Ibly 🏳️⚧️ 
EeveeEuphoria@translunar.academy
once again i question everyone’s praising of signal for being “so secure” when their whole model requires you to fucking phone home with an app in order to keep it working
ah yes, let me use this ultra secure messaging app by making sure it’s attached to a stupid piece of shit that cops will break into, to view all my messages as they so please
very genius design they have here
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but the fact it's tied to a phone, and especially a phone number, makes signal fucking suuuuuuck
why. the fuck. does it need. a fucking. app.
if it exists on PC, i should be able to *just use it on PC* and not need a stupid dinky smartphone that i need to constantly refresh it's access to, otherwise it will whine and complain and stop working
that is complete horseshit
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*Ada - Np-93/237/
ada@ublog.kimapr.net
it's just one of the worst sources, since phone numbers can be trivially socially engineered to be cloned.
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you can social engineer your way into anything you want, a phone number doesn't protect you from that shit
if someone wanted to extract info from my friends they could do that in 10 seconds flat, there's no technological way to work around that
and signal pretending otherwise is a testament to how fucking stupid they are i stg
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*Ada - Np-93/237/
ada@ublog.kimapr.net
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@ada exactly! fucking exactly!
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@ada @EeveeEuphoria phone numbers aren’t a source of truth on Signal though. you can add people through usernames, or directly without ever learning their username or phone number. there is no friendly identifier in signal that is a “source of truth” for the identity. the source of truth is just whatever private keys your phone possesses.
to my understanding, the main rationale for having phone numbers is to like, combat abuse? phone numbers aren’t great for establishing identity but they are relatively inconvenient to acquire large amounts of, and everyone has at least one phone number. therefore, it theoretically helps to mitigate spam because it’s difficult to create many accounts in bulk.
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and i don't buy that bullshit for a single second, what even is the harm that comes from "fake accounts" or whatever. the system should be designed around that... oh wait! it already has perfectly fine protections!
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Charlotte/Cinny 
charlotte
@sodiboo @EeveeEuphoria @ada i think it’s more convenient for scammers to acquire phone numbers than it is for typical end users, especially in places where obtaining said phone number requires an ID
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Charlotte/Cinny
charlotte
@sodiboo @EeveeEuphoria @ada signal is less bad about this than some others, i could register my second signal account to landline with no issues
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Ibly 🏳️⚧️
EeveeEuphoria@translunar.academy
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Charlotte/Cinny
charlotte
@EeveeEuphoria @sodiboo @ada also the threat model of signal kinda implies that some users may want to use Multiple accounts
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Ibly 🏳️⚧️
EeveeEuphoria@translunar.academy
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sparrows (doll arc) 
dangerdyke@translunar.academy
@EeveeEuphoria we would love for there to be a secure messenger that doesnt require a phone. unfortunately, none of the alternatives out there provide the same cryptographic quality signal brings
applied cryptography is hard, and signal is the only player who has provably gotten it right
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but it's like they buried a diamond in 50 pounds of crap, why the *fuck* did they design everything around it so horribly poorly
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sparrows (doll arc)
dangerdyke@translunar.academy
@EeveeEuphoria historically, because it was originally designed to be sent over SMS rather then the internet. a lot of its design quirks go back to its roots as TextSecure circa 2010
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sparrows (doll arc)
dangerdyke@translunar.academy
@EeveeEuphoria otoh, if you destroy everything you consider “legacy cruft” you end up with shit like modern gnome https://woltman.com/gnome-bad/
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Ibly 🏳️⚧️
EeveeEuphoria@translunar.academy
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sparrows (doll arc)
dangerdyke@translunar.academy
@EeveeEuphoria and secure messengers are not an area in which you want to move fast and break things. quite the opposite, in fact
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this is a very new thing, a very fast thing, and it breaks things for me all the god damn time
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sparrows (doll arc)
dangerdyke@translunar.academy
@EeveeEuphoria that is not what that phrase means. moving fast and breaking things would be completely redoing their identity system. this would be no mean feat, and come with significant risk of compromising their anonymity guarantees, even if done with the utmost care
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and requiring this out of their users is such horseshit, if other chatting platforms didn't suck complete ass at encryption, nobody, and i mean NOBODY would be using signal
the only reason i use signal is the same reason i use discord, because it's the only thing out there that does what i need it do, and everyone else sucks more
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sparrows (doll arc)
dangerdyke@translunar.academy
@EeveeEuphoria it’s easy to say “this is a terrible design they never should have made” in hindsight, in 2025. it’s a lot harder to know that in advance in 2010. sometimes things like this suck, and thats just life
if a competitor comes along with the same level of cryptographic guarantees comes along, we’ll happily advocate for it. until then, it’s signal
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