Meta … can’t guarantee “what a third-party provider does with sent or received messages.”
I’m more concerned with what the first-party provider is doing with my sent or received messages when that first-party is Facebook!
Please Signal, use this opportunity. I really want to be on Signal AAAAH
Signal absolutely should not interoperate with other data-mining software.
And they won’t, for the same reason they removed SMS (no insecure messaging options).
That’s so short sided. Signal is useless if all your contacts only use WhatsApp.
It’s not useless. It has a very specific use that does not coincide with interoperability with data-mining corporations.
Yeah I believe this to be a fallacy. If all your contacts use WhatsApp, they still haven’t grasped the concept of installing two applications side-by-side. Or they don’t fully understand why people are using signal over WhatsApp. If you fail both of those, congratulations, you’ve failed to be a self-aware tech user and you’re now demoted to a braindead consumer.
I know, mind blowing right? Point is, society in general should not accept others forcing you to keep the WhatsApp monopoly in tact, which is exactly what’s happening here.
It will take some time but eventually adoption will spread, even among your contacts. It’s just a matter of critical mass, and there are some pretty compelling features within Signal that make it a worthy replacement.
Why not convince people to use Signal as well? Even my family has a group chat on Signal. Of course, it’s a slow move with most people sticking to non-open chats. But it’s worth the effort I would say.
Yeah after two years even my parents and brother are on signal plus most of my close friends, the rest I just use regular sms
Most of the world doesn’t use SMS, they use WhatsApp. Plus, SMS is even worse than WhatsApp for privacy and security. And stopping using WhatsApp in most of the world is like not using email, so no “I don’t have WhatsApp, you can only contact me through signal” is possible.
It might work with people you know but is harder to convince people you just met, that’s the reason I still use Whatsapp and recently opened an Instagram.
Yeah, but you can still chat with them on the insecure messenger. You can have both on your phone.
What would be the win if signal would support sending messages to WhatsApp? You’d still be putting your trust into meta.
I remember the days when I spent time convincing people to use chat apps. The last one that stuck was WhatsApp.
I’ve since stopped installing new chat apps because people won’t use them.
WhatsApp just works. Wanna video call my Mum? Push a button. Wanna send a Lemmy meme to my mates? Yeah it’s 3 taps.
I open up Facebook on me birthday and press the ❤️ on the birthday messages then shut it down and don’t use it for another year.
But if I do that with WhatsApp then I don’t hear from people I actually care about.
I actually have a friend that refuses to use WhatsApp like I do with FaceFuck. “How does she do it then?” I hear you ask.
She uses Facebook Messenger.
That’s the hold Meta has on our communications
Eh, my missus insisted we use Signal, but it’s just flat out not as reliable. It misses messages very occasionally and it’s always at the worst possible time.
Like I get that it’s a tiny bit more private than Whatsapp, but I’m not running a terror cell or a paedo ring over here. I just want to know if she wants anything from the shop.
Classic “No thing to hide, nothing to fear.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument#Criticism
I dislike when they say in news clips that Signal represents the “current gold standard” for E2EE chats, it doesn’t, Signal is a helluva lot better than the commercial stuff that mines user data but there’s stuff like SimpleX Chat that doesn’t leak even metadata because it doesn’t have it.
Still, this is a good thing, these megacorps have their iron grip on people because they have raised walls around their services making it painful for people to move to a different service, tearing down those walls can only help us all.
Thanks for the tip about SimpleX, that looks interesting! I could never use Signal due to the way they operate and force you to rely on their and Google’s servers, actively blocking forks from their network. So much for FOSS…
SimpleX is very neat. But it cannot do multiple devices unless you count shutting down, exporting database to new device replacing existing database as a sensible workflow. Using the database on two devices at once will break encryption and cause all sorts of weird problems.
@jherazob @Mysteriarch Though great with some worthy competition for Signal!
Does this mean third party apps will be able to interact with whatsapp?
only when the service specifically requests it and agrees to Whatsapp’s terms.
So I [in theory, I don’t know how to start with this on a technical level] could make a third-party Signal-compatible app, but allow it to connect to Whatsapp instead of Signal? Even if I can’t use my Signal account to contact Whatsapp people, that’s still potentially useful. Although I imagine the terms I’d have to agree to to do so would be full of nonsense that stops this being remotely feasible.
could make a third-party Signal-compatible app, but allow it to connect to Whatsapp instead of Signal?
you’d have to create a messaging service, not just a client.
Meta says that it will only allow third-party developers to use another protocol besides Signal, “if they are able to demonstrate it offers the same security guarantees as Signal.”
If matrix finally finishes implementing MLS, maybe they could convince meta to use it.
Last time they touched an open chat protocol, they hung it out to dry. That was XMPP. That’s why more than half of the fediverse is reluctant or outright hostile to federate with anything meta.
maybe they could convince meta to use it
I think he/she meant convincing Meta to use MLS, not Matrix.
XMPP is used in many, many places. It’s just not usually explicitly known that the backend is using that protocol
