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We can do better than Signal

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Re: We can do better than Signal

#81

Post by shafyy »

stavros wrote: post #10

I'm a bit annoyed at "we can do better than X" when, you know what? Maybe we can't. Yes, it's nice that you and I can install Element and deal with the finicky crypto handshake that for some reason always shows red for me because a friend opened the web UI and closed it before he completed the handshake and now we can never actually make that check go green, and it's nice that Mastodon is distributed but mastodon.hos…

Haha, I love the angry honesty in this post. That's exactly how I feel. I think it's possible that we can get the UX right for a chat app based on a decentralized protocol such as Matrix some time in the future, but that's just not the case today.

And today, I'd rather have everyone using Signal instead of WhatsApp. Yes, Signal might go evil in the future, but we'll deal with it then. In the meantime let's improve our decentralized chat systems. And as this current period shows, it's absolutely possible for a lot of people to quickly switch from one social network to another.

Re: We can do better than Signal

#82

Post by walrus01 »

tombert wrote: post #57
stavros wrote: post #10

I'm a bit annoyed at "we can do better than X" when, you know what? Maybe we can't. Yes, it's nice that you and I can install Element and deal with the finicky crypto handshake that for some reason always shows red for me because a friend opened the web UI and closed it before he completed the handshake and now we can never actually make that check go green, and it's nice that Mastodon is distributed but mastodon.hos…

I had a similar experience with Matrix/Element. I was using the desktop app to chat with a friend, and while we were able to get some end-to-end encryption working, it was a huge pain the butt, and if two software engineers struggled this much to get the damn thing working, there's no way in hell that I'm convincing my parents to use it. To me, we have to accept the incremental wins where we can get them; getting my…

My experience with Matrix/Element and the various standard-compliant Matrix chat clients, in an ISP environment, is that it's totally possible to set up a rock solid replacement for Slack within an organization that has a person on staff to spend some cycles setting it up, and periodically maintaining it.

We don't have any major technical challenges or problems running our own Synapse daemon server. It's a debian stable xen PV VM stored on a LVM logical volume, so easily moved between hypervisors, or cloned, if ever necessary. It runs at a load average of 0.01.

In my specific ISP environment it's the same person that admins the X.509 private root CA PKI so we're well equipped to deal with running it in a purely intranet environment with no access to the global routing table.

For widespread non technical random end user use? Totally agreed it's not ready yet.

Re: We can do better than Signal

#83

Post by mft_ »

justapassenger wrote: post #61

Signal will have very hard time competing as a product with WhatsApp. Their main value proposal is that they aren’t backed by Facebook, but other than that, there’s no real difference to end user. That’s enough for geeks, but not very compelling argument to break to mainstream. To break into such a highly competitive market, they need more unique features. Or they can count on Facebook to keep on shooting themselves…

Not sure about this - I’ve seen more acquaintances install Signal in the past two weeks than the previous two years.

What (I suspect) will work is something providing enough of an incentive for enough people to install it to then provide a network effect which is self-sustaining.

The recent coverage about WhatsApp/Insta/FB’s egregious data collection (thanks to Apple) plus the high profile recommendations of Signal have had quite the effect; time will tell if it’s enough.

Re: We can do better than Signal

#84

Post by jeltz »

busythrowaway22 wrote: post #34

>Another response I usually see is “But Signal is all we have!”. While that is somewhat true — at least by the metric of “secure messengers your granny can use”, there are some promising alternatives who are especially focused on decentralizing E2EE communications. So the author readily admits that these alternatives aren't actually good enough for the average user. Newsflash: This IS for the average user! This is fo…

If the average user was fine with the terrible clients which are Skype, Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger why should we hold Element to a higher standard?

Re: We can do better than Signal

#85

Post by bilal4hmed »

solstice wrote: post #24
tailspin2019 wrote: post #2

I wanted to disagree with the headline. Then I read the article and do see their point. I’ve been a big proponent of Signal for years and donated for the first time during their outage. But I do think this is a conversation worth having. I’d also like to understand more about this: > In fact, the Signal server code [0] hasn’t even been updated since April 2020. You’re telling me it’s undergone no changes? [0]: https:…

If all the interesting stuff happens on the client and the server "just" forwards encrypted messages, why would the server need frequent updates?

if you go to the main git page https://github.com/signalapp you can see that changes were made to the server 8 hours ago. So something is happening on the server, the public cant see it. I definitely would like to see whats happening given. I trust them, but we definitely need to see whats on the server code.

Re: We can do better than Signal

#86

Post by alerighi »

stavros wrote: post #10

I'm a bit annoyed at "we can do better than X" when, you know what? Maybe we can't. Yes, it's nice that you and I can install Element and deal with the finicky crypto handshake that for some reason always shows red for me because a friend opened the web UI and closed it before he completed the handshake and now we can never actually make that check go green, and it's nice that Mastodon is distributed but mastodon.hos…

Nobody thinks about it but the most professionally used communication medium is the email, and part if not all of its success if not all its success is that is decentralized.

A company cannot afford to use a service that can be closed and loose all the communications. Centralized services are single point of failure, and in that regard Signal is no better than WhatsApp, because yes, in theory you can run your own server, but have you tried to do so?

It's not practical or even endorsed by the Signal creators themself, since there is no way in the clients to make them connect to your server instead of the centralized one.

Another bad thing of Signal is the use of a phone number as the authentication method. A phone number is not something that preserves your privacy. Well in theory in countries where you can go into a shop and buy a SIM card cash yes, but in a lot of countries you have to give your ID. Another aspect in which email is just better.

Re: We can do better than Signal

#87

Post by Ericson2314 »

creata wrote: post #68
Ericson2314 wrote: post #13

As I wrote in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25795575 - WhatsApp: Oh wait, SMS etc. is completely insecure - Signal: Oh wait, WhatsApp is structurally unable to be a force for privacy - Matrix: Oh wait, even benevolent centralization is an unnecessary risk It's not that worse is better, but the general public's imagination can only grow so fast. We need to coax people along. As such, I do think all 3 serve a pu…

Matrix is merely federated, right? Why is it unlikely that a situation like email or the Internet will emerge, where the network still ends up massively centralized because that's just more convenient ?

matrix.org is already 30% of network I read once? For the general public I expect this to continue (at least until we with NixOS making self hosting things far easier someday :P).

However, just as regular users want to get off the Facebook ecosystem, business's should want to get away from GSuite (Really, it's embarrassing if you are anything close to a google competitor) and I have some optimism there. The "element matrix services" of course isn't political decentralization, but is a helpful stepping stone, and still more isolated per tenant than GSuite (e.g. completely distinct accounts).

Re: We can do better than Signal

#88

Post by zamadatix »

BillyTheKing wrote: post #52
Ericson2314 wrote: post #13

As I wrote in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25795575 - WhatsApp: Oh wait, SMS etc. is completely insecure - Signal: Oh wait, WhatsApp is structurally unable to be a force for privacy - Matrix: Oh wait, even benevolent centralization is an unnecessary risk It's not that worse is better, but the general public's imagination can only grow so fast. We need to coax people along. As such, I do think all 3 serve a pu…

In fairness, I think WhatsApp's value proposition is and was as little more than 'just' oh wait, sms etc. is completely insecure. I don't think the majority really cared about that (especially since end-to-end encryption was a later addition). I think most people primarily started using WhatsApp because a) it was (is) free b) cross-platform c) worked very reliably

Also for all of the messaging apps out there it's surprising how much feature differentiation they still have. Once you get used to a certain feature set it's hard to move to something with a different set even if it's overall probably better.

Re: We can do better than Signal

#89

Post by ThePhysicist »

I never understood what problem E2E encryption actually solves if you don't have full control over the client. All it would take Signal or WhatsApp to extract all your private messages is a single update of the client, which is trivial to do and currently very hard to validate as e.g. Apple does not even (to my knowledge) provide checksums to end users.

The problem of messaging as it is today is that we missed the opportunity to create a well-accepted federated protocol that can be implemented easily. There were a few contenders like IRC but they never reached a critical mass like SMTP or IMAP did. Maybe Matrix can fix this, but I don't have much hope we'll turn away from WhatsApp anytime soon, 95 % of users don't care enough to change and the lock-in effects are enormous at this point. The only way that this situation could be resolved is through legislation, e.g. the EU forcing WhatsApp to implement the Matrix protocol and make their infrastructure interoperable with third-party providers, but even that seems quite far-fetched right now.

In any case, having a non-profit like the Signal foundation run a messenger is already a vast improvement over a company that sees this mostly as a data mining operation.

Re: We can do better than Signal

#90

Post by [deleted] »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #77
tombert wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that I think will always give Signal and WhatsApp an edge over something like Matrix is that it's simply tied to a phone number. You don't "make an account" and have to memorize a password or anything, it just falls into place like any other texting app. The barrier to entry is about as close to frictionless as possible.

There's nothing inherent about this to Matrix, I don't believe.

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