Signal / Silence on GNU+Linux : A comprehensive summary | Librem 5 app

Well I think they changed their minds as I heard that registering with the desktop client is now possible in the beta version. They really improved it the last few months, allowing for vocal messages, video call and even group call. The code base is big and all in web technologies so more portable than native code.

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Yes, theyā€™ve been talking about replacing phone number authentication with an independent ID for several months now.
The introduction of the PIN, the user profile and the online storage of contacts are intended to make this change possible.

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Really? Because they recently said they will not be implementing registration from the Electron client.

Do you recall, where this was mentioned and from whom?

13 posts were split to a new topic: Signal messenger

@weirdnerd please do not clutter this thread with off-topic discussion of other messanging protocols.

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Iā€™m still optimistic concerning Signal and linux mobile phones in the future. There are numerous things Signal in the past said they are not planning to offer but implemented then afterwards. It just takes time and I can understand they have other priorities right now keeping in mind that they increased their userbase over 500%.

Last thing was push notifications without Play services. After some time and many people needed support for running Signal without Play services they implemented websockets as fallback. Another thing was offering Signal as APK from their website. The app even updates from itself without the Play store whereas they once told us to not implement that.

Donā€™t stop to nag and remember them sometimes. If there are linux phones out in the wild which are accessible and offer a nice software experience, linux smartphones gain user and they can give the Signal foundation a bit pressure (and maybe donate money :stuck_out_tongue: )

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Agree and mostly feel the same. I get the feeling they have a similar approach to communication to Purism in some ways in that they donā€™t like to announce or commit to things until they have actually done or or are ready to but they do generally seem to listen, even if it takes a while and isnā€™t immediately obvious.

The recent drive to improve the desktop experience does seem promising.

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Yes, I hope they respond to Linux phones becoming more widely available, as supporting Free software/hardware seems like it would fit perfectly with their mission, but I tend to be highly skeptical when it comes to data privacy, because of the tremendously powerful incentives and actors involved.

Signal has made incredible progress in promoting the adoption of end-to-end-encryption to help protect privacy. By mandating a locked-down operating system for registration, they would be defeating the whole point of end-to-end-encryption by mandating that big tech companies control all the endpoints. That would be sad.

I donā€™t have a Librem5 yet, and Iā€™ve used Signal for a long time, so I donā€™t feel a huge amount of urgency. Patience is a virtue, and we shall wait and see :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Indeed, this has been confirmed by upstream:

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That is as close to tacit support for an approach as anything Iā€™ve seen from OWS.

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Yes. I think they would like if we stop asking them to make the clients they maintain work for our purposes and instead write our own client using their library.

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I donā€™t know how long itā€™s been like this, but I noticed today that the desktop app changes size pretty nicely. This seems like a valuable step toward making it work on a phone screen. Am I mistaken that it used to be impossible?

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What exactly do you mean? I havenā€™t noticed any change the last weeks. Iā€™m on 1.39.6. One of the showstoppers which some Signal dev said he would look into is the message drawer which does not hide on small windows.

I thought that when I tried to resize the app by clicking on an edge and dragging, that it had no effect before, or didnā€™t work well. Same for full-screen.

Iā€™m on the same version you are. Iā€™ll have to go back over commits/releases and see if/when a change occurred. Maybe Iā€™m just imagining.

Edit: Also, I notice that when I resize the app, then close it, then reopen itā€“the app stays the same as I resized it, instead of returning to the default size. I feel like it didnā€™t do that before.

IIRC the resizing of the window has been there for a while. IIRC it could not be resized to very small sizes. The conversations list did not collapse.

Please, discuss about it on dedicated topic or open a new one.

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Can a moderator please move the unrelated posts to a different topic? @joao.azevedo

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Done. For general Signal discussion, please go to Signal messenger

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@Be.ing I appreciate your activity in both Purismā€™s and Signalā€™s git issue trackers. Signal is my main barrier for not running an L5 full time (you know, other than not having an Evergreen unit yet lol).

Hopefully with Signal being #4 in Purismā€™s Fund Your App theyā€™ll be able to fund a dev to get it working in Chatty.

Has anyone played with Axolotl lately? Has that become viable?

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