@rysiek
Imo yes, look at Signal. I will put trust to service with centralized servers if everything is open source in their code. In that case they are providing you their service and ease of not setting and maintaining things yourself, because not everyone has technical skills to do it. Centralised services are not evil if every bit of their code is open to the public.

@nikolal I disagree.

The reason I disagree is the same reason why a techie with time on their hands and a server would still not run their own Signal server and roll out their own Signal client: that would be useless, because people who are on Signal are locked up in the walled garden.

So, if Signal does something abusive, dumb, or malicious, the code being open will not help is. We will still only have a binary choice of "use it or drop it".

@nikolal now, I wouldn't use the word, "evil" here, since it's unnecessarily emotionally charged. Problematic? Yes. Red flag? Yes.

They're not just "providing you their service and ease of not setting and maintaining things yourself", they are actively making it effectively impossible for you to maintain things yourself.

It's a fine line, but an important one.

@nikolal that being said, I will continue to use Signal, simply because it currently offers the most reasonable (to me, in my specific circumstances) trade-off between Doing Things Right, and being popular enough to be useful day-to-day.

I would still love #Briar to take off, big time. In fact, I should play with Briar again.

@rysiek I think that main problem is ease of usage, no end user (eg my grandma) should even know what encryption is but she should be able to easily install and use apps. Briar with grandma? Maybe if I come and set it up for her. Briar with friends in foreign country? No go. I support decentralized services but fact is that they are not user friendly, and average user uses Whatsapp and doesn't know what decentralization is.

@nikolal have you tried briar? Set-up is pretty simple. The bigger problem is lack of client implementations (no desktop client, no client for iOS), and no store-and-forward (although last time I checked work was being done on that).

@rysiek Yes, I have and I love principle behind it. But there is that "get your friends on it" and they don't want to hear about it when I say that we need to exchange identities by scanning each others QR codes. They don't even know what identities are. You see problem now what centralized service like Signal solves easily? I would love for everyone to use Briar but that is simply not even close to being reality