How Signal walks the line between anarchism and pragmatism
How Signal walks the line between anarchism and pragmatism
The privacy-focused messaging app arose from a fringe culture that emphasized individual autonomy and skepticism of authority. As it tries to go mainstream, can it escape its roots?
I use Signal with a few of my friends. It has enough features to replace Whatsapp, but most people just don't care about their privacy enough to change what's convenient and already works for them even if they have zero privacy.
37If you are willing to use Signal, you already don't mind a tiny userbase, so why not use Session (or maybe Matrix) and enjoy privacy, security, AND anonymity?
Signal has always been clear that privacy!=anonymity and regards people who want both as both stupid and unusual. Its always been a weird dance to watch.
24Because the ux for signal is superior and I don't care about anonymity when I'm communicating with friends and family.
The right tool for the right job, and signal is the right tool for general communication, but I wouldn't use it for my virtual pals.
Essentially, I see entirely different use cases for decentralized options like matrix, session, xmpp.
38I haven’t done any Signal app recruiting in my circle of contacts (in fact, I don’t think I’ve talked to anyone about it) and I have 14 contacts that have it installed at the very least. I don’t think it would be a huge push to make Signal more prevalent.
The uphill battle is making a dent in iMessage adoption, which seems to be deeper and deeper entrenched every day.
31They dropped the native sms integration. IMO, that was the best tool for adoption. Make it seamless for people to move over from their native SMS messenger and people will use it. Going full closed, only signal to signal, meant I needed to use multiple messaging apps for different people. And I had to remember who is on which. It's been a headache.
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Because you want to use it to talk to your friends, who know who you are anyway? I don't get this need to wipe yourself completely from the face of the Earth.
14IMO the issue with Signal's lack of anonymity isn't that your friends know who you are; it's that Signal itself can build a graph of everybody's contacts.
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The concern with Session is that theyre based in Australia, a country that is in the 5 eyes, and their government passed a bill forces companies to provide a backdoor when ordered to, the company cannot deny to create this, and they can't declose that they got ordered to ether. [A great video talking about said bill] While the Session devs say their services are resilient to these threats, [see their FAQ] it's best to remain cautious.
8And session removed perfect forward secrecy from the signal protocol they forked.
4Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/r2h3iSA-Vac
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
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SimpleX is also a good alternative, though a bit immature still.
7Because the UX is horrible and they (especially matrix) have a ton of privacy/security issues that Signal doesn't have
5I just checked, there are 97 Signal contacts on my phone.
Edit: It's all persons I really know
4I use Session because it doesn't require a phone number.
3Session is pretty slow in my experience, since it — as I understand it — works in a similar way to Tor. Images and videos are especially bad
1Matrix is hella buggy, Session part of the lokinet weird ancap crypto scheme, XMPP is god tier
Briar, now that's a thingy
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Paywalled
10I just read the whole thing and didn't hit one... Weird
13They give free access to a limited number of articles and then put up a paywall.
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I was sad when signal changed to not include basic sms to non signal users. I don't like having separate messengers for things like that. But it makes sense in the grand scheme. If I could get the few people I message the most to convert over I'd be happy.
9But it makes sense in the grand scheme.
How? Signal doesn't have the leverage to get the bulk of users to stop using SMS. So all that move did was to force people to reinstall an SMS. Then, signal became yet another messaging app for like one contact to manage and forget about.
Matrix does what signal does, but it's distributed, unlike Signal. Plus you have protocol portability.
7people on new phone are now auto enrolled to Google's RCS. This poses a few issues:
- if a user switches from RCS to SMS they're now using a less secure messaging mechanism.
- it's confusing (to some not all) to have a very insecure method of messaging in a secure messaging app.
- if a user switches from RCS to SMS and they don't know to unregister, they'll now be sent RCS messages that never arrive making Signal look like the cause of the problem.
- Google hasn't provided an Android API for RCS. the writing is on the wall, text messaging via alternative apps is no longer a long term option and a waste of developer resources when they could instead be improving what they do control, Signal.
- SMS on Signal was already unmaintained and not that great.
- SMS was a feature on a single platform, Android, and didn't even sync to the desktop app, confusing some (not all) users.
All that said, with limited resources and budget, they really should not be spending any dev points on 40 year old tech. does it suck for some? yes, absolutely. Is it the end of the world?
Lastly, while I love Matrix, its not ready for prime time. I was able to get my grandma to install Signal and join group chats with almost no help. I wouldn't fare as well with Matrix/Element.
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Great article. Signal has achieved a lot but still faces huge challenges. This article puts that all in perspective nicely
9Thank you for the reminder that I should donate to Signal for all the good things they have brought to the world.
8I had a conversation with a cryptographer who worked for Wickr he says none of the DoD or other government agents he knew trusted Signal 🤔 - personally I use Signal with my mom or personal friends as like the bottom tier of security, because metadata is a real thing, they don't have to actually know what you're talking about. Just using a phone number itself tells you most everything feds need to know if they're really after you.
if you actually want privacy use XMPP
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