Is anyone here aware of some alternatives to mentioned instant messaging applications ? Alot of people keep mentioning Signal , however since it is US based I am not going to entertain it as a possibility.
Is anyone here aware of some alternatives to mentioned instant messaging applications ? Alot of people keep mentioning Signal , however since it is US based I am not going to entertain it as a possibility.
well … US based.
It is a us based non profit that doesn’t store any information about you, your contacts, or any of your metadata, and encrypts all of your data in transit and at rest, using a strong open source encryption protocol. Signals privacy is so strong that when delivering a message, they cannot tell who the sender is. It is developed out in the open and has been independently audited like four times.
Also you don’t need to purchase the app so boycotting it really only harms you since every other messaging app (that isnt self-hosted) is objectively worse in all of these measures, or has no network effect.
Don’t punish orgs who are doing things right.
still it runs in AWS, Microsoft, etc servers, and as any centralized service policy and interests can change at any time in the future, which would be pretty bad when you have several countries fully depending on them, just look the current situation with whatsapp, you can not be resilient/sovereign like that
could you provide source pointing to the security audits?
That is a good take. However I could instead support European company with european people which is not to be neglected
That is completely reasonable and in every other instance I would encourage this, but there really isn’t a secure, private (those are two different things; WhatsApp is (probably) secure, but definitely not private) alternative to Signal at the moment. Even if one did exist, it likely isn’t compatible with Signal and would only serve to fragment messaging even further until it has more users than Signal already does.
I guess, I just want to encourage you to make changes where it really matters. Absolutely dump Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and other for-profit American manufacturing and services. But boycotting Signal doesn’t really help the way you want it to.
Ultimately you have to decide what is best for you and I obviously can’t and won’t force you to use something, but I hope I can at least provide some perspective.
It’s serverless though, right? The messages aren’t stored in any of signal’s servers? Or am I mistaken?
It’s also open source, so it would be possible just to fork and use a “European” version of it. Also, since it’s open source, it’s free to use, so no money actually goes to on American company by using it.
no, and in fact the cost of running it is really high because the server infrastructure they need to pay, they even say it themselves “Signal is expensive” https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/
in theory yes, in practice no one has done it, and then you should not use Signal but the european fork which will not be compatible/federated with signal
I think they are also non-profit company