I don’t know if I’m opening a can of worms here, and I’m still trying to backtrack a lot of history where I was tuning everything out. I keep seeing random swipes at Signal (or the representatives (?)), and I was wondering whether they are founded or just lies.Is it another situation like Lemmy where we just “take the technology and move on”? Thanks!
If we have a federated messager that some people self host, would that actually be more secure? i dont know much about how federation works, but i imagine that an intelligence agency could make an instance that would federate to the others, listen to the metadata of the exchanges in the network and rebuild a social graph like a centralized server could. Is this a non-issue?
Its actually less of an issue with federation. The way most federation works is that messages are only exchanged with servers that have a relevant party, ie if I’m on instance a and ur on instance b then our messages are only exchanged between instance a and b instance c would have no idea about any of it.
Its even better than that because with sealed sender the recipient server will know that u have received a message and from what instance but not which user on the instance.
instances are severs - you now have two servers you need to trust.
The average person has no own server.
The point of any secure system is that u shouldn’t need to trust the server. If signal federated it makes the capability for any single server to collate data across all instances significantly harder.
oh, i see! that would be cool