thegreenguy

I guess they have some criteria for security and they don’t want to “ship” features that are below that (SMS is the most insecure you can get).

Still better than iMessage or WhatsApp!

Do they require to have a backdoor into the actual app (on your phone) or into the servers.

I’m not sure how data is stored locally (probably encrypted tho), but some time ago the FBI demanded Signal to give them all of the data they had on a specific account. All they were able to get was the phone number of said account and the account creation date.

I personally really, really like (Docker) containers and I host most of my stuff with it, on a Raspberry Pi and on (free tier) Oracle Cloud VPS’s. I also plan to (re)install Proxmox on a spare old laptop and run some stuff in VMs on that (namely Home Assistant) and might try a NixOS server too.

So really, use both. Use the right tool for the job. And you can also run containers in VMs and even use Ansible to configure everything with playbooks, allowing you to re-run said playbooks when things go wrong.

1. They used to have that functionality (and I loved it) but they removed it due to it “not being secure enough” for their standards

2. Signal can absolutely replace WhatsApp, Viber (although I never heard of it before), etc. It supports voice and video calls, and you can even screen share from desktop

I would also add that Lemmy is part of the fediverse, meaning it is federated. Federation means all instances “talk” to all instances (unless they defederate), so you aren’t limited only to the content on one instance (or in some cases not even Lemmy, case in point: I’m posting this from my kbin.social account).