Comment by ActorNightly
2 years ago
Has anyone tried setting up their own Signal server? Be cool to do this, and then give all your friends the ip for truly private messaging.
Seems like all their stuff is open source.
2 years ago
Has anyone tried setting up their own Signal server? Be cool to do this, and then give all your friends the ip for truly private messaging.
Seems like all their stuff is open source.
Which app would they all use and from where would they get it? Signal does not (intentionally) support the official app using other servers or the platform itself supporting federation. [1]
[1]: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
This can be a premium feature. Run your own server and for a little bit of money you can configure your client to use an alternative server. Client code is what make it private and secure, so you want to use their verified client even with your own server.
This makes sense and in the same time it doesn't. You're supposed to pay to use your infra, not theirs?
Offering self-hosted servers would probably just degrade the security guarantees of Signal if people misconfigure them. Doesn't seem to be worthwhile for the Signal foundation to run into this risk of undermining their own reputation for a niche user base who cares about self-hosting.
> Doesn't seem to be worthwhile for the Signal foundation to run into this risk of undermining their own reputation
It's a bit too late for that. They undermined their reputation when they started permanently keeping sensitive user data in the cloud (like a list of every person you contact), and then again when they refused to update their privacy policy which lies to users about their data collection practices, and then again when they killed off the ability to get both "secure" communications and unsecured SMS, and then again when they started adding weird cryptoshit nobody asked for. Signal seems to be telling people as loudly as they can not to use/trust them.
In my mind, the whole point of using Signal is that I don't have to trust the server. Why would it matter who hosts the server if we can trust that the clients' communications are E2E encrypted?
unlikely the people i want to talk will bother setting this up
And the people those friends want to talk to. And the friends of those friends.
To have self-hosted chat services, you either need a niche enough service that you'll never have two parties that would want to talk to each other while being on different servers, or federation. Signal chose the former, so here I am with eight communication apps on my phone.
Maybe the next best thing could be to support multiple servers, like how email clients let you fetch data from more than one email provider, if they're so worried about federation inhibiting their ability to control the ecosystem that they plainly won't go there and hold speeches about how harmful that situation would be. Then we could have self hosting and also Signal wouldn't have to care about federating with my self-hosted server.
Layer it on top of something like Matrix, then?
I mean the idea would be you download the app but use my server instead of of the default ones.