I really don’t get why so many people are turning this into a privacy versus anonymity debate when the real problem is censorship.
Yes, Signal needs a phone number to sign up, but replacing that with an email or username doesn’t make it anonymous. The real issue is that governments are blocking the registration SMS, so people can’t even sign up for the app in the first place.
Sure, there are workarounds, but most people aren’t going to jump through all those extra hoops just to use an app. If we want to spread privacy, how do we do that when Signal’s phone number requirement is actively working against us?
Instead of arguing over privacy versus anonymity, shouldn’t we focus on making sure everyone can access Signal without issues? What do you think?
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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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I’d rather ppl not use US-based centralized services, hosted on amazon’s servers, and subject to national security letters.
There are far better self-hostable alternatives that aren’t hosted in burgerland.
Not opposed to the overall message but for the national security letter it worth remind people that the communication is E2EE, before propagating some certain level of panic.
Even with full e2ee, they still have
With this its easy to build social networking graphs, and tag everyone implicated with a targeted account as an accomplice. Reading and trying to build meaning from the e2ee message content is almost less important than social graphs.
E2EE isn’t the magic solution everyone claims to be: https://xkcd.com/538/
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server
But you’re right about decentralisation. The main issue is:
https://lemmy.world/comment/19308972
They went a whole year without publishing updates to repo a few years back, until there was a big community backlash over it. Also you have no guarantee that’s what they’re running other than: “just trust us”.
What is this slop? Libre software has never meant we control what other people do with their servers.
I know of matrix, what are some other alternatives?
Also a protocol that got falsely maligned during the crypto days was secure scuttlebutt, and people should be talking about it more.
Matrix, SimpleX, Briar(not a huge fan of this one since its android only), XMPP (only if you have encryption addon).