What are everyone's thoughts on Molly, advertised as a hardened fork of Signal?
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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Don't care too much about the supposed hardening, but it's on FDroid and has UnifiedPush, so I use it over Signal
I've been using it for several months mostly due to it's UnifiedPush notifications support and been really happy with it.
I've used it because it actually allowed me to register, while the registration in the official app broke (my best guess is due to lack of Google services, because that's the popup the app got stuck on). And if I knew about it earlier, I could've used it to register in an Android VM and then tie a desktop client - because unlike the original, it did not force you to use your camera, you could just use a link. Another important quality for me is the ability to use arbitrary Socks rather than Signal's own - when every protocol has a chance to be blocked, flexibility is important, and having a standalone proxy may be more convenient than a whole-device VPN (that you'd have to keep on all the time to receive notifications).
To be even more critical of Session, it uses Oxen which is like someone took Onion routing and decided to dress it up as a cryptocurrency grift
[…] it uses the X25519 public key… as a symmetric key, for AES-GCM.
[…] anyone that knows the public key can decrypt it.
Ouch.
I'm OOTL, why do people want an alternative to Signal? It thought that was the good app
It's centralized, it doesn't officially allow 3rd-party clients, it requires a phone number, and the desktop app kinda sucks. I use it anyway, but it could be better.
The "centralized" part is not a problem with their protocol and it's well explained.
The 3rd-party clients thing ... I agree with, but one can find justifications for that too. They probably don't want people to use it for filesharing with uuencode and base64. Or even for VPNs, like they did with Tox when it seemed to have a future.
The phone number thing sucks, but there's a need to defend against bot registrations somehow.
The desktop app sucks absolutely and conclusively. If there were a library one can use to make a Pidgin plugin, it would be a godly gift.
That desktop app really is super hot garbage.
Not just sucks, but is limited. Like, you can't even register there! To use Signal without a smartphone, you'd need workarounds that are unfriendly to an average person! All while a computer is far easier to make private than a phone.
I don't know about other people, but the only thing I don't like about Signal is that it is centralized. It seems to be the only option to actually get everything right for security though from what I hear.
I personally think they could replace the "centralized" part with the "relay" part. Seems technically possible with their protocol. Their center plays mostly the relay role. So it would be a bit similar to Usenet, or to NOSTR, or even maybe to something like old Freenet.
But yes, there are good arguments that making it decentralized would slow down necessary changes and fixes.
That's a reasonable thing to dislike about it.
I dislike that I can't reply to another message with a sticker.
I also dislike that, despite having admin access, I can't delete abusive messages left in groups for anyone but myself. That makes it unsuitable for building communities.
The replying with stickers bugs me so much, your pack has been helpful too. Hopefully we'll eventually be able to edit created packs though.