I don't really use it either, but I thought it would be relevant to post here since the pawb.social network uses it to communicate outages, so it might be best for us to try to move away from that to something else, maybe something a bit more open.

Yeah I know this is a hot take but I don't really like signal much either, but for me it's mainly because it is a centralized protocol and they attempt to maintain exclusivity over it (Moxie used to go after third party clients because of this).

That's why I feel matrix is a way better alternative. It still has the option of being secure with the E2E encryption and so long as you save your keys you can still retrieve older messages on other devices. It also has the ability to create public chats, same as Telegram, but with the addition of Spaces, which can group connected chats together (almost like a discord server, except you can also join each room individually).

Also matrix doesn't require a phone number to sign up so it's significantly better than Signal in that regard because signing up with email is much more convenient, and probably more secure than phone number sign-up since you can simply use temporary email services.

might I suggest using Matrix instead? End to end encrypted and fully open source (client and server), plus message history gets synced to new devices (assuming both your old and new clients support it, which nearly all do), and as a bonus it doesn't store data on a centralized server.

Oh, and it supports sticker packs and custom emoji.

I use Signal a little. While it doesn't sync full history you still get all new messages going forward which is good enough for me.

Signal is a terrible recommendation for any basic chat user. The security is solid, but you give up sooooooo much to get there. The desktop apps are garbage as well, they don't even sync chat history.

Stickers.

A lot of Stickers.

Lax moderation policies allowing for many groups to do what they want without getting banned (for a while anyway).

Signal does not sync chats across devices or store chat history. Telegram has that going for it. 🤷‍♂️

That is true, there are definitely much worse messaging platforms out there.

I'm mainly calling out signal because in terms of private messaging platforms they are one of the only ones yes but they are also pretty bad due to their centralized dependence (and the fact that they insist on staying centralized) the fact that they are insanely and (most likely) artificially overhyped doesn't help at all, and if people want to choose a better one they should choose one that isn't going to end up having the same problems.

Obviously many signal fanboys would argue that it just wouldn't happen, that signal could never enshittify but they fail to understand that centralized services can be fundamentally restructured in ways much harder than if not impossible with decentralized ones. Also the fact that companies, even non-profits can be influenced by money and even go public. Overhyped centralized bullshit is not the solution, and it never has been.

Yeah, we just started hearing about this recently. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I have no problem with us moving the announcements channel somewhere else. My main complaint with matrix is that only a vocal minority uses it at the moment, and hosting yet another service before we have our house in order is a bad move anyways.

We use private groups on TG currently for the mod/admin live chats, and I personally can’t ever fully uninstall because it’s my primary point of contact with my parents who live out of state. I already got them to jump ship from SMS for higher quality picture uploads, but I don’t think they would care enough about this to change again.

Once I get our storage and infrastructure in general into a state where I don’t have to babysit it I will likely revisit running a matrix instance, but it won’t likely be our primary status channel. I feel we need to prioritize ease of access to get announcements in front of as many eyes as possible.

Also this is rich coming from me in the middle of an episode of insomnia, but please get some rest if it’s anywhere near as late as it is here!

(Posted under wrong comment, moved it here. Don’t lemmy at 3am folks.)

Second bit i missed: not actually against an rss feed. May bother crash about it and see if we can just embed an rss feed into the status page proper. Maybe try to make a simple system to simulcast announcements to two places at once if we need to.

Maybe rss for announcements, and an official matrix channel for discussion? We currently use reactions on the announcements to gauge how everyone is handling our responses.

I think criticism of matrix as a platform and protocol is valid and can help build a better decentralized ecosystem. We need to address the flaws in order to make it better.

I still think Matrix is probably the best way moving forward since its only real alternative is XMPP, which yeah, better than nothing but not great. Also relying on and ultimately hyping centralized solutions is relying on one guy to not love money more than "the dream", and his reputation, which always ends up happening at some point in the end (every one of us are susceptible to it, just keep adding 0s). FYI whatsapp used to be just like signal, E2EE zero knowledge, over-hyped privacy messaging app, then they sold it to Facebook who backdoored it and made that not true anymore.

Pushing for a service that ultimately can and very likely will have the same fate, especially when this app is overhyped too just feels irresponsible at least in my opinion, especially since centralized messengers are the hardest to break away from.

I’m impartial about both platforms, and the way I see it is that Signal would be great if it was decentralized, and Matrix would be great if it used a different type of protocol, even though Matrix does use a fork of a protocol that Signal uses.

I think if signal were decentralized it would be awesome and possibly even better than signal in some ways, I also wouldn't really have any issues with it being given as an alternative to Matrix or XMPP, since it wouldn't have the same deep issues it has now. Though it isn't and their developers' attitude towards decentralization shows that it probably won't be (someone could fork the open source parts and make it so but it wouldn't be signal, that would be something else).

I’m not sure what the difference of the protocols Matrix and signal use so I have to look into that in my own time to really find out why one is better than the other like soatok claims haha

I'm not really sure either, I've heard that they use similar protocols underneath but I've also heard from others that they are drastically different. So hard to say.