Anonionman

https://signal.org/blog/help-iran-reconnect/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N9raG2g9zo Just a Signal censorship hype IMO. I am Signal user from 2015. and was following Moxie Marlenspike and his encryption solutions even before there was a Signal app. Moxie was nothing but a hostile to any other fork of his Signal app, did not like forks using his servers, or his Signal branded name in forks like LibreSignal. You can say Moxie did not liked idea of others being able to use his technology in other ways. Some forks were even better than Signal, and were working without GooglePlayServices even before Signal. And if that is the case, Moxie want only him running Signal infrastructure it is kind of tasteless of him, mildly speaking, asking people to host proxies for him when Country censor Signal. Signal was using domain-fronting to combat censorship, so they should go with similar approach now. I see no point in helping Signal if they are not serious about their infrastructure issues and how in that aspect they are not different that What'sApp or Facebook Messenger. And just as reminder they had an world-wide outage at the same time as their competitor in past. 1. Telegram and Signal 2018 2. []() From Privacy and Anonymity point of view Signal requires phone numbers for phone app usage, but also for Desktop, you can only use it if you already have it installed on phone. That is mandatory, not even opt-in or opt-out. And Yes, Signal is somewhat better than What'sApp, Viber or Facebook's Messenger, but only in two categories: it is open-source and it requires and collects less personal information from it's users. If Signal really want to fight censorship, it should make phone number registration optional, and users to run and register on other servers, in other words be federated like XMPP/Jabber, or email.

In the past Signal used technique called domain fronting to combat censorship in other countries 5 years ago. link

So in stead of outsourcing Signal services they chose to use services like Amazon and Google in their advantage to combat censorship. So, this tactic is rather ironic since Amazon and Google censored Parler in 2021 in US. So why is Signal hoping for any better and haven't they learned that the only way of surviving big-tech censorship or country wide censorship is trough collective effort on network level like in case of decentralized, distributed, federated or P2P platforms and protocols.

Some of those examples can be: 1.Briar 2.XMPP/Jabber 3.Jami 4.IRC

All of them supporting encryption both on network layer SSL/TLS and on message layer E2EE like OTR/GPG/Omemo.

And same goes for other chat platforms like Wire, Telegram or Threema.

[UPDATE1]: Other people are saying actually the same as me about Signal and Censorship problem and how Decentralization could change that. https://mastodon.social/web/statuses/105682606045005528

But this situation can be also interpreted as benchmark for Signal and other chat platforms and we can now see what platforms perform better in difficult situation.