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!
@Mysteriarch I deeply hope that there will be some connection to Matrix in the future.
At least we know that this won’t be open federation. But still maybe some company could bridge them or at least could become a JMP.chat like service for WhatsApp.
Element wrote a first look summary on this: https://element.io/blog/the-eu-digital-markets-act-is-here/
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
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!
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.
