Here are two reasons you might not want to use Signal: Your contacts, your settings, your entire Signal experience is tied to a Signal account managed by Signal. Metadata—who you’re talking to, when, and how often—can still be collected and analyzed. Question everything.
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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Privacy
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So use no messenger? Any decentralized options?
So use no messenger? Any decentralized options?
Alternatives to Signal that prioritize decentralized communication.
- Briar Project (https://briarproject.org/ ): A compelling choice for censorship resistance. Briar employs peer-to-peer messaging, connecting via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or Tor, and incorporates privacy features by design. It’s a robust solution for those concerned about surveillance.
- Delta Chat (https://delta.chat/ ): A decentralized and secure messenger application. It's often praised for its ease of use and integration with existing email accounts.
- XMPP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP ): Less of an application and more of a foundational protocol. XMPP is an open standard for instant messaging, allowing for decentralized implementations – though setting up and maintaining such a system requires a degree of technical expertise.
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How's signal compared to Element?
Also, is there a secure way to directly send messages to someone else's phone without the message having to be stored on a central server? As in they're only stored on the recipient device. Is that even possible with how the internet works and how packets are routed between networks? Even if the server has no way of decrypting messages by default, just having the encrypted messages stored there is a liability because your encryption keys can easily get leaked by malware running on your device, phishing, etc.
element keeps a lot of metadata unencrypted. but it is federated, you can choose the server that has access to it (deny federation for the room or set up federation ACLs if important to keep it there), and because of the former it's harder to just shut down.
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/660
signal doesn't, in theory they don't even know the recipient of your messages (but there's a twist in that part as I remember), but it is centralized around US servers. it is easier to shut down.