I dont understand the signal hype. We have better alternative
I understand it perfectly. None of the alternatives there come even close to the ease of use of Signal.
You can use one of these “better alternatives”, but you’ll never manage to get your family/friends to move to it. On the other hand, I communicate with a lot of my friends and family through Signal, with top tier E2EE and using Free Software.
None of the alternatives there come even close to the ease of use of Signal
Really? Session is a fork of signal!
But it uses IDs that you can’t remember, which means it’s a pain to add a new contact that is not tech-saavy and that you can’t just use your phone’s contact list.
Better!= ease of use
When you are trying to sell solutions to ordinary people, the problem/threat is not understood by objectivity but by perception.
Until the pro privacy libre culture flourishes in society, it will remain a problem forever. Hence this is my mission.
Edit: added ordinary for accurate context
Until the pro privacy libre culture flourishes in society, it will remain a problem forever.
Even if people understand the problem, only a minority will actually be able to switch to a more complex app. Free software seriously needs to be made accessible to more people before it can even try to gain widespread adoption for end users. If you look at the successful FLOSS projects that are being used by non-tech people, they are all as easy to use as their competitors (Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, Ubuntu/Pop!Os, and now Signal).
And seriously, what is wrong with Signal? Clients are GPL and Servers are AGPL, and its openness has already allowed a lot of other software to become more secure, there are now a ton of apps that use the Signal Protocol.
Signal is playing a bad idol role here by condemning decentralisation, and with how Moxie shut down a good chunk of the anti censorship community.
Ease of use has to be the key for flourishing of pro FOSS culture. Decentralisation will never be superior to centralisation in ease of use, simply because one has to take extra step of either creating own homeserver, or chasing the servers that follow protocols, and are reliable and speedy as well. And there will always be some kind of issue even if one started to index and rate servers accordingly.
There are many servers, but only a handful are decent like ejabber, jabber, snopyta, 404city and so on.
The situation is complex with decentralisation, hence it can only be a second alternative. Matrix is tipping the line between XMPP and Signal, though. (Matrix has shitty clients though, Element acting weird unless you have high speed connection. XMPP works even at less than 2G speeds.)
