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this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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Signal is centralized, on the Signal foundation. It went down because Signal put all their eggs in one basket (data center). This is a (arguably) reasonable and common business decision/practice, and there's no way to predict outages. However, all users of the Signal app are at the mercy of these business decisions made by the Signal foundation. Whether or not Signal is using a distributed architecture internally is irrelevant.
Compare Signal to Delta Chat, which uses standard Email servers as well as custom optimized chat relays to implement the chat network. That is truly decentralized. It doesn't matter if all of AWS goes down, delta chat users will still be able to communicate using other email servers.
Yeah, I noted that they are centrally run by a single foundation, and that there are drawbacks to that. My argument isn't that it is perfect, my argument is that it is good, and people promoting privacy and security shouldn't be cutting it down. The FUD just keeps people using SMS and WhatsApp.
Well unfortunately you could never have a giant group chat in Delta currently due to the lack of moderation features. XMPP is better for that. I completely agree though that Delta (and Arcane Chat especially shoutout ADB great guy) has many of the privacy improvements that something like Signal ought to. It's stupendous for handing limited connectivity, the bots and apps are awesome (better than Matrix by far) and unlike the more commonly promoted alternatives that are dependent on US state dept funding (Signal and Matrix), XMPP and Delta Chat use W3C internet standards
Although they are trying to get picked up by the EU who are ignoring them ๐ not much better than state dept. Delta is just so interestingg