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About how we could decentralize Signal (futurology.today)
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by mintdaniel42@futurology.today to c/signal@lemmy.ml
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Many of us (or at least me) would probably like to see Signal getting decentralized. Here are a few thoughts I had about this recently.

First let me define three persons:

  • Peter (using the official signal.org instance)
  • Ted (using the example.com instance)
  • Andrew (using his own instance under andrew.chat)

Couldn't we use the upcoming username feature to build a decentralized signal network? For example with a modified client or maybe just a modified libsignal library we could parse the instance from the username which would look like an email address (ted.42@example.com or andrew.62@andrew.chat). If the username doesn't have a domain part it just uses the default instance (so Peter just has the username peter.94).

Maybe we have some people here who are already familiar with the Signal codebase and willing to assist?

EDIT: Yes I know Session and Matrix exist but Session is to extreme and technical and Matrix is more focused on communities and groups which aren't even encrypted. Besides that both of them have a much smaller userbase compared to Signal.

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[-] davel@lemmy.ml -1 points 9 months ago

From the last I recall, the owners of Signal have never wanted it to federate. They have their publicly stated reasons, but I think the real reason is that Signal has always been on an enshittification track. JWZ has spoken out against Signal many times.

[-] mintdaniel42@futurology.today 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I'm gonna be honest. I chose a random article by JWZ and read it. The only thing they are talking about is the contact discovery system. If they don't want contacts to be uploaded (encrypted) then simply don't give signal the permission. And that the author moves to facebook messenger because there

at least the privacy failings are obvious

just shows how the author isn't even interested in secure and private messaging but only in defamig signal

[-] pinguinu@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 9 months ago

Agreed. And also, it's very old. There are forks of Signal with no proprietary blobs, outside of Google Play (which wouldn't matter anyway since Google can't tamper with the builds distributed). Gotta say the part where you have to use your mobile phone does suck, instead of having a random ID like Jami does.

And about this post, decentralizing Signal wouldn't do much. There are no fully open source implementations, and if you hosted your own instance, you'd have to pay up for AWS and use some proprietary libraries, so you could get unwanted attention.

this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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