The other comment by @Pfosten@feddit.de focuses on the contents of the article, which are more important. I took a peek at the author, Kit Klarenberg.
The author also writes for The Grayzone (
thegrayzone.com/author/kit-klarenberg/), which gets posted on Lemmy occasionally. Among other questionable and misleading pieces, The Grayzone and Kit put out articles ‘calling out’ Bellingcat and TOR…For the stuff below, if you have doubts in the source, please follow up on the linked sources each one contains. To be clear, we do need to hold these tools and services accountable. Spreading misleading content does not help with that. Even worse if it’s intentional disinformation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grayzone
an American fringe,[7] far-left[19] news website and blog,[23] founded and edited by American journalist Max Blumenthal
The website, initially founded as The Grayzone Project,[24] was affiliated with AlterNet before becoming independent in early 2018.[4] It is known for its critical coverage of the US and its foreign policy,[1] misleading reporting,[25][26] and sympathetic coverage of authoritarian regimes.[4][21][27][28] The Grayzone has downplayed or denied the Chinese government’s human rights abuses against Uyghurs,[32] published conspiracy theories about Venezuela, Xinjiang, Syria, and other regions,[33][34] and published pro-Russian propaganda during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-grayzone/
Overall, we rate The Grayzone Far-Left Biased and Questionable based on the promotion of propaganda, conspiracy theories, and consistent one-sided reporting.
This article may be bullshit, but people are still wasting their time on walled gardens like Signal. Organizations like Signal can easily disappear because they run out of money or, arguably worse, sellout because there is no other way to stay afloat. I wouldn’t use any messenger not compatible with the XMPP internet standard at this point.
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Isn’t signal open source though? I know being open source doesn’t magically make it interoperable with other services but even if Signal or Whisper systems sell out, someone could just fork the projects
You cannot run Signal without “Signal - the company” existing. All of their systems are designed to be attached to one specific backend, namely the signal-run backend, meaning without re-engineering the existing infrastructure you cannot simply swap over.
As @kpw already mentioned, “Signal - the company” dying would involve a functional reset of everything: No contacts, no servers, no infrastructure. COULD you fork the thing and build you own system? Sure, but it would be functionally unusable since no one else would be using it, since everything relies on specifically the signal servers to function. A post-signal system could re-use some of their code (if it runs outside signal corp - “works on my machine” could be present in this project as well), but would need to rebuild the actual network.
This is in contrast to something like the matrix protocol: If a specific matrix instance goes kaput, you still have the overall network working. This means that even if an instance implodes, you would have an easy migration path since the matrix network itself persists.
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All your contacts will still be gone when their servers shut down.
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If signal can collapse because of a single contributor withdrawing support, then it kind of deserves to die. If It’s not robust enough to withstand the lack of money, it would never stand up to government intervention.
Though I suspect signal is perfectly fine, this is just an outrage seeking article for clicks. Or unnecessary conspiracy. If you don’t trust signal, you have other options like simple x, briar…
Intentional conspiracy, judging by who the author writes for
It’s a good thought experiment. Let’s assume signal is a conspiracy.
What do we do now?
The article doesn’t seem to have any thesis here. If signal becomes untenable:
Briar and simple x are the most promising in my mind, but I know there’s a lot of proponents of matrix.
I personally don’t think session is sustainable, simply because they don’t have any development going on, no perfect forward secrecy added.
If we’re talking about the signal replacement, we need a way for people to find their contacts. A phone contact list as a social graph is pretty good. I could see that being added as a discovery, optional, service for simplex, or even briar. But that would probably take quite a bit of development of work to do it in a non-Spammy fashion
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