The Signal Server repository hasn’t been updated since April 2020. There are a bunch of links about this here but I found this thread the most interesting.
To me, this is unforgivable behaviour. Signal always positioned themselves as “open source”, and the Server itself is under the best license for server software (AGPLv3 – which raises questions about the legality of this situation).
Signal’s whole approach to open source has constantly been underwhelming to say the least. Their budget-Apple attitude (secrecy, i.e. “we can never engage the community directly”, “we will never merge/accept PRs”, etc) has lead to its logical conclusion here, I guess. I have been somewhat of a “Signal apologist” thus far (I almost always defend them & I think a lot of criticism they get it very unfair) but yeah I’m over Signal now.
People seem to float https://getsession.org as an alternative. Are there any details on who’s actually behind that? Personally, I really hope p2p solutions like https://jami.net get better soon.
I won’t promote Session again because of this point:
Convenience again instead of doing something which is in their hand. They are just sold.
Better Jami.
Jami is great, at least from an intention standpoint. It’s backed by the freedom-fanatic FSF so it’s probably impossible they would even consider using proprietary dependencies
session is recently released on fdroid but you need to add their repository… https://fdroid.getsession.org/fdroid/repo?fingerprint=DB0E5297EB65CC22D6BD93C869943BDCFCB6A07DC69A48A0DD8C7BA698EC04E6
Then is not in “F-Droid” (main repo) itself which is what I meant. The repo was mentioned in the thread as is the way to not cleaning the code but allow people using F-Droid client to install it easily.
jami looks nice
Jami does look nice but personally I really like having partial sync. So that only recent data is on my mobile device and the majority of the data can be saved somewhere with more storage available. I think this could be added to Jami by adding per-device automatic deletion of old data and having one device serving as an archive (with the ability to resend messages to other devices if they scroll back or search) but this would be a huge feature and doesn’t really match the current architecture IIUC.
You could have a private server interacting with the Jami network, and connect all your devices to that server
I have tried Jami about more than a year ago, It has its promise. but they need to work on resolving many connectivity issues. I might go back to checking it later.
I find it sad that this app isn’t more advertised and talked about in privacy and security circle it definitely deserves more light. but hey we always flock t champion the winner.
as for session, I don’t like the direction the devs are taking, as they are switching to using Loki net instead of tor. and they will be tying the app more and more with their blockchain and cryptocurrency. this is enough for me to stay clear as I can’t trust projects developed on money insentives
Last time I looked into Session, my conclusion was that its background was shady enough that I’d never use it.
p2p solutions would be great. The team at Matrix have demonstrated p2p over Matrix (using the Dendrite homeserver) so hopefully that also becomes more accessible at some point.