Because of the ongoing fucktastrophe, the cries of "Use SIGNAL!" are constant and unavoidable. And I get it, it may be the least-bad option in a sea of terrible options. If, that is, you choose to ignore the advice of "don't use your phone for that...
https://jwz.org/b/ykmD

@jwz did you just goatse us with that Signal logo? LMAO 🤣 🤣 🤣

@jwz So what’s the least bad option when you “don’t use your phone for that shit”?

@jwz I use simplex chat

@jwz Threema?

@jwz the cryptocurrency that signal uses does not use proof of work. In fact, it's not even using a proof of stake. It's literally a proof of DNS, an XRP (ripple) and stellar kind of protocol, where the nodes trust in the websites of their choice. It doesn't use any more electricity than any other web service.

@licho Fuck all the way off with this shit.

@jwz
2. Signal has reproducible builds. There were genuine viable attack strategies with third-party app distribution until very recently; the decision not to allow third-party packaging is pretty reasonable.
3. True and bad, but find an alternative that won't make you reasonably easy to track down.
4/5. You can opt to not share your phone number. By default, Signal does not share your phone number. You are (by default) discoverable by your phone number, but you can disable this. See https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/6712070553754-Phone-Number-Privacy-and-Usernames . Signal also now lets you discover people by usernames.

It's important to consider the particular use cases Signal targets, and the ways in which it may reduce harm. Their track record has only improved with time, their protocol is extremely sound, the client is FOSS (and regularly audited), and the reasoning behind their decision-making is fairly transparent. It's important to use cryptographic software that is made by people you can trust, rather than trusting something implicitly "because its server is open source".

I don't agree with their decision to embed a cryptocurrency transfer mechanism in their app, but transferring money anonymously on the internet is a genuine need for certain people in legally sensitive situations. Most popular crypto apps will scam you, and Signal is addressing this harm by providing an alternative from a trustworthy source.

I am not aware of any alternative to Signal that genuinely addresses privacy concerns in the way that Signal does. I'd love to be pointed in the right direction.

@jwz Use delta.chat

@jwz I'd like to soapbox for a moment, since I see others posting with "better alternatives":

It has taken decades for secure chat platforms to reach the state that they're in, and Signal has consistently been the vanguard of the most important privacy features that we now consider absolutely mandatory. For the love of God, stop blindly trusting every FOSS project that claims to have undergone a "thorough security assessment" without addressing the obvious attacks commenters speculate may be possible. The following applications are in no way more "secure", "private", "open", or "trustworthy" than Signal:
- Matrix
- Wire
- Threema
- Tox
- SimpleX (though, they are beginning to address the more problems, and it may be a viable option when it's more mature)
- XMPP
- IRC

The only case in which you should use these applications for "secure" messaging is if your potential adversaries are extremely weak. State adversaries will be able to perform very advanced attacks on any protocol, and Signal is the only application with a genuine strategy for addressing high-level attacks.

@jwz for what it's worth, there are third party apps, such as Molly.

@jwz I saved several friends from falling for this bullshit Ponzi within the first day. It's my most important red flag towards Signal. But your info that it's climate incinerating is factually incorrect so maybe tone down those curses towards me.

@jwz isn't it enough that the "Mobile coin" had all of the coins issued on day one, in the hands of 8 chosen ones? And they weren't even multi signature addresses because the coin uses ring cryptography literally taken from Monero. It was literally 8 people controlling like a quarter billion coins. On day one it was $30 per coin. People were buying it like crazy only because of signal reputation. It was affinity scam. There's no need to insist it's bad for the planet. And there's certainly no need to attack me.

@licho You came in here to Well Actually me that this is one of the "good" cryptocurrencies. Fuck -- I must emphasize -- entirely off with that shit. All cryptocurrencies are evil, full stop. I understand that you might be moved to engage me in debate on this topic, but that won't happen because I will just immediately block you.

Most predictable outcome ever of this post: The people telling me that the things I think are bad are Good Actually.

@jwz
it's 2025. people are still defending and going to enclosed gardens, completely controlled by one entity.

this is reaaaaally great it's going to be fine this time i promise

sigh

@jwz Signal's fine. It isn't perfect, but then nothing is. It is somewhere I have a hope of getting friends to switch to from Whatsapp.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.

@gavin57 Thank you for mansplaining the very first paragraph of my post back to me.

@jwz Calling @cybergibbons

@jwz I wasn't explaining anything, despite being male.

I'm just getting really, really tired of people presenting problems without any solutions, sowing doubt in things that are actually fine.

@gavin57 The block button is right there.

Me, I'm really tired of people saying "your criticism of anything is invalid unless you are presenting a fully fleshed out solution."

@jwz hold up, "don't use your phone for that shit" is a thing?

It needs to be a thing if it isn't yet.

@neale The advice I generally give is: don't allow a computer to intermediate any conversation you'd be uncomfortable hearing read back to you by opposing counsel.

My comms are exclusively poop jokes, so I'm good.

@jwz @neale I once had an exec message me something along those lines after I wrote something in a slack channel at work about a competitor (nothing illegal/slanderous/etc, but lacked tact).

My response was "in my defense, that would be hilarious to be read out in court" (but nonetheless removed my channel comment).

@jwz damn I wasn't even aware of the cryptocurrency integration. Yuck!
I remember with WhatsApp for a long time I couldn't initiate chats because it would only let you if you gave it access to your contacts. With Signal I said no, but it has this awful habit of asking you again periodically, and each time you tap "no" it pops up a little message saying "ok, we'll remind you later" which is wearing very thin. This behaviour blows.

@jwz @neale
the problem with that is we leave the most powerful communication and organizational tools to our enemies, to use against us.

and we need to coordinate and organise, securely, quickly. right now. tick tock

@jwz @licho id first try to understand it before generalizing that its all evil

@jwz @licho can you please tell me how much CO2 the coin that signal is promoting is producing?
bc ik bitcoin makes a ton of CO2 but not all of them do, stuff like etherium uses a different method that polutes far less

@jwz is this specific crypto scam actually harming the climate?
ik bitcoin is, but i mean just this one, how bad are the effects?

@untakenusername Try to visualize the field in which I grow my fucks related to which ponzi grift is worse than which other. Try to visualize it.

Anyone shilling cryptocurrency is an unethical grifter and not to be trusted. Full stop.

@jwz

Are you actually sure about that last point? Because I haven't received a single notification about any of my friends joining Signal in at least a year.

@untakenusername

@pgcd @untakenusername I haven't used Signal since they did that to me in 2017, but I'm reasonably certain that's what happened then.

@jwz I think you're right about the past (but IIRC WhatsApp does it, so it was probably an "everybody does it" thing) but I don't think it's the current situation.

Same for the phone#, which *I think* is no longer required or at least they are doing something to remove the requirements.

Dunno, it seems to me they're at least trying to do better, but I see your dislike.

@untakenusername

@bodg When the first and only contact I have had with some rando stranger is them telling me that some cryptocurrency grift is not as bad as all that, we're done talking.

But you're right, I shouldn't have replied to him, I should have just hit the Block button immediately.

@bodg @kt If you think this in any way refutes my points... it does not.

@jwz #altText4you
Screenshot of the linked post. There's the white on blue speech bubble that is Signal's logo, but with two hands superimposed on it, spreading it apart in Goatse style. The text starts the same as this post, but continues with:

The fact that they are shilling a climate-incinerating cryptocurrency ponzi scheme right inside the Signal app;

The fact that there are no interoperable third-party implementations, or even third-party builds/distributions of the Signal app, because the Signal Corporation abuses Trademark law to legally prohibit anyone from doing so;

The fact that one cannot sign up for Signal without giving them your telephone number;

The fact that when you do sign up, they will spam your name to everyone who has your number in their contacts;

@punissuer Oh fuck off

@jwz Just trying to answer the question in the post as accurately as I can. The answer to "has Signal addressed this" is "yes", whether you like their reasoning or not.

@jwz "Is you takin' notes on a criminal conspiracy" is one of the most legendary lines in the history of crime drama. Still a great meme about opsec.

Just one more centralized service bro, just one more single-source unmodifiable app bro, just one more monolithic server farm operated in secret by a single corporation bro, this time we'll get it right bro...

@jwz I promise *I* won't sell out. You can trust me with it.

@jwz anonymity is not the same as security. Signal's built on the model of "very public journalist with a known public handle/confirmable phone number, and source they don't know messaging them"

e.g., your friends can verify it's you. Two ways to do that: registering phone numbers, and sharing QR code links.

It strikes a specific engineering balance /for a reason/. Everything else doesn't try to solve that problem.

https://www.privacyguides.org/videos/2025/03/14/stop-confusing-privacy-anonymity-and-security/

@risottobias Oh good, here's another person telling me that everything's fine, I'm just holding it wrong.

@jwz no - just that the use case of most ordinary folks (SMS) can be replaced by signal. Your use case might be different.

If you're swapping from contacts that already know your number, the net change /is/ the end to end encryption,

and that's the bloody point.

@risottobias This is post-hoc nonsense. Show me anywhere in Signal's documentation or press that says "This product is for famous journalists who publish their phone number widely, if you don't publish your phone number, this product is not for you."

@risottobias And I know very well the difference between privacy and anonymity, thanks, this is not my first rodeo. But wanting to control who has access to my phone number is not some weird, unreasonable kink.

@Rgsharpe @jwz I kind of get using Signal if you think you're in a government's radar and want E2EE today and don't know anyone trustworthy to run an #XMPP server for you and don't mind sharing your phone number to a US company and some of its users ("least worst", as you said)

Since I have the privilege of not being in that situation, I'm instead supporting the open, federated, enshittification-resistant XMPP protocol so we can give ourselves comparable privacy and more besides😉

@Rgsharpe @jwz shoutout to Signal for developing their encryption protocol in the first place though. And making people give privacy and E2EE the attention it deserves. I hope they decide to federate with us one day

@jwz Signal is good actually.

@jwz regarding interoperable third-party app, there is at least Molly https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android

@jwz I have similar questions about WhatsApp, too. Slightly fewer questions about Wire. But I'd also ask them all, how are they making money, for real now? Nobody is doing this as a public service.

@jwz LOL! First of all, ppl should go away from WA which is far worse.

After this happened (probably never), we can discuss further.

@midzer "Never" works for me, I'm glad "never" works for you too. *plonk*

@jwz AIUI, they have in fact fixed the phone number issue: you can now keep your phone number private when establishing a new contact.

@inthehands As Joost said, they only fixed a fraction of the problems. Permanently maintaining exclusive access to a phone number just for the purpose of logging into an app is an unnecessary chore. In some places, it's expensive, and In not a few places, you cannot legally get a SIM without registering it with a government database. In that situation, you're essentially handing over your bomb coordinates. Signal are well aware of all this and pretend like it doesn't matter.

@nex @inthehands you can register the account and throw the sim card away.

@licho You mean, you _can_ do that like you _can_ jam a pencil up your nose? Or is there a sane and secure way of abandoning the number you registered with? (Without replacing it with a new number, of course, which would accomplish nothing in this context.)

Last I checked, whoever can read SMS texts to this number can take over your account, hence the requirement to permanently maintain exclusive access. Also, don't you need a SIM to log in on a new device etc.?

@nex no, that's not how it works. You set a pin code for re-registration of your number on a new device. The program reminds you to retype your pin code over and over so you don't forget it.

@licho Are you sure you have a better clue about how it works?

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/5440120029082-Re-registering-using-your-Signal-PIN says that [unlocking a token with] the PIN is an _optional_ alternative to using SMS and that you can _skip_ entering the PIN by authenticating via SMS.

Also as per that page, if the phone number gets re-used (which does happen all the time) and someone else uses it to register a Signal account, you lose your account.

@nex it required me to do both just yesterday

> The token is useless without knowing the correct Signal PIN.

I think it means that you can't register with sms without the pin

Edit : although maybe I am indeed wrong about it

@licho It means you can't use the _token_ without the PIN, but unless I see official documentation on signal.org saying otherwise, I'll assume that SMS alone is enough to bypass this entirely.

But thanks for taking the time! I learned that it's possible to log in a new device without SMS. (Not sure if that wasn't a thing back when I tried Signal, or I'd just forgotten. Either way, good to know.)

@nex @licho I once had a Signal account taken over by someone else through this:
1. I got a prepaid SIM to sign up for a Signal account.
2. I left the SIM card unused for two years
3. The provider decided I don't use that SIM card anymore and disabled it.
4. The provider assigned the phone number to a new SIM card.
5. The new user signed up for a Signal account using what previously was my Signal phone number.
6. I had to notify my contacts that they can't reach me on Signal anymore.

@nex @licho So tl;dr: Don't suggest people to use a throwaway number for a Signal account (except if the Signal account is meant to be a throwaway account as well). It's a bad idea.

@debacle @jwz true, Signal is a mobile-first app where mobile (unfortunately) means iOS or Android. I don't like that either.

This is why my reply was suffixed with "if you _have_ to use Signal." But I'd counter on your argument that you've no reason to change from using XMPP - is because the people you care to talk to are already using XMPP.

@jwz

"fucktastrophe"

--great word. Well done.

@khm
But you can download the apk? I know cause my neighbour uses it. https://signal.org/android/apk/

Also desktop clients are available for linux distros and run with no issues.