Signal’s privacy and security are great, but being a centralized app makes it vulnerable. Element explains to TechRadar why we do need decentralized apps more than ever.
This has always been a huge problem I have with signal. It’s open source but it’s not open infrastructure
So is any other frictionless messaging app, so…
Wake me (or rather the other people out there) up when federated doesn’t mean worse than centralized.
When Reddit was down, most (all?) Lemmy and Piefed instances were still up. Aside from the number of users currently on the platform, I don’t see any significant ways that Lemmy is worse for the average user than Reddit.
Federation is less friction imo. If you want to message someone who has a signal account, you have the friction of making yet another account to message them. If you then want to message someone who uses whatsapp, you need to make yet another account to message them. Etc, etc. That seems far worse than the awkwardness of trying to interact with microblog activitypub platforms within threadiverse activitypub platforms. Granted, you still have multiple federation standards (ie: email, activitypub, matrix) that don’t directly interact at all (although that might be for the best).
With federated platforms, you can message anyone using the same federation standard. Unfortunately, there’s more than one, so you need an email address to message anyone else who uses email regardless of whether they’re icloud or google or aol or self-host. But you can’t email someone using activitypub or matrix directly. And even within activitypub, its far from seamless to interact between different parts (piefed/mbin/lemmy all work pretty well together, but interactions between more different parts because more awkward).
This is why folks use Matrix. But it still needs a lot of work.
But it still needs a lot of work.
And that’s why folks use Signal.
It’s the most accessible privacy-friendly option. IMO we should be pushing for both things. Signal to implement decentralized infrastructure and at the same time improve existing apps like Matrix.
As it turns out, none of the services I run from my living room NAS or the one that I have hosted on a dedicated machine elsewhere had an issue.
And all three users rejoiced!
Seriously, while self-hosting is an option for some, it’s not viable for the vast majority of humanity and unless something revolutionary happens, that’s unlikely to change. Ultimately, technology is complex and our dependence on it will continue to create friction.
As it turns out, not every problem has a simple solution.
