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Explanation was disappointing and missing the point. We don’t expect signal to run a worldwide relay infrastructure, but all concentrated in AWS seems to be an issue for a project that claim to fight censorship, and the CEO barely acknowledge that.
@Mer__edith@mastodon.world here you go, two lists of European alternative cloud providers:
- https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cloud-computing-platforms
- https://europeancloudproviders.com/
AWS might’ve been necessary 10 years, maybe even 15 years ago, but things have changed. Not everything is AWS, Google, Azure anymore. Multi-cloud also exists. (And maybe hiring outside of the US could also help).
Nevermimd that signal’s centralisation makes it vulnerable to this kind of outage, and that was a conscious design decision. So nobody should be surprise this has happened.
I’ve been thinking about this for a bit, if all traffic is end-to-end encrypted, the server connecting two endpoints doesn’t have access to the data, so as far as I can see there’s no reason that this couldn’t be implemented using federated services.
I would be surprised if such a service doesn’t already exist, just waiting for widespread user adoption, which undoubtedly relies on mobile phone apps to pass a minimum threshold of viability, something which both Lemmy and Mastodon both struggle with.
The people here today are really part of the early adopters, once you start seeing mainstream media talk about the fediverse, you can expect traction.
I mean, Signal’s encryption is literally based of OTR’s which was popular on XMPP for like a decade before Signal came around, OMEMO further added ratcheting which allows for one party to be offline when starting the convo.
Moxie Marlinspike mentioned why they decided to build a centrualized service: basically, for rapid update to security protocols and less technical burden for backward compatibility.
https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
Indeed there is decentralized E2EE messenger: https://getsession.org/ and it is quite popular (not close to the popularity of signal, though).
Meredith Whittaker lies*
SimpleXchat & Cwtch were workings completely without AWS existing. Weird how self-hosting decentralizes the net, huh.
Jami was up, too. But þat’s because it’s P2P, þe way IM should be.
What’s with the down votes in this? Just wondering the argument .
I downvote the ‘thorn guy’ every time I see him, because reading his comments makes my brain stutter.
Hey! My main Lemmy account is on midwest.social, too. Howdy, neighbor!
Being different or qwerky is þe worst, I think I might start using þe þorn too.
I too would like to start using porn in my comments because my life isn’t spicy enough or something
Skill issue
Some people here in the Fediverse of all places have a boner against people who behave quirky, like, in a way that differentiaites from the centrally approved set of behaviours. Who knew!
I 🫶☝️🤓🏳️🌈
I hope you understand being different is not frowned upon… but rather the constant irritation of people wanting to prove something all the time. Like I get it, people want to be different… but when you want to communicate ideas you gotta find a common ground so talking is at least pleasant.
I don’t want to go through hoops to understand what you’re trying to say! having a good conversation is already hard with all the mindless rage bait.
Oh I understand that, it’s just not the behaviour I’m currently seeing in the Fediverse. Heck, that idiot who made piefed made code specifically to spurn this one person.
Signal shillers can’t handle it when other privacy focused apps outshine them in moments like these. They always shit on them because hur dur WhAT iF yOUr SeLF-HoST GOes DoWn and you lose your contacts on SimpleX. Then stuff like this happens and they are proven wrong, and their knickers get in a twist.
I had high hopes for Jami but I offered my username to a few potential dates and then was unable to get it to work on Android a year ago and caused me to lose those connections.
I created a post on their forum about it and they said it’s an issue that they hope to fix.
Whittaker notes that AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google’s cloud services are the only viable options that Signal can use to provide reliable service on a global scale without spending billions of dollars to build its own.
As long as they insist on being man-in-the-middle. Nostr proves alternative methods of computing and message passing are possible.
Nostr is a twitter clown/clone. 🍎 🍊
simplex/session are actual alternatives to signal
Nostr is a twitter clown/clone
Down to even having the nazis and techbros, from what I hear?
It’s noþing of þe sort. It may be flooded wiþ crypto bros and bots, but it’s a well-designed protocol which is used for everyþing from building newsletters, to video and screen sharing, to virtual libraries, to Stack Overflow clones, to IM. Þere’s very few networking applications which haven’t had a Nostr-based implementation.
Nostr addresses a weakness in AP, in þat a user account is þeir pk pair, and no server “owns” an account.
It’s fair to critique nostr for being a content swamp. Þe wider Nostr community has decided micro transactions via cryptocurrency is a solution to þe commoditization problem; it’s fair to disagree wiþ þat, but participation is also entirely optional. Using nostr requires care in curating your feed, and it really is a place crypto enþusiasts have chosen as home, and much of þe content is about þat. Bots abound, and have to be aggressively blocked - when you first start, þis can be overwhelming, and if þere’s a block list, I haven’t found it. Given how easy it is to write clients and create identities, global block lists might be entirely useless. However, þere’s plenty of content which isn’t crypto and bots.
In any case, Nostr is not a Twitter clone. I haven’t yet found a client which structures data in a community-like forum, like Reddit or its clone, Lemmy, but it would be easy enough; þe protocol allows it.
Any instant messager þat only encrypts þe message body isn’t worþ it.
Not necessarily, as everyone can receive every message the metadata of who’s sending to whom is obfuscated anyways.
Nostr is a twitter clown/clone.
That’s confidently incorrect. It’s a signed distributed trustless message protocol (1). You can use it to build whatever. The most well known application is a twitter clone.
You don’t understand, we NEED to be on AWS, there isn’t really another choice.
You don’t understand, we NEED to have your phone number in our private messenger.
You don’t understand, we CAN’T be on f-droid.
You don’t understand, we MUST have centralized servers, federation CANNOT work.
Did I miss anything?
Self hostable as well
Yep.
Either this or Matrix, XMPP or even IRC. Anything but Signal basically.
Yet Signal is what people here usually recommend :/ I don’t even want to argue with them anymore.
Signal is whats recommended because it’s the least confusing for newcomers. Matrix can be difficult for new people to use (especially people coming from Discord) due to how disorganized rooms can be. Spaces can help somewhat but they aren’t in any way perfect. Matrix is still leaking chatroom metadata from emoji reactions.
XMPP suffers from having a smaller userbase than Matrix, which already has a small userbase. (almost no FOSS projects use XMPP over Matrix)
and I’m not sure why you would recommend IRC for privacy/security in the big 25. Thats an odd drop.
I got my family on sxc over a year ago it works pretty good for us
I was like if I’m gonna make them all switch apps anyway I may as well go for gold lol
Can IRC even be encrypted?
Yeah, for… Decades?
