[jkaplowitz]

My experience of Signal is that people don't reliably follow up on safety number changes, yet keep using it in a MITM-vulnerable way. Including myself, honestly, because people change or reset phones frequently. Is your experience different?

At least with GPG I can factory reset all of my computers and phones and not have to re-establish trust if I take the right steps to preserve the secret key information.

Even if I don't preserve that correctly, people change computers less often than phones.

On the other hand, I'll admit that my GPG key is newer than my Signal number (which I've owned for 15 years), due to upgrading crypto algorithms.

[twr]

It isn't. I rarely send sensitive messages, however, so I feel that some surveillance potential is acceptable, to save time and effort. The few times where I did, I first verified both ends.

I perform the safety number verifications in exchange for forward and backward secrecy. GPG isn't enough to establish a truly confidential communication channel, I think. (Unless you erase keys after every sent message, maybe.)

I'm not happy with Signal's dependence on a phone. Ideally I'd like to use a pocket-sized SBC for secure messaging. Come to think of it, that sounds rather like a phone. Just, uh, without the cellular hardware, and with a user-installed OS.