It is for people outside of tech circles. Just having to locate an instance is a massive amount of friction. But you need to locate an instance and a client, and there are a lot of configurable options and things that can go wrong.
Signal is turn-key, easier than Whatsapp friction wise, encryption by default, open source, non-profit, and secure. I don’t like that their messaging platform isn’t more open and that they don’t have mitigation against, say, AWS going offline, but at the moment, they are the only app I have successfully migrated “normal” people to.
I think in the future, fediverse-esque tech will reduce their friction. Instead of managing instances, data is user-sovereign, instances never see non-encrypted user data, users automatically move between them, you don’t sign up you have generated signing keys that are opaque to users unless they want to see them (tech people), etc. Fediverse can actually be LESS friction than current social media people use, but that hasn’t been implemented yet.
Encryption is enabled by default in most sane clients for DMs. Groups are not by default because encryption in huge groups is slow.
And if you use a public server it’s not that hard to set up.
It is for people outside of tech circles. Just having to locate an instance is a massive amount of friction. But you need to locate an instance and a client, and there are a lot of configurable options and things that can go wrong.
Signal is turn-key, easier than Whatsapp friction wise, encryption by default, open source, non-profit, and secure. I don’t like that their messaging platform isn’t more open and that they don’t have mitigation against, say, AWS going offline, but at the moment, they are the only app I have successfully migrated “normal” people to.
I think in the future, fediverse-esque tech will reduce their friction. Instead of managing instances, data is user-sovereign, instances never see non-encrypted user data, users automatically move between them, you don’t sign up you have generated signing keys that are opaque to users unless they want to see them (tech people), etc. Fediverse can actually be LESS friction than current social media people use, but that hasn’t been implemented yet.