On its 10th anniversary, Signal’s president wants to remind you that the world’s most secure communications platform is a nonprofit. It’s free. It doesn’t track you or serve you ads. It pays its engineers very well. And it’s a go-to app for hundreds of millions of people.
What is signal anyway? I’ve never paid attention to phone apps much. Why isn’t it on F-droid if it’s FOSS? Is it like irc but with encryption? I guess I should look into it.
It’s more like WhatsApp or messenger (pick your poison on which one I am referring). Fairly lightweight. No useless features. And I think there’s an F-Droid version, running as Molly.
Interesting, it looks like molly.im has its own f-droid repo, but there is nothing about Molly in the regular f-droid repo. Thanks though. I guess I should look into this a bit more. I’m way out of date with phone stuff.
Molly allows you to use alternative push servers (instead of Google’s), amongst other things.
Oh interesting, yeah I saw some reference to Signal relying on some kind of Google service. I figure I would want to self-host anything I was serious about. It also looks like these things do video chat, so they’re much more elaborate (perhaps unnecessarily) than IRC, which is text-only. I’ve never used Whatsapp and am not even sure what it is, except that for a while I confused it with Instagram.
I’ve installed GNU Jami and that seems like enough for video chat? I just haven’t had occasion to actually use it. I’m not a video guy and frankly am usually happy with email. PGP from the 1980s still works fine, if anyone cares.
The aim of Signal Foundation is to displace the likes of WhatsApp and Messenger thus it has to support all modern and expected features.
Interestingly enough WhatsApp uses Signal’s protocol for encryption, it’s part of the planned messaging interop forced on Meta by EU.
Thanks that is interesting. I wonder if newer versions will use MLS.
And (what is important to me now) allows using any Socks proxy instead of only Signal’s own censorship-bypassing solutions. This is a weird decision on Signal’s part, because in places like this, you might need to switch between various protocols when the old ones stop working. And for Signal, developing censorship evasion is not the primary task so naturally they would not be as advanced and quickly-evolving as the communities dedicated to it.