this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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Privacy
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Federation is different in that:
you can chose amongst a very diverse pool of providers, including local ones that you actually have a chance to meet in person, those with shared ideals that enable long-lasting/mutually-beneficial relationships, some operating truly in the open and enabling a just and provable retribution for the offered service (i.e. "you are not the product"), etc
you can be your own provider, and with "turnkey" self-hosting options like https://snikket.org/ , it's never been easier to do it safely at small/medium scale, and cheaply (e.g. for a family/neighbourhood/association on a shared instance/RPi/…)
choosing a provider never cuts you off from the rest of the network: you are not tied to anyone, and you can migrate with no drama nor loss of contacts/histories/data like is the case when the captive networks "flavour of the year" inevitably shut down.
You must be new on the internet to believe that this is a sustainable state of affairs. Google was letting you use GApps for free until it didn't. Reddit used to be mostly usable and ads/clutter-free until it wasn't. Recently Unity pulled a weird one against their users and customers for a quick buck. Examples are plenty, and more recently people have referred to this as "enshittification" or "the tyranny of the marginal user". Such monopolistic networks are particularly prone to that phenomenon, by design. Personally I don't want to live under the constant threat of a single entity potentially changing its mind/ToS, and I certainly don't want to drag my family, friends and peers into the gamble.
fair but you missed the point: Signal already controls and enforce this aspect of your user experience, which only benefits themselves, in spite of the significant backlash. Sure you can feign blindness, but what's next and what recourse will you have ?
Integrity has nothing to do with that, Signal can absolutely be forced by law to suspend its service in some countries (e.g. to implement sanctions) and whole regions can disappear from the network overnight. In terms of resiliency, that's pretty much how email (federated) just works from anywhere, but things like WhatsApp are blocked in e.g. China or allowed to work without E2EE (e.g. in some Gulf countries).
Sure, but you missed my point, in case of sealed senders and contacts discovery, we are not talking about zero-knowledge/E2EE but about Signal basically saying "trust us, bro, we ain't looking at it" which can't be proven one way or the other.
I'm not sure that you understand what's really going on. All your messages are routed through Signal. You can absolutely infer who's talking to whom with enough frames by just matching packets popping out of X and being received by Y. Encryption plays no role in that because this takes place at a lower level. At least some protocols like XMPP let you host services entirely on Tor or to even skip the central server.