<story><title>We can do better than Signal</title><url>https://icyphox.sh/blog/signal/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stavros</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a bit annoyed at &amp;quot;we can do better than X&amp;quot; when, you know what? Maybe we can&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;Yes, it&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s nice that Mastodon is distributed but mastodon.host went down one day with all my toots without a word from the administrator, and yeah I know I should have picked a better host (though if you could predict that mastodon.host will die why didn&amp;#x27;t you tell me?), but my mom can&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;Users value their convenience, and security and privacy are inconvenient. Hell, we &lt;i&gt;started&lt;/i&gt; decentralized and over email and newsgroups and personal websites and blogs and it&amp;#x27;s all Facebook Facebook Facebook now that the Eternal September came around.&lt;p&gt;If we could do better, we would have done better by now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tombert</author><text>I had a similar experience with Matrix&amp;#x2F;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&amp;#x27;s no way in hell that I&amp;#x27;m convincing my parents to use it.&lt;p&gt;To me, we have to accept the incremental wins where we can get them; getting my parents on Signal means that they&amp;#x27;re &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; on WhatsApp.&lt;p&gt;I &lt;i&gt;am&lt;/i&gt; a believer in federation, honestly, but the fact of the matter is that there&amp;#x27;s a reason that XMPP hasn&amp;#x27;t taken the world by storm, and people have gravitated towards centralized stuff: it&amp;#x27;s just easier, and not everyone is a software engineer.&lt;p&gt;That said, I would love to be wrong about this....if we can make Matrix&amp;#x2F;Element approachable by anyone, I would support that.</text></comment>
<story><title>We can do better than Signal</title><url>https://icyphox.sh/blog/signal/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>stavros</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a bit annoyed at &amp;quot;we can do better than X&amp;quot; when, you know what? Maybe we can&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;Yes, it&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s nice that Mastodon is distributed but mastodon.host went down one day with all my toots without a word from the administrator, and yeah I know I should have picked a better host (though if you could predict that mastodon.host will die why didn&amp;#x27;t you tell me?), but my mom can&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;Users value their convenience, and security and privacy are inconvenient. Hell, we &lt;i&gt;started&lt;/i&gt; decentralized and over email and newsgroups and personal websites and blogs and it&amp;#x27;s all Facebook Facebook Facebook now that the Eternal September came around.&lt;p&gt;If we could do better, we would have done better by now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alerighi</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;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?&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></comment>