeing random swipes at Signal (or the representatives (?)), and I was wondering whether they are founded or just lies.Is it another situation like Lemmy where we just “take the technology and move on”? Thanks!
Sure. If you want full control, you need to run your own server.
Matrix crosses my mind.
But using that is a different animal than installing an app from a store.
As far as security when communicating conveniently on mobile phone goes, Signal does a pretty good job. But you’re right that it’s important to realize what’s possible and what’s not possible.
I use signal for communicating with normies who just wanna download an app. Just cos signal is better than most doesn’t mean we shouldn’t demand better. Why can’t we have both? With self hosted federated signal servers and no phone number requirement we can have our cake and eat it.
If we have a federated messager that some people self host, would that actually be more secure? i dont know much about how federation works, but i imagine that an intelligence agency could make an instance that would federate to the others, listen to the metadata of the exchanges in the network and rebuild a social graph like a centralized server could. Is this a non-issue?
Its actually less of an issue with federation. The way most federation works is that messages are only exchanged with servers that have a relevant party, ie if I’m on instance a and ur on instance b then our messages are only exchanged between instance a and b instance c would have no idea about any of it.
Its even better than that because with sealed sender the recipient server will know that u have received a message and from what instance but not which user on the instance.