Is it still viable to use Signal for privacy in 2026? It’s centralized, and has had many suspicious occurrences in the past.(Unopen source server code, careless whisper exploit which is still active as far as I know, and the whole mobile coin situation.)

Thoughts?

  • bad_news@lemmy.billiam.net
    1·
    2 hours ago

    My sister and wife and parents aren’t going to use Matrix or SimpleX. The no account or password, you just install on your phone and it’s like iMessage basically sells them in a way I could NEVER get enough buy in for anything else. The way I see it, Signal’s primary problem is the metadata availability, but the government knows I talk to my family, presumably, what I want to hide is the contents, which are as far as anybody knows, E2E as long as you’re not using the Israeli Molly, but evil, app the Trump admin uses. I have tried since Threema to get these people on better platforms, Signal is a win in this case.

      • bad_news@lemmy.billiam.net
        1·
        2 hours ago

        I agree. But I literally have software engineer bros who whine like little bitches about Matrix. I’m not stanning Signal, I try to Matrix where possible, but there are people in my life where Signal is the high watermark of what they will even try because they heard about it via Waltz accidentally putting Jeff Goldberg in the chat and there’s no account setup.