Et Tu, Signal?

Shit. Just as I convinced all my family and friends to move out from whatsapp and I uninstalled the stupid green app. What do we get to do now?

I was recently pulled onto Signal by a non-techie who values his privacy. I talked to him about Matrix/Element and he had no idea what that was, but was very happy with Siganl. I must admit, the app is very nice. All I had to do was give it access to my contacts and bam, I am now able to chat with all my contacts.

By comparison, Element is much more like a chat program than a phone messenger. It's good for "I want to connect with that person from GitHub" instead of "messaging the cute girl I met last night" or "messaging my grandpa". And yet, it feels to me like Matrix/Element is the platform less likely to pull something like this. Then again, Keybase seemed that way as well...

Woah putting telegram to the same bucket is insane - their network was permined, true, but unlocking value exchanging of 500m users makes this a tiny drop in the ocean.

Unlike Signal, sigh.

The piece doesn't note the additional fun fact that the website to buy the tokens is blocked in the US presumably to avoid an SEC investigation.

edit: Blocked at the cloudflare level without even an explanation of why if you go there.

This isn't a privacy breach at this point though. It's just questionable. The security model of Signal doesn't require us to trust the servers (in theory - in practice, well, you've got the app chain and non-reproducible builds and distribution).