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c/privacy · by Blaze@piefed.zip · 311d

"We need to go beyond Signal" – How today's AWS outage shows the weaknesses of centralized apps

https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/we-need-to-go-beyond-signal-how-todays-aws-outage-shows-the-weaknesses-of-centralized-apps

Signal's privacy and security are great, but being a centralized app makes it vulnerable. Element explains to TechRadar why we do need decentralized apps more than ever.

133 points · 16 comments · view on lemmy.world

16 Comments

Scoopta@programming.dev · 33 pts · 311d (9 replies)

This has always been a huge problem I have with signal. It's open source but it's not open infrastructure

9limmer@lemmy.zip · 16 pts · 311d (5 replies)

This is why folks use Matrix. But it still needs a lot of work.

scytale@piefed.zip · 15 pts · 311d (1 reply)

But it still needs a lot of work.

And that’s why folks use Signal.

It’s the most accessible privacy-friendly option. IMO we should be pushing for both things. Signal to implement decentralized infrastructure and at the same time improve existing apps like Matrix.

InFerNo@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 310d

I'm using SimpleX with my family, to see if it's any good and I think it's pretty ok :-)

Blaze@piefed.zip · 3 pts · 310d (2 replies)

Element X got better recently, with space and thread support

9limmer@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 310d (1 reply)

Has it been pushed out yet? I've been waiting for this since seeing it in original Element.

Blaze@piefed.zip · 3 pts · 310d

Both are working, the features are "experimental" (you enable them in the settings) but they work

dwindling7373@feddit.it · 16 pts · 311d (2 replies)

So is any other frictionless messaging app, so...

Wake me (or rather the other people out there) up when federated doesn't mean worse than centralized.

Zagorath@aussie.zone · 27 pts · 311d

When Reddit was down, most (all?) Lemmy and Piefed instances were still up. Aside from the number of users currently on the platform, I don't see any significant ways that Lemmy is worse for the average user than Reddit.

WalrusDragonOnABike@reddthat.com · 9 pts · 311d

Federation is less friction imo. If you want to message someone who has a signal account, you have the friction of making yet another account to message them. If you then want to message someone who uses whatsapp, you need to make yet another account to message them. Etc, etc. That seems far worse than the awkwardness of trying to interact with microblog activitypub platforms within threadiverse activitypub platforms. Granted, you still have multiple federation standards (ie: email, activitypub, matrix) that don't directly interact at all (although that might be for the best).

With federated platforms, you can message anyone using the same federation standard. Unfortunately, there's more than one, so you need an email address to message anyone else who uses email regardless of whether they're icloud or google or aol or self-host. But you can't email someone using activitypub or matrix directly. And even within activitypub, its far from seamless to interact between different parts (piefed/mbin/lemmy all work pretty well together, but interactions between more different parts because more awkward).

BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org · 15 pts · 311d (1 reply)

As it turns out, none of the services I run from my living room NAS or the one that I have hosted on a dedicated machine elsewhere had an issue.

vk6flab@lemmy.radio · 14 pts · 311d

And all three users rejoiced!

Seriously, while self-hosting is an option for some, it's not viable for the vast majority of humanity and unless something revolutionary happens, that's unlikely to change. Ultimately, technology is complex and our dependence on it will continue to create friction.

As it turns out, not every problem has a simple solution.

JoeyJoeJoeJr@lemmy.ml · 14 pts · 310d

This article was posted here as well. Here's the comment I left there:

This article seems either very naïve, or fairly disingenuous. Signal is not precariously installed on one box, and if that box goes down, the service dies. It is distributed. It's running on many machines within AWS, and technologically, there's no reason it couldn't be in multiple regions of AWS, or even spread across multiple clouds (e.g. Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, etc), to improve resiliency to outages. The only way in which it is "centralized" is that there's one foundation in charge of the whole thing. Are there drawbacks to this? Yes. But self-hosted, distributed, mesh/relay chats also have drawbacks. Servers in the mesh go down, people don't keep things updated, they don't necessarily connect to every other instance creating disjointed pockets, etc.

Also, to say "we don't need the internet" we need "mesh networks" is odd... The internet is a mesh. Hence "inter." Anything else is just a smaller version of the same thing, again with some benefits and some drawbacks.

Fighting a (relatively) successful platform that champions privacy and security, seems like a bad thing to do, when those are the same primary goals of the platform you support. It would be better to discuss the merits and use cases of each, and beat the privacy and security drum together.

In my opinion, this article is just spreading FUD. Signal is not perfect, but it's pretty good. And when there's an outage, we know why, and we know there's a team working on it. With a federatated service, it may be harder to take "the whole thing" down, but that doesn't mean nodes don't go down, service isn't disrupted, etc. Scaring people away from a (usually) reliable, open platform, that has been audited, that actively advances security research and keeps it's platform secure against emerging threats, is counter productive. It's just going to keep people using SMS and WhatsApp.

sommerset@thelemmy.club · 1 pts · 309d (1 reply)

It's funny aws report didn't mention 40% of aws sysops people were replaced by AI right prior https://blog.stackademic.com/aws-just-fired-40-of-its-devops-team-then-let-ai-take-their-jobs-d9db9d298bfa

teolan@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 309d

That's about à change that is multiple months old, only the article is from 2 days prior.

AntiBullyRanger@ani.social · 1 pts · 310d

Cwtch & SimpleX say “Hi”