• Sr Estegosaurio
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    53 years ago

    Good comment exposing all. I agree with you, what signal has been doing sucks. But I heard somewhere that there was a signal based app that was a bit better (not requiring phone number etc) I will research a bit about it.

    • @ethicallypulmonary@lemmy.ml
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      3 years ago

      That would be Session, the Australian Signal fork that uses a Tor-based network to route traffic and requires no information to setup. You don’t have to give any of your personal information to anyone you want to communicate with; you give them a randomised hash, which represents your address instead of a phone number. It’s even easier to setup than Signal because you don’t really have to do anything after you download it. I like it as a simple method to send encrypted messages between computers, because I don’t have to register a phone number every time I want another account. There’s no arbitrary 5 linked devices limit like Signal. Works on Windows/macOS/Linux.

      I can’t imagine getting any of the people I know to use it, though.

      The app is incredibly buggy and takes a long time to send and receive messages because of the onionized network. Also, it’s in Australia, a country that’s openly against end-to-end encryption and has been passing (and is still trying to pass) laws that mandate backdoors in encryption protocols. You can read about that here, under “Does the Australian government’s anti-encryption stance pose a risk to Session?”: https://getsession.org/faq

      Session is developed by a non-profit foundation like Signal, and they also have their own cryptocurrency token, OXEN.

      I think it’s definitely interesting, but there are probably too many annoyances for the people I know to use it on a daily basis.