Technology

https://molly.im/

AFAIK, nope. There are several personal projects which modify Signal to work on private infrastructure rather than use signal's centralized service, but nothing intended for public consumption or at least not that I've heard of. Maybe search it.

Signal is good enough and has been pushing for more mainstream appeal and polish (e.g. gif search) Its Achilles heel and main drawbacks stem from it's centralization: needing a phone number and routing thru Signal's infra. But that can also benefits them in some ways. Most devs who would be tempted to change that would rather spend their time elsewhere: tox, matrix, i2p, tor, xmpp and irc shenanigans, etc. Signal is just hydrated, in its lane, unbothered; chugging along as its LLC dictates. No alarms, no fires, no compelling reason to do a hard fork.

Edit: it completely slipped my mind that Molly exists. So yeah there's that. But they still use signal's infra.

You know, I’ve always wondered if local sexpot was thrown from that balcony for his anti-establishment and “eat the rich” positions. I think he was too dangerous to them. Tragic loss for the rest of us.

I use my self hosted matrix server and the signal bridge, that way I don’t have to do file backups.

Same here. And the real benefit... One place to aggregate all my chats. Discord, slack, telegram, twitter, linkedin, etc... Just download on app on my phone and connect to my matrix server.

But my backup is just LXC containers on proxmox backing up to a PBS instance. Literally 2 button restore to any snapshot from the past year (2 backups a day, morning and evening)

file backups? settings > chats > backups, and sync it to your computer with syncthing. just set up versioning in syncthing at the receiver side, so that you don't loose it if there's some weird issue. a week or so of versions is probably enough

The files are pre-internet encrypted. Shouldn't matter who gets the backup file

I notice that a lot here on Lemmy, and I think that's because most of us here have at least an above-average understanding of current technologies, and tend to forget that we're a very small minority of people. So when above-average understandings are commonplace in your online bubble, your view of what an "average" understanding is can become skewed.

ALL people forget that different people have different priorities and as such will "slack" where others are "diligent". Our lives have gotten so complex that you would have a hard time finding a single person that does not slack in some areas, deemed important by some subset of society. Sport, nutrition, financial security, education, minimal tech secop, political action (atleast voting), a clean living space, clothing thats considered acceptable, an active social live and the list goes on.

So to summarize, of course "techies" forget that backups are not important to most people. Thats just normal behaviour for people in general.

This is why I’m fine paying for iCloud backups. ducks out of the way

It seems a reasonable guess that a person whose hobby is building custom mechanical keyboards probably does keep it clean. I figured people using an encrypted messaging system with backups enabled would probably go to the trouble of ensuring those backups didn't live in one place.

The point is that encrypted messaging is not a hobby for anyone but Moxie Marlinspike. It's just a tool that people use for communication. WhatsApp and iMessage are both encrypted and have relatively seamless backup solutions and do not require any extra thought or effort.