The U.K. Parliament is pushing ahead with a sprawling internet regulation bill that will, among other things, undermine the privacy of people around the world. The Online Safety Bill, now at the final stage before passage in the House of Lords, gives the British government the ability to force backdoors into messaging services, which will destroy end-to-end encryption. No amendments have been accepted that would mitigate the bill’s most dangerous elements. If it passes, the Online Safety Bill will be a huge step backwards for global privacy, and democracy itself.
This is why I’m worried about Signal. Signal is designed as a central service, which means its easy to block/kill. If similar laws are brought to the country Signal operates from then it could be shutdown. Centralized applications are easy to monetize and easy to kill.
Alternatives that aren’t so obscure you can’t get your family/friends to switch?
Perfect doesn’t have to be the enemy of good. Signal is Good, it could be better. There is a architectural weakness. There will be some other messenger that ticks all the boxes in the future, hopefully they will take what signal has done and continue to improve it.
Signal is the easy for adoption because of the phone number as identity, but its weak because of the centralization. Its currently the best option. I don’t want to spend effort moving normal people to Briar or Session until its absolutely necessary, or those applications improve the onboarding experience.
https://www.securemessagingapps.com/
You can’t send voice messages and videos or any type of file except for photos on Briar. I don’t have a problem with that myself, but it uses a lot of battery power.
Briar is a long way from being generally useful to typical users, but i think its a gold standard example of something that is unkillable.
SimpleX is the new thing to watch imo. Even protects your metadata while still feeling modern and compfortable
Simplex chat is the only one I was able to popularize and its based in the UK