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by mmooss7 hours ago |
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upvoteby wolvoleo4 hours ago|
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True they can make their choices but it also means I won't support them in any way. Or recommend them.

I'd use something that's truly decentralised but signal is just another walled garden like WhatsApp. Just one that promises to behave better. But what's a promise worth these days?

A decentralised network would mean a guarantee that they can't do anything bad. I'll take that over promises and good intentions any day.

I don't care about the masses. If signing up for a matrix account is too annoying for them they don't really care about privacy anyway. After all it's the same they have to do for any online shop. Just create a username and password. Somehow it's not a problem for the masses if they wanna order a phone charger but for matrix it's suddenly 'too complicated'?

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upvoteby tchalla1 hours ago|
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People like you who equate signal and WhatsApp are also responsible for not making any progress due to ideological stubbornness it’s something that I absolutely despise from a part of HN crowd here.
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upvoteby wolvoleo4 minutes ago|
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Great, I'm happy to be a nail in the coffin of the signal advocacy.

Remember how everyone jumped on Google when they promised to do no evil? Now they're one of the most abundant mass surveillance companies in the world and we can't move away because they're too big to fail.

Signal is one sale away from being evil too. They might not do it but we've been conned so many times that I will only take technical guarantees, not promises that can be broken.

And really, lots of progress is made in real open communications. Matrix is getting more mature by the day. NATO uses it, the French government and several others. And the good thing is, you can always run your own server and connect to the hive. Nobody can tell you what to do, nobody can tell you to surveil your users like the EU is planning to do.

We need something truly open. Not a WhatsApp light.

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upvoteby fn-mote2 hours ago|
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> signal is just another walled garden like WhatsApp

For me the difference is in the ownership. Who owns each. Which is BigCorp? That’s why I trust one more than the other.

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upvoteby wolvoleo2 minutes ago|
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Ownership can change. That's the problem. It happened to WhatsApp itself! Meta bought a network with the userbase that was already too big to leave.
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upvoteby traceroute665 hours ago|
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> What is a more private, usable solution for filtering them out than using a phone number?

Since when is giving out your phone number a "more private" option ?

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upvoteby tialaramex5 hours ago|
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You don't have to give out your phone number. You can mint an arbitrary "username" and give the username out to people.
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upvoteby mmooss5 hours ago|
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If it's not, let us know a solution (to Signal's actual problem as stated in the GP) that is more private.
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upvoteby snackbroken3 hours ago|
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One possible solution is to only be able to contact someone if you have received an invitation code from them out of band. E.g. "scan this QR code to add me on signal". Such an invitation code should default to single-use but users should be allowed to generate standing invitations so that businesses and the like can print and post one in their store or whatever. Start getting spam from one of your standing invitations? Just revoke it and make a new one. Presumably the Signal folks can come up with more alternative solutions than the half baked one I came up with after thinking about it for a minute, they're clever cookies.
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upvoteby fn-mote2 hours ago|
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Welcome back to “key signing parties”. PGP never got enough adoption. At least Signal is simple enough that the (ahem) leaders of the US can (mostly) manage to use it.
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upvoteby chews1 hours ago|
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Leaders of the US use an Israeli backdoored version of Signal (TM-Signal) TeleMessage by Smarsh was used by DOD, CPB, and others for records retention reasons... also hacked to smithereens.
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upvoteby some_furry2 hours ago|
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Requiring manual key verification is a bad design that doesn't scale or benefit most people.
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upvoteby snackbroken2 hours ago|
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People seem to get on with Discord invite links just fine. You don't have to do the "confirm that all these emoji are the same on both your devices" dance to stop spam.
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