If it was all of Europe, I’d agree. That explanation seems improbable for just two countries.

I’m sure there are several I would consider fine for me.

I’m skeptical that they can be fine for someone who doesn’t know what federation means, isn’t especially upset that a handful of megacorporations control most human communication, and already finds the fact that I’m asking them to use anything different from what they’re used to annoying. XMPP has more things for the end user to think about than Signal does even if a client is very polished.

SMS works perfectly well for sending https://signal.org/install

That’s a risk, and a reason I’d like to see something federated succeed in this space. Unfortunately neither Matrix nor XMPP has managed to achieve quite the level of UX necessary for mainstream adoption, nor have the average person’s tech skills and comfort level improved.

Signal’s status as a well-funded nonprofit gives me hope that the current situation is reasonably stable.

No. WhatsApp came first, but later adopted Signal’s key exchange and encryption. WhatsApp was an independent company for years and had rejected several acquisition offers, but $19 billion is a big number.

One of WhatsApp’s founders is now chairman of the Signal Foundation and a major financial backer of the project.

Mastodon’s federation is not at all consistent even when it could get much closer with a little effort.

Servers don’t remote fetch old posts from recent follows for example, nor replies to off-server posts from people on a third server. There’s work being done on both, but I’m surprised it wasn’t prioritized much earlier. Some other Fediverse software handles these situations better.

I think the fediverse has a built-in legal risk in that any time someone posts, data is sent to a large number of servers when then make it available via the web or sometimes push it to additional servers (e.g. by user boosts or community subscriptions). This is currently done without any explicit license for the IP contained in that post.

I’m inclined to think that irrevocable permissions are the right thing here, in large part because it’s impossible to guarantee that any subsequent signal from the original poster propagates to everyone who has a copy of that post, or that the server software responds how someone else expects it will.

There is a legal basis: congress passed a law, the president at the time signed it, TikTok sued, and the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against TikTok. That’s a legal basis by definition.

Perhaps you mean that there is no rational basis. That’s a reasonable position you can argue for.

Android, iOS, or desktop?

I’ve noticed the occasional slow delivery, but I have had reason to believe the recipient has an unstable internet connection when that has happened.

When I have a reason to use a Chromium-based browser, it’s usually Ungoogled Chromium. Otherwise, I use Firefox, and I’ve been playing with Waterfox in case Firefox ever asks me to agree to the terms of service that were discussed a little while back.

signal got overloaded, experience degraded

I did not experience this, and I’ve been using Signal daily for years. Prior to 2020 or so, I experienced more unreliability and hesitated to recommend it to the average person.

I’m familiar with the problem though; in most of the EU and probably other places WhatsApp usage is so high that it’s a major inconvenience to avoid it entirely.

A fair number of my contacts from countries where this is true also have Signal. If you don’t, I suggest installing it and seeing how many people are there.

If it’s hard to remember who uses what, start conversations from the contacts app instead of one of the messaging apps; in most cases it will tell you.

I don’t think any evidence has come to light that WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption of message contents is broken, but it’s also impossible to prove that it is correct because the client is not open source.

This list seems to be based entirely on aesthetics, not necessarily recommendations for apps with good features or functionality.

Every screenshot there is eye-searing with nearly the entire screen filled with 100% white.

I think even something like Drip is not sufficient in this kind of situation. If the police can compel someone to unlock their phone and decrypt data, then being local-only won’t stop them. Of course it’s a lot easier to ensure that no data exists if it’s local-only and something happens that might attract the interest of the police.

Nothing in this comment should be construed as legal advice.

I suppose the distinctions between the OS and “just an app” are blurred on any OS. One might argue anything that isn’t the kernel is just userland software on conventional Linux.

On Android, anything a third party could deliver without system or root privileges is “just an app”. That includes keyboards, launchers, messaging apps, image editors, and smarthome device managers, but not direct management of network connections, notifications, or direct interaction with other apps (i.e. outside of intents or over the network).

If you’ve used an Android device with root access, you’ve seen things that fail this test. Anything that needs root to work can’t be delivered to most Android users unless it’s part of the OS or a system app.

I’m not sure what the best answer to that is. I don’t think it’s forcing Google to improve its search results.

I want it to be the average person gaining a baseline level of computer and media literacy such that they seek out and find apps that cannot send sensitive data to third parties without the user’s clear intent, but I don’t think we’ll ever get there.

The launcher is, but not everything new in Android 16 could be just an app. The new desktop mode, for example likely requires much deeper integration with the OS.

Would the cops come beating my door down claiming I had an abortion? 🤔

I don’t think that has happened starting from a period tracking app yet. There was a case involving an unencrypted messaging app used to discuss a criminalized abortion.