this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
610 points (98.1% liked)
Technology
59708 readers
2158 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 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's more like WhatsApp or messenger (pick your poison on which one I am referring). Fairly lightweight. No useless features. And I think there's an F-Droid version, running as Molly.
Interesting, it looks like molly.im has its own f-droid repo, but there is nothing about Molly in the regular f-droid repo. Thanks though. I guess I should look into this a bit more. I'm way out of date with phone stuff.
Molly allows you to use alternative push servers (instead of Google's), amongst other things.
Oh interesting, yeah I saw some reference to Signal relying on some kind of Google service. I figure I would want to self-host anything I was serious about. It also looks like these things do video chat, so they're much more elaborate (perhaps unnecessarily) than IRC, which is text-only. I've never used Whatsapp and am not even sure what it is, except that for a while I confused it with Instagram.
I've installed GNU Jami and that seems like enough for video chat? I just haven't had occasion to actually use it. I'm not a video guy and frankly am usually happy with email. PGP from the 1980s still works fine, if anyone cares.
The aim of Signal Foundation is to displace the likes of WhatsApp and Messenger thus it has to support all modern and expected features.
Interestingly enough WhatsApp uses Signal's protocol for encryption, it's part of the planned messaging interop forced on Meta by EU.
Thanks that is interesting. I wonder if newer versions will use MLS.
And (what is important to me now) allows using any Socks proxy instead of only Signal's own censorship-bypassing solutions. This is a weird decision on Signal's part, because in places like this, you might need to switch between various protocols when the old ones stop working. And for Signal, developing censorship evasion is not the primary task so naturally they would not be as advanced and quickly-evolving as the communities dedicated to it.