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.

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.

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.

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.

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.