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Signal is working on registration without a phone number. But what form will it take? (aboutsignal.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/privacy@programming.dev
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[–] 4 points 1 month ago (1 child)

Yes, that means it's synchronous.

My point is that we need servers for asynchronous messaging (or some clever network where everyone is a server relaying messages for others). Lacking asynchronous messaging is not going to be a practical solution for 99% of people.

Encryption works. We don't need to trust servers. They're not inherently an issue for security nor anonymity.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Thank you for the clarification. I just wasn't sure on the terminology, but this makes perfect sense.

    We don’t need to trust servers. They’re not inherently an issue for security nor anonymity.

    For me, my issue with a central server infrastructure is less that it can be snooped on (because, to your point, properly implemented encryption does work) and more that it's easy to be taken down or censored, since it is a central server infrastructure.
    The benefit with the every-client-is-a-server infrastructure, such as the one that Delta uses, is that if one of the many servers gets taken down, the network, as a whole, keeps working.
    Something similar can be said about the Lemmy infrastructure, really any of the Fediverse. If one of the servers gets taken down, there are still hundreds, thousands, or millions more that are serving content, even if not the exact same content, allowing the social network, as a whole, to not be subject to mass censorship.

    For the everyday, central infrastructure, such as the one that Signal uses, works perfectly fine. For those "special locations", a decentralized every-client-is-a-server infrastructure might be a requirement. So it really is situational.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago*

    That's a good point.

    I guess the best is a hybrid where the server is just optional for asynchronous messaging, and if the server is temporarily down, the service just becomes temporarily degraded into synchronous mode.

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