Listened to the recording and I think y'all hit the nail on the head when you said the biggest risk to #FreedomTech is centralization. It's not just about lightning wallets, or overtly evil platforms like Google.
Take a look at your list of the best in class. A centralized notes app, a centralized chat app, etc. Sure, they're better than using GDocs or SMS, but they have a single point of failure (or surveillance).
I've seen a lot of people in infosec moving away from Signal over the past few years. The list of reasons is long:
- being a centralized chat service, run in the USA
- requiring and storing your phone number even after they implemented usernames
- making it difficult to have multiple accounts
- causing most of the non-privacy people to leave by pulling SMS support (because they can't use it as their texting app)
- blocking Signal-FOSS from being in the stock F-Droid repos
- not allowing different implementations of the client to connect to their servers
- waiting years to fix the known ussue of Signal desktop issue where the key were stored in plain text, and only doing it when a researcher with enough followers made a stink about it
- still not completely fixing that encryptoon issue (the key is stored in the keychain, which any other app can request and obtain) outside of macOS (where the OS has app-level restrictions and not just user-level restrictions)
- any person you've chatted with can get your phone number from your username by default (although, it does take some time & effort)
- the server not being fuly open source, and what source is published doesn't seem to run for those who have attempted to run their own Signal server
Any of these may be forgivable on their own, but they've added up to the point where people in infosec moving away, and they are usually the bellweather for things like this.
They're largely flocking to Matrix. It's the same encryption algorithm as Signal, but decentralized. It allows multiple accounts, you don't even need to give an email address to sign up on some servers, let alone a phone number. It has different clients, and I don't mean multiple forks of the same client. If one isn'polished enough for your taste, switch to another one.
Nothing is absolutely perfect, but it's a significant upgrade from Signal, which is already well above many other messaging apps.
