Many of us (or at least me) would probably like to see Signal getting decentralized. Here are a few thoughts I had about this recently.
First let me define three persons:
- Peter (using the official signal.org instance)
- Ted (using the example.com instance)
- Andrew (using his own instance under andrew.chat)
Couldn’t we use the upcoming username feature to build a decentralized signal network? For example with a modified client or maybe just a modified libsignal library we could parse the instance from the username which would look like an email address (ted.42@example.com or andrew.62@andrew.chat). If the username doesn’t have a domain part it just uses the default instance (so Peter just has the username peter.94).
Maybe we have some people here who are already familiar with the Signal codebase and willing to assist?
EDIT: Yes I know Session and Matrix exist but Session is to extreme and technical and Matrix is more focused on communities and groups which aren’t even encrypted. Besides that both of them have a much smaller userbase compared to Signal.
I think most iOS users have no trouble understanding how user hostile Signal has been after getting a new device or losing all the messages they wanted to save.
As for the user base, that’s a problem that fixes itself as more people switch away from Signal.
Yes I understand that but there’s no messenger that’s really perfect. Btw signal is working on free and paid cloud backups for iOS and Android
Signal fails as a useful solution as long as:
- I can’t switch devices and keep messages.
- I must give them a phone number.
- Multiple devices can’t cooperate to allow me to chat continuously from any device.
- Messages can’t be sent/received arbitrarily because the server decided my client isn’t acceptable.
Signal is not reliable and very user-hostile.
Okay so I’ve been using Signal for over two years now and would like to address your critical points:
- I switched from my old phone to my current phone without losing even one message. Not even safety numbers changed
- Yes you have to give them a phone number. And yes atm everyone is able to see them. This will change this year as usernames are coming. The phone number will from then on only be used for verification and stored encrypted
- I have three devices: Phone (Android), Tablet (Android) and PC (Linux). All of the messages get synchronized properly and almost instantly
- I don’t know what you mean by this exactly but I think you mean that the official Signal server doesn’t support forked clients which is false if you take a look at Molly (which I’m using on my Tablet due to several reasons)
In terms of reliability in general I never experienced any issues with Signal. It works great even in bad internet connection scenarios.