[dijit]

Sure, but I don't see whatsapp/telegram as worse realistically if you've already lost at that level.

Signal is very much in the same area of: "trust us".

With a caveat that they also say: "here's a bunch of information on why you should: but you can't really verify any of it and we have proven bad faith before- also we have an army of people who will pile-on if you call us out for not being actually verified, so, just trust us- we are the secure messenger and all those scary things are just so we are easy to use".

[Nab443]

I read somewhere here that, in the case of what's app more metadata is shared with meta, and telegram doesn't have E2EE by default for groups. Didn't check though.

[godelski]

You're correct. There are more security features with signal too like the server stuff. It's true that they don't update the code enough but the parent is being overly critical. It's not like WhatsApp is giving us access to the server in any form. So it's not a fair comparison. (Edit: Also, the app can be built from source and you can verify that the communication isn't happening in a way where the server could decrypt it. So it's not too big a deal that the server isn't perfectly up to date on public commits)

To their point, there are benefits to federated systems. But I've yet to see a federated system have moderate to large usage without becoming centralized. Think email. And until this problem can be solved you're still left with a "trust us" problem. There's no trustless system out there, yet. But hopefully it comes in the future. In the meantime, signal is the best if you also want to communicate with anyone that can't tell you if a stack is FIFO or LIFO (or even know those acronyms).

[tamimio]

Pretty much, Signal is more dangerous for giving that false sense of privacy while you need to trust them just like other messaging apps, no thanks.

[buzzerbetrayed]

> Signal is more dangerous...

Definitely not true. Facebook literally censors private conversations. You simply can't send certain text strings to your friends. That is far more dangerous than relying on a third party that claims to be protecting your privacy. Especially since all signs point to them being honest.

[aembleton]

What strings can't I send over WhatsApp?

[buzzerbetrayed]

I don't know about WhatsApp (but I also didn't mention WhatsApp), but go to FB Messenger right now, open up a conversation with yourself, and try to send a message containing the string "thedonald.win". You'll get an error message saying "Couldn't send", with no further explanation. The list of banned strings used to be longer, but they've unbanned a lot of them since the election ended.

To be clear, this is in private conversations. Not just posting publicly on Facebook or w/e.

[aembleton]

Just tried with and without quotes and it sent fine. This was on Messenger version 445.0.0.41.109 on Android 14.

[dns_snek]

Could be regional. Are you in the US?