> I currently use Telegram for my friends and family
-
-
so the company can be bought
The company (Signal Messenger LLC) is fully owned by Signal Foundation, a 501(c)3 non profit organization.
Try to use federated services
I generally like this idea, and I also use federated services for things like social media, that's why we're having a discussion here on Lemmy. But it introduces some issues with private messaging, like lack of reliability, which sucks if you want to use Matrix as your primary messenger, as well as metadata leaks. Federation is not always the answer, and in my opinion definitely not when it comes private and secure messaging.
they are more robust against hostile take overs
Probably around 80-90% of Matrix users are on the matrix.org homeserver, so it's absolutely not as decentralized and resilient as you think it is.
-
At least (to my knowledge) the Signal messages are decrypted on the client end, so buying the company doesn't give you automatic access.
Having said that, I'm sure a hostile new owner could update the app to decrypt and then send the messages as plaintext to the servers if they wanted..
-
The company (Signal Messenger LLC) is fully owned by Signal Foundation, a 501(c)3 non profit organization.
OpenAI is also non-profit. Not really an argument.
Probably around 80-90% of Matrix users are on the matrix.org homeserver, so it's absolutely not as decentralized and resilient as you think it is.
Well, the goal is that moving to your own server, will not mean that you will loose access to all your contacts. Which makes moving instances much simpler. If Matrix gets a hostile take-over, your don't really need to reach a critical mass for an alternative server.
-
-
-
AFAIK, Signal does not want anyone to use alternative clients, has that changed?
-
Shortcut question: What's a workable federated e2ee solution that's available today?
-
In the 1990s US ISPs would "give you" an e-mail account with their service: [email protected]. Of course, this is insta-lockin for that e-mail address, you can never port it.
Owning your own domain name and running e-mail service through that worked, for a few years, but the big players have made whitelist / blacklist such a frustrating whack-a-mole game in the e-mail space that running your own e-mail server quickly became impractical.
-
-
-
-
I actually tried Tox - maybe 8 years ago now... the real problem with it, or anything similar, is that you need both ends of every conversation to take the trouble to set it up. It was pretty easy to setup, IMO, but... as an example, in 2005 I had an engineer co-worker ask me about "that Linux thing" when I got around to telling him that pretty much everything he used on a daily basis was available in Linux, just under different names than he was used to in Windows "Oh, you mean I'd have to learn different names for Word and Excel and Outlook?" "Uh, yeah." "Oh, that's more trouble than I think I want, I'll just stick with what I know."
-
This was outlined 50 years ago as part of Anarchist analysis of the system then. Not exactly an easy read, but "the second watershed" can be equated to "jumping the shark" or "enshittification" or whatever other term you want to apply to: a good thing gone bad due to the business owners switching from serving customers to enriching / empowering themselves:
https://archive.org/details/illich-conviviality/page/9/mode/1up
The alternative proposed by Illich to "Radical Monopolies" are "Convivial Tools" which empower individuals instead of central decision makers.
-
-
No, the server is on the github account linked above as well. The repo is here.
Signal however doesn't federate and does not generally support third-party clients.
-
-
-
I'm with you on this, I strongly recall there was some sort of not fully open source portion of Signal at least at one point in time.
