A relevant community for anyone visiting this thread:

[email protected]

I think what they’re saying is that, to a lot of people (myself included), Signal is currently the best option despite being centralized. The decentralized options have UX issues, too small a user base, or aren’t well known enough to have gone through robust security/privacy reviews. While you can’t see what’s running on the signal servers, the app is open source and so far it looks to be encrypting the information correctly and it’s not sending anything but the minimal data to their servers.

‘A lot of eyeballs on the code’ is only relevant for open source apps. They were making a comparison between Signal and the many other open source mobile messaging apps.

You might also find this chart helpful if you’re looking for other alternatives. Personally, I found Signal to be the best one to get my friends and family onto

https://www.securemessagingapps.com/

Looks good, I’ve added it to this post and the two pinned ones

Finally! This was keeping me from recommending Signal to more people

If you do decide to opt in to secure backups, you’ll be able to securely back up all of your text messages and the last 45 days’ worth of media for free.

If you want to back up your media history beyond 45 days, as well as your message history, we also offer a paid subscription plan for US$1.99 per month.

That’s excellent to hear. Hopefully no one abuses the media backups, I would understand if they did it by file sizes

This one

https://github.com/TrianguloY/URLCheck

You set it as the browser and it intercepts any links you click on so you can edit them. You can set some default actions, as well as share links to the app

For example, the share sheet on Android is still terrible. Something that could be fixed by adding a way to customize it quickly (whitelist a few apps and manually pin+sort a few contacts/apps)

Yet another reason why privacy focussed tools should be automatically stripping those out. I use an app on mobile and do it manually on desktop, but it’s still tedious at times

It could mean faster development if they can spend that time on other things

I found that after a good part of a year, I wasn’t using the widgets menu at all and it would take me more time to find the right tag than if I had folders that benefit from muscle memory

I do get the appeal though, it’s very polished

Lawnchair is what I’m currently using, and it’s improving. They’ve had a large development push recently. Another one I’ve looked at was SmartLauncher.

I tried Kvaesitso for a while but ultimately it wasn’t for me

For people asking about alternative communities, we put together a list a while back when closing !askmen@lemmy.ca: https://lemmy.ca/post/48642221

“Ask” communities (for starting a discussion):

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

For questions that are more specific to your situation:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]

Group specific communities:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

Broader in topic (not necessarily questions):

• [email protected]

There are some other projects in this space already, with varying levels of open source / selfhostability / features

https://zulip.com/

https://revolt.chat/

https://mattermost.com/

https://www.rocket.chat/

Zulip and Revolt looked the most promising for Slack and Discord replacements respectively

You might like [email protected], which is specific to software

I think that’s Futurism.com’s text, not OP

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/09/google-antitrust-ruling-firefox-search-deal

United States District Judge Amit Mehta has ruled that Google can continue to pay other companies, including browser makers like Mozilla, to be their default search engine.

I see, I’ll edit my other comment. So what even changes then, were they even making exclusive deals in the past? The discussion I remember was about how being the default made it difficult for others to compete since most people don’t change the defaults.

I think they’re referring to Firefox’s funding, a lot of which was through search deals

An article from 5 years ago: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-google-search-deal-for-firefox

edit: seems like that hasn’t changed by this ruling either

United States District Judge Amit Mehta has ruled that Google can continue to pay other companies, including browser makers like Mozilla, to be their default search engine.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/09/google-antitrust-ruling-firefox-search-deal

It might, but I think it might be a federation bug between our instances. I haven’t seen one like this before, but I’ll keep an eye out to see if it happens again / there’s a pattern.

You could also try setting yourself as a bot, saving, and then reversing it again. That might prompt your instance to send out the information again.

Oh sorry about that, it’s still showing up as a bot for me but it’s fine on your instance. I think the information just hasn’t federated over to lemmy.ca yet

An excerpt

Jen asked:

There’s a lot of secure software, that probably people in this room work on, that is developed in the open, and that is used primarily by at-risk users, including things like Tor, Signal, SecureDrop. That’s great, because it makes it easy for folks to contribute. Maybe you don’t want that, I understand that can be hard. But it also makes it easier for people to audit and gain assurance that the app is doing what you claim without having to have, you know, EFF reverse engineer it. Would you be open to making the app open source?

His answer: “Absolutely not.”

Why? “I don’t want anybody from the government to have their hooks in how I’m doing what I’m doing. Once you go open source, everybody has access to it. So I’m just going to keep the codebase private at this time.”

He also claimed that the government can’t learn everything about how an app works by reverse engineering it, which isn’t true.

I agree with Jen. His answers are very concerning.

Your account is marked as a bot by the way, you can fix that in your user settings