Many of us (or at least me) would probably like to see Signal getting decentralized. Here are a few thoughts I had about this recently.

First let me define three persons:

  • Peter (using the official signal.org instance)
  • Ted (using the example.com instance)
  • Andrew (using his own instance under andrew.chat)

Couldn’t we use the upcoming username feature to build a decentralized signal network? For example with a modified client or maybe just a modified libsignal library we could parse the instance from the username which would look like an email address (ted.42@example.com or andrew.62@andrew.chat). If the username doesn’t have a domain part it just uses the default instance (so Peter just has the username peter.94).

Maybe we have some people here who are already familiar with the Signal codebase and willing to assist?

EDIT: Yes I know Session and Matrix exist but Session is to extreme and technical and Matrix is more focused on communities and groups which aren’t even encrypted. Besides that both of them have a much smaller userbase compared to Signal.

  • pinguinu [any]English
    2·
    5 months ago

    Agreed. And also, it’s very old. There are forks of Signal with no proprietary blobs, outside of Google Play (which wouldn’t matter anyway since Google can’t tamper with the builds distributed). Gotta say the part where you have to use your mobile phone does suck, instead of having a random ID like Jami does.

    And about this post, decentralizing Signal wouldn’t do much. There are no fully open source implementations, and if you hosted your own instance, you’d have to pay up for AWS and use some proprietary libraries, so you could get unwanted attention.