Started moving to Element/Matrix this weekend when I attended a protest and wanted to have some kind of communication, but also wanted to leave my primary phone at home. I was using a de-googled android fork and an e-sim, but being a data-only e-sim, I couldn’t use Signal due to the phone number requirement.
Annoying to have try to get contacts to get another app, but at least it’s decentralized and comes with the option of being self-hosted once I’m ready to tackle that.
@Sunny@slrpnk.net already has an XMPP account, as that is included in every slrpnk.net account automatically. It is very easy to set that up for most Fediverse software, and the user id is identical between Fediverse and XMPP.
Oh damn i did not even know about this! I will defo have a play around with this tomorrow, how very neat!
However, it isnt me im really worried about in the grand picture, its family and friends. It was already difficult enough to convert them to using Signal.
My friend messaged me on Signal asking if Instructure (runs on AWS) was down. I got the message. That being said, it’s scary that Signal’s backbone depends on AWS
Why is this scary? That’s what e2ee is for, so that no one besides your recipient can view the contents of a message. It does not matter which server is used. If anything for a service like Signal, you want a server with high availability like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or Cloudflare.
I hate how Signal went down because of this… Wish it wasn’t so centralised.
Started moving to Element/Matrix this weekend when I attended a protest and wanted to have some kind of communication, but also wanted to leave my primary phone at home. I was using a de-googled android fork and an e-sim, but being a data-only e-sim, I couldn’t use Signal due to the phone number requirement.
Annoying to have try to get contacts to get another app, but at least it’s decentralized and comes with the option of being self-hosted once I’m ready to tackle that.
Hey, note that you can use mautrix-signal to access your Signal account within Element on this phone.
@MrMcGasion @Sunny Come to the dark side (xmpp, and jmp.chat) and get decentralized messaging and SMS support with that data-only sim!
@Sunny@slrpnk.net already has an XMPP account, as that is included in every slrpnk.net account automatically. It is very easy to set that up for most Fediverse software, and the user id is identical between Fediverse and XMPP.
Oh damn i did not even know about this! I will defo have a play around with this tomorrow, how very neat!
However, it isnt me im really worried about in the grand picture, its family and friends. It was already difficult enough to convert them to using Signal.
Matrix is way more dark side in my opinion (this is a joke about how often it fluffs up, leaving you in the dark).
I have been able to use Signal like any other day. I haven’t seen any disruption in sending or receiving.
For me it was not possible to send or receive messages for a couple of hours.
My friend messaged me on Signal asking if Instructure (runs on AWS) was down. I got the message. That being said, it’s scary that Signal’s backbone depends on AWS
Why is this scary? That’s what e2ee is for, so that no one besides your recipient can view the contents of a message. It does not matter which server is used. If anything for a service like Signal, you want a server with high availability like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or Cloudflare.
Scared because it’s centralized. If Amazon decides that it wants to shut Signal down, they can. Nobody can spin up a Signal instance and help out.
I would be surprised if Signal didn’t have a contract with another cloud provider as well, incase of this sort of thing.
I hope they consider other ways of doing things after this incident.
Willing to bet a lot of companies will be considering that now lol. Will it actually happen though? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Signal’s love affair with big tech is deeply disturbing.