kali

it kinda was but it seems to be getting more popular again

the protocol has also changed a huge amount since google used it, but its still quite a small community as far as messaging apps go

Even then, you're jumping to the conclusion that

a) Signal sends this data to the NSA and b) Signal doesn't protect phone numbers in somr way

Neither of these do I care about enough to keep entertaining this conversation. Goodbye.

I mean, Signal has over 100 million downloads on the Play Store alone. Even on the odd chance those phone numbers do somehow end up in the hands of the NSA or whatever the chances of it actually relaying any real information about you is second to none.

Even then, you can't assume everyone who uses Signal wants to use e2ee explicitly. Some might just like the app's style, some might have family members who only use Signal, some might have an ethical problem with corporate apps but aren't computer-brained enough to know how SimpleX or Jabber or some other obscure alternative works.

Is the phone number requirement bad? Yes, absolutely. Does that instantly rule out all opportunity for it being a good app, privacy wise? Definitely not.

Further; privacy should be simple. Signal is designed to be as close to perfect as it can be without compromising too much privacy. They have decided that a phone number is necessary to prevent spam, and to combat the privacy implications of that they have chosen not to block temporary numbers for those who are more concerned.

Private chat apps are useless if noone knows how to use them. Signal tries to fix that, and I think they're doing a pretty good job even if it does have it's pitfalls.

I'm not sure, it might be on their website. I hope so.

Prose is an extremely good looking crosd platform XMPP client coming out very soon, I'm hoping that will help.

Currently XMPP is my preferred federated messaging platform, but to say the clients are bad would be an understatement

Not really answering your question, but I wanted to say thank you.

Thank you, not just on behalf of your girlfriend, but on behalf of all trans people. Good people like you are what we need.

Isn't Signal's whole thing that they reduce metadata as much as they can? What do you recommend? Matrix and XMPP certainly aren't options if you value metadata protection.

The Fediverse is not an app in itself, but rather a collective term for all the services that integrate themselves with the ActivityPub protocol for federation.

This just means all the apps that talk to each other in a specific way.

Now, I don't know anything about Chromebooks or Fire Tablets, but to use Android as an example; I use the app 'Interstellar' to use Mbin. Mbin uses ActivityPub, and therefore is part of the fediverse. Also, I use Moshidon to login to my Iceshrimp.NET account. Iceshrimp also uses ActivityPub and therefore is also a Fediverse service even though it is completely different to Mbin, and I can't log in to Iceshrimp with Interstellar and vice versa.

If you want to find apps for the Fediverse you should look at the websites and source code repositories' readme's to find information about clients. E.G. For Mastodon clients you can check https://joinmastodon.org/apps

Also, if there are no apps for your platform, almost all services let you just use the browser. Like if you have a Mastodon account on https://defcon.social/ you can just open that link in Firefox. Good luck :)

But in signal you crypto for chat rooms with multiple clients

Signal doesn't backfill your messages though, it just sends the new messages to both devices. I don't see how this makes it less secure than Telegram.

Telegram's servers are not open source. Telegram's client is. If you make a back door in a messaging software, you'd want to do it server-side which means the users can't tell if it's backdoored as Telegram's server's source code is not available.

Alternatively; Signal's server code is open source, so if they put a back door in it they'd either have to lie to their users, or publish the back door in their code.

For me I'm interested in it for four main reasons:

a) It's intuitive, even if you've never used Linux, while also being very customisable.

b) It's new. The DE world at the moment is almost entirely Gnome and KDE, with some XFCE and Cinnamon. COSMIC adds to it with their own coat of paint and a very clear, professional outloom on it and clear goals.

c) It's in Rust. I don't know Rust, but I know it's loved by the community and will bring in contributors as well as the bug-related stuff at compile time which is handy.

d) System76 needs to sell it. Normally I'm not a fan of companies being involved in my OS, but I like the way System76 does it: They make laptops that come pre-installed with Pop_OS! and then sell those, so while technically the hardware is their source of income they'll have to improve their software in actually meaningful ways for it to be appealing to customers. One of the best and also worst things about the open source community IMO is that there's a lot of very niche stuff- like how 7-zip supports selecting multiple items, compressing them, and then emailing the .zip all in one mouse click. Really cool for whoever wants to do that, but no one wants to do that.