Looks like before it gets out of beta it will be available in fucking whatsapp.

Fucking

Parrelli explains that Signal is instituting the $3 fee to prevent scammers from creating multiple accounts and flooding the network.

$3 does not seem like nearly enough to prevent this

You also need to factor in the cost of getting a new phone number. If creating an account without a phone number is significantly more expensive than just buying a burner SIM, it defeats the entire purpose.

Here in Austria, I've seen SIM cards for as low as €2.

Oh hey great, I don't need a phone number anymore, I just need a...Google account and a credit card? That's so much worse...

If you’re worried about the payment being tied to your account, Parrelli also explains that the app will use the same zero-knowledge proofs Signal uses for its donation system.

Trust me bro.

This is just a quicker way of de-anonymizing than having to track down how you paid for a phone number. At least you can get a phone number with crypto.

You can only reach a few people before an account is banned due to reports.
And most people won't fall for scams.
And you also wanna pay the remaining operation not spend most returns on signal accounts.

Because of that there's a massive difference in the kind of spam you get when it costs cents vs a few bucks per account.
I definitely get more spam on discord than signal for example.

3 bucks is also a lot more than it takes in some places to get numbers, so maybe long-term signal will try to also limit those number spaces with a fee? Either way this is enough to keep numbers as the weak link not numberless signups.

Agreed. They should not have tied it into a Google account, literally ruins the whole point of being anonymous on there. I get they needed to implement some sort of easy payment method, but this isn't it.

Only thing I could think to do is create a burner Google account, buy a Google play card in cash, and add those funds to your burner account to pay the 3 dollars.

This plus their longstanding refusal to implement things like an official FDroid client or UnifiedPush notifications leads me to believe they're not committed to privacy.

Those are also my two biggest gripes about Signal as well. At least the Molly fork solves both of those issues, that's what I use.

Yeah, I've been considering trying to move friends and family to an XMPP server, but there are a couple older folks who will probably make that difficult.

simplex folks. use simplex.

Why Simplex over Molly?

simplex requires zero identifiable information.

you have to add users to the trust to get access to the channel/dm.

the relay is self-hosted, meaning you have control over where your messages are handled. this means you could run it entirely on an intranet or pipe it through a lora-wan.

personally I run a local instance within my LAN, and another instance in the cloud. both terminate with the same DNS. this means I can have quick very secure chats with family while at home that never leaves my network and when we're out messages are still going through my infrastructure.

This trust is also needed for sealed sender. It's fundamentally impossible to make such a system actually anonymous

molly is no longer maintained properly. It's worse than signal as last molly version is from Jul 31 and last signal is from Sept 11.

i would think twice about using molly as the only benefit over signal is db encryption.

I'm aware they lag behind in updates, only reason I chose to use Molly was because if I recall correctly they use Google Firebase for notifications, and I use grapheneOS and don't have Google play service installed. So not sure if I would get notifications in my setup if I used signal witn no play services.

Correct me if I'm wrong though

definitely a comparative turd to use in my. expernce and mine just sh! the bed and froze solid, losing everything with a decryption error, while attempting to do that most boring of things, a backup

were you trying to backup a relay or your chatlog?

A Google account is required?? Well that's just dumb..

This is a red flag.

I don't think the same credit card can be used for multiple accounts.

So it is not about money but hoops one needs to jump through to pay that money.

So $3 and Google is to "prevent spam"

But yet I can pay less then 0.25$ for an SMS and get 4x the accounts.

I don't think its going to prevent spam, I think its going to eventually lead to someone getting got for linking a gmail to a signal account.

Signal is a paid contractor for Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and others since many years.

They openly talk about this on their own blog: https://signal.org/blog/allo/

Is there no better way of doing this for Signal?!

Simplex have different design and does not cover the same use case.
For me I just want a middle ground between the two.

While this may be true, I don't understand what this has to do with a tool that peaches privacy requiring a tool that violates all aspects of privacy.

EDIT: ah I believe you are saying that I never should have expected such purism in the first place.

fair enough.

Signal has always been shady. Never trusted them

Hey, at least their clients are open source so you know that their chats are actually encrypted.

Well yes and no. You can compile a client yourself but you can't use it with the official server, you have to use the binaries they put out for that. So there's a bit of a gap there.

Aren't they free? I would think any carrier would jump at the occasion to get you on their network. Besides you'll have to purchase service anyway so charging for the SIM seems like a dick move. Unless you meant that the 2€ includes some form of service.

Just for the moment

Can I buy an account on a device that has no Play Services?

Not yet. We have plans to add more payment methods, but currently only offer Play Store in-app payments, which requires Play Services.

I just checked again, the offer is now €4 and includes 100 minutes/sms/megabyte.

their clients are open source

Their clients are but they sell proprietary licenses, so when they proclaim that There is no WhatsApp 'backdoor', you have to take their word for it.

I believe you are saying that I never should have expected such purism in the first place.

What I'm saying is that Signal have a conflict of interest when it comes to Google and other customers.

I would support them than having to provide a phone number.

It doesn't matter how many back doors they have on the server side. As long as the clients are open source (and end-to-end encrypted), the only thing they can tell is that two people communicated.

That's not how it works when you have a messaging platform where the server provider can secretly pair additional devices. Send PGP encrypted mails if you want it differently.