I don’t know if I’m opening a can of worms here, and I’m still trying to backtrack a lot of history where I was tuning everything out. I keep seeing random swipes at Signal (or the representatives (?)), and I was wondering whether they are founded or just lies.Is it another situation like Lemmy where we just “take the technology and move on”? Thanks!
my problem with signal is that they have a hard requirement to use a phone number for signup and that they don’t want to do anything about federation or messenger intercompatibility.
Their resoning is that they only trust themself to keep the meta data safe and so need you. Leaves a little bit of a sour tast in my mouth that they don’t even give their users the option to opt into federation.
That’s not their reasoning. Their reasoning is that it’s much harder to evolve the protocol in a decentralized context than a centralized one. It’s not that they only trust themselves with your metadata, it’s that they can improve the protocol much faster in order to get rid of most metadata.
They have been able to deploy a ton of protocol updates with regards to minimizing the amount of metadata anyone has access to (including them), while other decentralized alternatives have essentially been stuck in limbo for a while:
On the other hand, Matrix, XMPP and email are very leaky with regards to metadata. I’m not going into email because that’s pretty documented, but here it is for matrix: