this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2021
37 points (97.4% liked)

Privacy

31179 readers
623 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

Chat rooms

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
37
Signal Server is effectively closed source software right now (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
5 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The Signal Server repository hasn't been updated since April 2020. There are a bunch of links about this here but I found this thread the most interesting.

To me, this is unforgivable behaviour. Signal always positioned themselves as "open source", and the Server itself is under the best license for server software (AGPLv3 -- which raises questions about the legality of this situation).

Signal's whole approach to open source has constantly been underwhelming to say the least. Their budget-Apple attitude (secrecy, i.e. "we can never engage the community directly", "we will never merge/accept PRs", etc) has lead to its logical conclusion here, I guess. I have been somewhat of a "Signal apologist" thus far (I almost always defend them & I think a lot of criticism they get it very unfair) but yeah I'm over Signal now.

all 6 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 years ago

Whenever I question Signal on Reddit, I get downvoted to hell.

In terms of privacy, I still vastly trust Signal over WhatsApp, Snapchat, etc. But they've been sketching me out more and more lately. First was them making Signal dependent on Google services. Then there was them threatening to sue projects that attempted to create forks of the project without said Google dependencies. Now it's them not disclosing the source code for their server side software.

In their defense, the client is still mostly open source, but they need to stop acting like some savior for privacy when they are so hostile to open source.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Let's be honest, Signal was never an option.

Rather than being free software, signal is more like museum software, you can see, but you cannot touch.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 years ago

A few years ago (2017?) I decided I would move messenger apps. The aim (and what I’ve achieved) was all my messaging going through a secure, private app.

Signal was never an option.

In 2017, Signal really was the only option. Element (Riot, back then) was really bad and didn’t feature e2ee (which only got enabled by default last year!). XMPP was and remains difficult to use (not even many people here use it, how could I expect “normal people” to use it?)

I made the choice to use Signal, and I don’t regret it. I only regret that it has taken until now that we are starting to see a glimmer of a real competitor, in the form of Matrix. But a really competitor to Whatsapp and the like, back in 2017, just didn’t exist outside of Signal.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’ve been recommending Session over signal for a while. It does what’s signal is supposed to do, and more, with even more anonymity