7d ago

Torn on Signal and BlueSky

I am torn on how to handle both Signal and BlueSky. They are definitely outside of the big tech, privacy violating bunch but ultimately still part of the US ecosystem.

Especially the recent event that Elon pressured the Reddit CEO to censor a subreddit keeps me thinking.

BlueSky does in theory have federation support, but it is still in its infancy. It is also still a company, albeit a public benefits one, and thus has a commercial interest. Most people are leaving X for BlueSky so true momentum is building there rather than in Mastodon.
Signal is a foundation but servers are fully US based thus still under US jurisdiction (like the CLOUD Act). Signal is the biggest alternative messenger and even there it is hard to build enough momentum to move entire groupchats from Whatsapp to Signal.

How do you view the situation?

9 comments

Signal is a real non-profit, they have a long history of putting their money where their mouth is and the usability is just so much better than any other alternative to Big Tech messengers with E2EE - I would be fine using Matrix, but my grandma can't and most people my age or younger already get the creeps at the mere suggestion of using a privacy-friendly messenger.
Blue Sky is just another American company IMO.
- So far Signal has stuck by its values, and a number of times it has threatened to pull out of a country if a new law would force them to compromise on encryption /privacy
  For example, most recently
  https://www.computerworld.com/article/3850597/signal-threatens-to-leave-france-if-encryption-backdoor-required.html
  I'm not sure if they would do the same with the US, but I don't think they'll just agree to the demands that easily.
  As for bluesky, I don't have much faith in them

Signal's boss Meredith Whittaker was one of the people who originally proposed Euro Stack, promoting European digital independence from the US.
https://euro-stack.eu/who-are-we/
There's also Jami: Canadian-based, open-source, encrypted, cross-platform, not tied to a phone number, and peer-to-peer, so no need to know / think about / choose "instances".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jami_(software)
BlueSky seems like 'fedivapour' to me: federation is technically possible but not likely to ever happen in reality. And they've taken venture capital; at some point the VCs will demand a return on their investment.
But yes, you've got a tough choice to make: communication is all about network effects (i.e. number of users), but the ideal options have much lower numbers of users. The only way they'll get more users is if people take the plunge.

Thanks all. I think I made a decision now.
Stick to Signal
Drop BlueSky
Adopt Mastodon, Matrix, and Threema to help build the network effects there.
- if you want to avoid signal with also a state of the art client, it would be simpleX. They are UK based i believe, but you can use your own server to pass messages

i dont use any of them. Mastodon is better than bluesky. Signal is state of the art, but its centralized in amazon servers. Since they are centralized, its like having a big target in their backs - all the bad actors will take a shot at it (not mentioning the current US politics and the fact they need donations to keep providing the service).
- Do you have a suggestion for a mastodon server? I was looking for
  European server
  Not hosted on AWS, GCP, Azure, and no usage of Clourflare or Fastly
  Still allows sign-ups
  More than 500 users or older than 1 year
  And I got hardly any results.
  
  unfortunately no. Also there's no page that i know of that we can use to search those requirements :-(

There are great open-source decentralized alternatives:
Signal < Matrix 🇬🇧
Bluesky < Mastodon 🇩🇪

9 comments