Signal Desktop

Software & Operating Systems
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1

I don’t know how many people around here are using Signal, but I just discovered that their desktop application doesn’t need chrome anymore:

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I’ve been trying to push people to signal, but moving people is difficult.

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3

doesn’t need chrome anymore

oh that’s good!

Electron

well, never mind…

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whats so bad with electron?
I’ve always heard people moan about it when they find out something uses it

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Simple programs that could otherwise only use like 5MB of ram wind up using 250, also it spawns lots of processes and some have a tendency to not die after you close the program.

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I thought it was good until I realized you need Google play services to run it.

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Wait, for signal?

What’s left then? Wire?

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Yes, to run Signal on Android you need google play.

Tox chat is very nice but it is far from being usable. Wire is just about the only decent IM left that is not bound by a platform or a service.

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That’s frustrating. :confused:

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what about telegram?

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Not encrypted by default. Also not a fan of services that reeequire a phone number to register.

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huh didnt know that is wasnt encrypted by default I couldve sworn it was

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Nope, you need to use the option “new secret chat” to use encryption, and that chat doesn’t propagate between devices.

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There’s no particular problem with electron IF you’ll only have 1 program using it. The problem is that there’s more and more electron apps, and each one is basically a standalone browser process with a large memory overhead. So yeah, 1 electron app running all the time (like an IM) not a huge deal, the problem is having 10 of them gobbling up all your ram for something that would eat up way less if it wasn’t electron-based.

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I thought it was good until I realized you need Google play services to run it.

Just a heads up, a PR was submitted and merged in Signal’s Android app that removes the dependency on Google Play Services. Still though, I would recommend a more federated alternative like Matrix + Riot.

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What’s the benefit?

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It’s federated, unlike Signal, whose maintainer has shot down PRs and Issues regarding federation. This means that anybody can host their own server and can communicate with anybody in the network, including those on other servers. This is beneficial for a number of reasons, most important of which is that you remove a single point of failure on the network and make it much more resilient.

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18

That’s nice, but I’m focused on end-to-end encryption as a must-have. Do they support this?

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They do, using an encryption protocol derived from Signal’s. The details can be found here.

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20

Thanks for the info, I’m going to have to give this a read when I have more time in the future.

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