You and I can’t even use signal, unless you wanted to tell me your phone number, so its also useless as general-purpose online communication.
Usernames as secondary identifiers are being rolled out so this is no longer true.
“Usernames on Signal are optional. If you choose to create a username other Signal users will be able to find you by this username and contact you without knowing your phone number.” -Pointed out from dev commits on signal forum
https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-introducing-usernames/9157/3
It’d definitely be a good thing if they added this, but they’re kinda late to have this as an afterthought. Matrix / riot being federated, self hostable, and e2ee capable, is pretty much the future of comms.
The metadata that needs to be shared on decentralised services is a lot and Riot/Matrix shares a lot of it. If you seek for anonimity and privacy this is not the best, you will always have to trust your instance admin. I too think that Riot/Matrix is the future but not for Anonimity. Only IM who has achieved not sharing metadata being decentralised is Session with the onion routing used when messaging.
Matrix / riot being federated, self hostable, and e2ee capable, is pretty much the future of comms.
I think that’s overly hopeful.
Webrtc dependent sollutions can’t be reliably used over TOR and most major VPNs.
Being self hostable is definitely a plus, but from the perspective of the communication protocols themselves Matrix is outclassed in both usability and call/message security.
Usernames as secondary identifiers are being rolled out so this is no longer true.
“Usernames on Signal are optional. If you choose to create a username other Signal users will be able to find you by this username and contact you without knowing your phone number.” -Pointed out from dev commits on signal forum https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-introducing-usernames/9157/3
It’d definitely be a good thing if they added this, but they’re kinda late to have this as an afterthought. Matrix / riot being federated, self hostable, and e2ee capable, is pretty much the future of comms.
The metadata that needs to be shared on decentralised services is a lot and Riot/Matrix shares a lot of it. If you seek for anonimity and privacy this is not the best, you will always have to trust your instance admin. I too think that Riot/Matrix is the future but not for Anonimity. Only IM who has achieved not sharing metadata being decentralised is Session with the onion routing used when messaging.
I think that’s overly hopeful. Webrtc dependent sollutions can’t be reliably used over TOR and most major VPNs. Being self hostable is definitely a plus, but from the perspective of the communication protocols themselves Matrix is outclassed in both usability and call/message security.