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Signal is the No. 1 downloaded app in the Netherlands. But why?
(techcrunch.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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Privacy
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That is the problem of getting another person to change something... A very valid problem but not inherent to decentralization.
Kinda is, though - regular people have a lot more trust in centralized services, and Signal has a very large userbase compared to anything selfhostable. And IME they really, really hate installing new messengers.
Plus, selfhosted E2EE would still be just as illegal as Signal. Many people won't be willing to participate in illegal activity, and if you just don't use E2EE on your selfhosted solution the usefulness seems rather dubious.
I don't think any ban on such selfhostable servers is enforceable at all.
What if the government shuts off the app source (and source code) and makes it illegal for anyone to download or redistribute it?
It doesn't necessarily have to be enforcable to deter most people. At minimum, with such a ban there's zero chance to communicate with government agencies with E2EE.
well in the end it's just HTTPS traffic.. police has to search your phone to know if you are a user.
but if you federate (on clearnet), that could give away that you host it
Well, technically, they could MITM the traffic similarly to how they did to jabber . ru. But a) there are mitigations for this and b) more importantly - they would need to bother. No one's going to bother doing it to a random family server that has attracted no previous attention.