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Comment by tut-urut-utut | Hacker News Reader

Facebook down, WhatsApp down, but Signal still works. Time for a change?

EDIT: Yes, Signal is not federated, but that's what people are at least ready to consider as a WhatsApp alternative. I also created Matrix / Element account, and had 0 contacts using it already.

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Signal had their own share of downtime. How about going to a federated system instead of repeating the same mistakes? (https://matrix.org)

But still a part would be down, if a server has an outage. How about a system, where every device that is used for chatting is a server at the same time? I wonder whether something like that already exists. Bundle it together with bigger servers to handle the load. If the bigger servers experience outages, the service can still continue, although a bit slower

Matrix P2P already exists.

Thanks, didn't know that!

The reason contacts don't tend to show up on Matrix/Element is because we don't push the user into sharing their addressbooks given the obvious privacy issues. Instead you mainly have to figure out who you know out-of-band for now (e.g. tweet "hey, who's on Matrix?").

I would be happy to have an option to share my availability on Matrix with other people that decided the same if that would mean I could bootstrap my network on that platform.

As it is now, Matrix may offer better privacy and more robust weil federated and p2p, but if I had to personally ask all of my contacts if they actually use it using some other medium, I can keep using that other medium too for conversations.

> Signal still works

https://old.reddit.com/r/thehatedone/comments/f160jh/is_sign...

Signal is still centralized and uses AWS. So if AWS was to go down, it would affect not just Signal but vast swathes of the Internets.

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