Hier nog wat tips voor als je overstapt, met bijv. een afbeelding die je kan gebruiken voor je Stories om aan te kondigen dat je overstapt.

On-topic: ik ben even ziek geweest (griepje wss), maar gelukkig weer aan de betere hand :)

Signal can update the client to reveal your social graph, sure, but right now, Signal technically cannot know your social graph. And there’s two additional layers that make that more likely, which is incentives: being a non-profit, they have no shareholders that would push them to try to look into them, and their primary selling point being privacy, they also have more to lose by doing so. Neither of those apply to WhatsApp. Oh, and a third one: they’d have been in contempt of court, which specifically requested access to such data, and Signal did not provide it because they were not able to.

(I will also say that, in a decentralised communication system, you are reliant on every party you communicate with, and the tools they use, to not expose such data about you either. It’s not a panacea.)

Again, it my not be as big a step forward as you’d like, but it’s utterly ridiculous to claim that this is not a way forward.

And given that it’s not unlikely that larger steps forward may not be possible at all, or would be reliant on us collectively taking smaller steps forward first, I would definitely reconsider putting active effort into discouraging Signal use. Especially if you’re not putting at least a multitude more effort into discouraging use of the incumbents.

Vroeger deden we dat iig, inderdaad.

Lekker bezig! SMS en bellen is waarschijnlijk ook nog altijd een optie :)

Heh, da’s bij mij ook, maar in mijn geval is dat omdat vrijwel iedereen die dicht bij me staat het al heeft :P

Signal heeft geen investeerders (en kan als non-profit geen winst uitkeren).

Maar inderdaad, ze hebben wel geld nodig, dus donaties zijn geen slecht idee.

any valid criticism against WhatsApp can be identically transposed to Signal

There’s plenty of criticism that only applies to WhatsApp:

• Your social graph is visible to Meta,
• other metadata is unencrypted,
• it’s controlled by a for-profit company,
• and that company already has its fingers in way too much of our communication infrastructure,
• and that company seems to be kowtowing to a (foreign, for some of us) government with ethics in direct conflict with some my own, more than they are legally required to.

I’m not against XMPP, Matrix, or whatever, but let’s not pretend that Signal is not a significant improvement, and one that actually has a shot at success here.

Ja, afhankelijk van de offers die je zelf wil brengen is het iig geïnstalleerd hebben, zodat mensen die er wel om geven je iig via Signal kunnen bereiken, al een prima stap.

Merk je wel ook dat de laatste tijd er wel opeens weer meerdere mensen Signal nemen? (Als je de notificaties daarvoor aan hebt staan: Settings -> Notifications -> Notify when… Contact joins Signal.)

There’s always talk about that (see alternative 2), but that could block packaging core apps as Flatpaks.

Ha OK, I don’t know what ozon is and I don’t think I’ve had to edit .desktop files so far, so I’m probably good. I’m on Silverblue, so I suppose they’re still doing system installs, or are looking at existing packages and following their lead.

Thanks for the clarification!

Wait, if I run flatpak list --system --columns=application, it looks like all my Flatpaks are system Flatpaks. Running flatpak list --user --columns=application shoulds just a couple of platform packages. What am I missing out on? What is this needed for:

like forcing crappy electron apps to use wayland

(Either way, thanks for writing up a detailed guide!)

we remain committed to being the responsible steward of the Chromium project

https://blog.chromium.org/2025/01/announcing-supporters-of-chromium-based.html?m=1

So this neutral space is still subservient to Google’s whims.

And llamafile is a binary you can just download and run, no installation required. “Uninstallation” is deleting the file.

I think it’s for the Hacker News crowd that’s always clamoring for smaller phones, or phones with a physical keyboard. Potentially for parents to give to their young children, to be able to contact them without getting them addicted to screens right away.

Not sure how big those markets are though.

It’ll be at the hands of whatever jurisdiction the forker is in. It’s not like you can escape governments.

No, I’m telling people not to suspect anything, because we don’t know anything.

This is all hypothetical

Yes, that is exactly my point: let’s not get all worked up about something where we have almost zero facts. Although:

open source is beholden to western laws and corporate practices

is definitely the case for the Linux Foundation: it’s beholden to US laws. And wake-up call or not, a foundation would always be incorporated somewhere, and beholden to the laws of that somewhere.

Oh geez, this the third reply by the same account… Again, I’m just saying that we don’t know whether the contributors were assumed guilty, or if they have actual ties to sanctioned companies.

I am literally saying the opposite: I am saying that it’s not clear that this applies to all Russians, or just ones that are sanctioned.