4 ms·

Keybase (the chat app) was hot for a while. However, everyone I know switched to Signal the day after Zoom acquired it. It's basically a ghost town now. ;(

sleepybrett 4y ago
If all you want is chat, it's a fine alternative. If you want the other features, key managment, web of trust... less great.
- Aachen 4y ago
  Web of trust is one of the biggest omissions on Signal in my opinion, right after the having of a public key in the first place (technically they do, much as moxie hates on pgp for having a long-term stable key, but they obfuscate it so that you can't use it without getting a lengthy explanation and comparing two of your contacts' fingerprints). I'd love if our new employee could just verify me or one other colleague and mark that I'm/we're trusted for one layer of verifications also. Now, they have to open up our directory and compare everyone manually before being able to safely make use of the big circle group chats. Wire is even worse: you get to verify individual devices instead of users. Doesn't require a phone (or a number, but I mean a phone here), though. And that's pretty much it for feature-complete-ish chat applications. Not that unreliable/buggy (Element) or incomplete (Threema) software has this either. It's basically down to PGP but those clients (GnuPG, Thunderbird) are so horrible that almost nobody uses it there, even if PGP use in general is comparatively high in Germany. Where now we trust the server for 99% of chats, a web of trust might let an order of magnitude more Signal users have a local root of trust. At least when considering the key distribution attack vector; there are more, such as update distribution, but we'll get there one attack at a time. Except when we take steps backwards by not implementing what predecessors already had...

4 ms·

Keybase (the chat app) was hot for a while. However, everyone I know switched to Signal the day after Zoom acquired it. It's basically a ghost town now. ;(

by jimt1234 4y ago

sleepybrett 4y ago
If all you want is chat, it's a fine alternative. If you want the other features, key managment, web of trust... less great.
- Aachen 4y ago
  Web of trust is one of the biggest omissions on Signal in my opinion, right after the having of a public key in the first place (technically they do, much as moxie hates on pgp for having a long-term stable key, but they obfuscate it so that you can't use it without getting a lengthy explanation and comparing two of your contacts' fingerprints). I'd love if our new employee could just verify me or one other colleague and mark that I'm/we're trusted for one layer of verifications also. Now, they have to open up our directory and compare everyone manually before being able to safely make use of the big circle group chats. Wire is even worse: you get to verify individual devices instead of users. Doesn't require a phone (or a number, but I mean a phone here), though. And that's pretty much it for feature-complete-ish chat applications. Not that unreliable/buggy (Element) or incomplete (Threema) software has this either. It's basically down to PGP but those clients (GnuPG, Thunderbird) are so horrible that almost nobody uses it there, even if PGP use in general is comparatively high in Germany. Where now we trust the server for 99% of chats, a web of trust might let an order of magnitude more Signal users have a local root of trust. At least when considering the key distribution attack vector; there are more, such as update distribution, but we'll get there one attack at a time. Except when we take steps backwards by not implementing what predecessors already had...