On its 10th anniversary, Signal’s president wants to remind you that the world’s most secure communications platform is a nonprofit. It’s free. It doesn’t track you or serve you ads. It pays its engineers very well. And it’s a go-to app for hundreds of millions of people.
Oh interesting, yeah I saw some reference to Signal relying on some kind of Google service. I figure I would want to self-host anything I was serious about. It also looks like these things do video chat, so they’re much more elaborate (perhaps unnecessarily) than IRC, which is text-only. I’ve never used Whatsapp and am not even sure what it is, except that for a while I confused it with Instagram.
I’ve installed GNU Jami and that seems like enough for video chat? I just haven’t had occasion to actually use it. I’m not a video guy and frankly am usually happy with email. PGP from the 1980s still works fine, if anyone cares.
The aim of Signal Foundation is to displace the likes of WhatsApp and Messenger thus it has to support all modern and expected features.
Interestingly enough WhatsApp uses Signal’s protocol for encryption, it’s part of the planned messaging interop forced on Meta by EU.