this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
138 points (94.8% liked)
Technology
60492 readers
5894 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm OOTL, why do people want an alternative to Signal? It thought that was the good app
It's centralized, it doesn't officially allow 3rd-party clients, it requires a phone number, and the desktop app kinda sucks. I use it anyway, but it could be better.
The "centralized" part is not a problem with their protocol and it's well explained.
The 3rd-party clients thing ... I agree with, but one can find justifications for that too. They probably don't want people to use it for filesharing with uuencode and base64. Or even for VPNs, like they did with Tox when it seemed to have a future.
The phone number thing sucks, but there's a need to defend against bot registrations somehow.
The desktop app sucks absolutely and conclusively. If there were a library one can use to make a Pidgin plugin, it would be a godly gift.
That desktop app really is super hot garbage.
Not just sucks, but is limited. Like, you can't even register there! To use Signal without a smartphone, you'd need workarounds that are unfriendly to an average person! All while a computer is far easier to make private than a phone.
I don't know about other people, but the only thing I don't like about Signal is that it is centralized. It seems to be the only option to actually get everything right for security though from what I hear.
I personally think they could replace the "centralized" part with the "relay" part. Seems technically possible with their protocol. Their center plays mostly the relay role. So it would be a bit similar to Usenet, or to NOSTR, or even maybe to something like old Freenet.
But yes, there are good arguments that making it decentralized would slow down necessary changes and fixes.
That's a reasonable thing to dislike about it.
I dislike that I can't reply to another message with a sticker.
I also dislike that, despite having admin access, I can't delete abusive messages left in groups for anyone but myself. That makes it unsuitable for building communities.
The replying with stickers bugs me so much, your pack has been helpful too. Hopefully we'll eventually be able to edit created packs though.