The Signal messenger and protocol.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/40356824

Signal only provides a script for .deb based distros on their official website. The flatpak is currently not ideal because it stores encryption keys in plaintext.

The provided link suggests an automated installation in a Ubuntu Distrobox including automated updates. Useful for every distro that does not natively support .deb packages.

Seriously, @signal @signalapp, two questions:

What the fsck?
What the fucking fsck?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/39286218

@signal I'm guessing you're not an official Signal account? If not, what's the best way to get feedback back to them?

https://signal.org/blog/polls/ says "but poll responses are not anonymous and anyone can see who has voted for which option in a poll."

That's anyone in the group chat who can see the poll, not actually anyone in the unrestricted sense, right? Right?

ETA: yes it is just people in the group chat. Message sent to signal through official channels. Thanks all!

#signal

Which I think is great! However, I've been donating $5/month for years and they're still trying to charge me $1.99/month. I feel like supporters should be exempt from the fee.

Anyone else having problems sending messages/making calls?

On a big group (like 800 ppl), it's really annoying to see a post, and then 30 system messages saying that someone joined the group, left, change their security, number, changed their avatar, etc. Is there a way to hide this by default? If not, do you think it could be a good idea?

Filmed on 5/20/2025 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.

About the speakers:

Meredith Whittaker is Signal’s President and a member of the Signal Foundation Board of Directors. She has over 17 years of experience in tech, spanning industry, academia, and government. Before joining Signal as President, she was the Minderoo Research Professor at NYU, and served as the Faculty Director of the AI Now Institute which she co-founded. Her research and scholarly work helped shape global AI policy and shift the public narrative on AI to better recognize the surveillance business practices and concentration of industrial resources that modern AI requires. Prior to NYU, she worked at Google for over a decade, where she led product and engineering teams, founded Google’s Open Research Group, and co-founded M-Lab, a globally distributed network measurement platform that now provides the world’s largest source of open data on internet performance. She also helped lead organizing at Google. She was one of the core organizers pushing back against the company’s insufficient response to concerns about AI and its harms, and was a central organizer of the Google Walkout. She has advised the White House, the FCC, the City of New York, the European Parliament, and many other governments and civil society organizations on privacy, security, artificial intelligence, internet policy, and measurement. She recently completed a term as Senior Advisor on AI to the Chair at the US Federal Trade Commission.

Stéphan-Eloïse Gras is a researcher and entrepreneur specializing in the geoeconomics of AI. An assistant professor at CNAM-Paris, she explores AI technologies through the lens of software & critical data studies. She also serves on the board of Probabl, an AI company built around the popular open-source library scikit-learn. With 15+ years in the digital sector, she has led initiatives at the intersection of innovation, research, education, and emerging markets. As CEO of Digital Africa, she oversaw a €130M initiative supporting African startups. She also co-founded Africa 4 Tech and led OpenClassrooms’ strategic expansion in Africa. Her doctoral research traced the rise of AI through a music recommendation algorithm acquired by Spotify. She teaches at CNAM, Sciences Po, NYU, and Sorbonne and is currently writing a book on the geoeconomics of AI, describing LLMs as “belief-making machines.”

Rachel Donadio, the Library’s Curator of Cultural Programs, is a Paris-based writer, journalist and critic, a contributing writer for the Atlantic, a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and a former European Culture Correspondent and Rome Bureau Chief of the New York Times.

This event was part of Ways of Seeing, a special series exploring the connections between storytelling, creativity, and the visual world.

For the past 4 days or so, I’ve received around 5 message requests from random accounts and was added to 2 groups with other random people. I assume these are fake accounts and scams.

Was my number leaked somewhere maybe? And even then, why use SignaI? I don’t really have a lot of contacts on Signal, mostly just family and a couple of acquaintances who also have it. And I’ve never gotten a random request in the 8+ years I’ve been using it.

Probably more relevant today than when the article was first published 7 years ago, this is the guy who went on to make Signal possible in its current form.

If walking away from $850 million feels like penance, Acton has gone further. He has supercharged a small messaging app, Signal, run by a security researcher named Moxie Marlinspike with a mission to put users before profit, giving it $50 million and turning it into a foundation. Now he’s working with the same people who built the opensource encryption protocol that is part of Signal and protects WhatsApp’s 1.5 billion users and that also sits as an option on Facebook Messenger, Microsoft’s Skype and Google’s Allo messenger. Essentially, he’s re-creating WhatsApp in the pure, idealized form it started: free messages and calls, with end-to-end encryption and no obligations to ad platforms.   Acton says that Signal now has unspecified “millions” of users, with a goal to make “private communication accessible and ubiquitous.” While Acton’s $50 million should take it a long way—Signal could afford only five full-time engineers until he came along—the foundation wants to figure out a perpetual business model, whether that means taking corporate donations like Wikipedia or partnering with a larger company, as Firefox has done with Google.

None of the other private messaging services that people like to talk about on Lemmy have a solidly moral billionaire on their side.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/35648744

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/18547034

In the past, if you broke or lost your phone, your Signal message history was gone. This has been a challenge for people whose most important conversations happen on Signal. Think family photos, sweet messages, important documents, or anything else you don’t want to lose forever. This explains why the most common feature request has been backups; a way for people to get Signal messages back even if their phone is lost or damaged.

After careful design and development, we are now starting to roll out secure backups, an opt-in feature. This first phase is available in the latest beta release for Android. This will let us further test this feature in a limited setting, before it rolls out to iOS and Desktop in the near future.

Here, we’ll outline the basics of secure backups and provide a high-level overview about how they work and how we built a system that allows you to recover your Signal conversations while maintaining the highest bar for privacy and security.

Secure Backups 101

Secure backups let you save an archive of your Signal conversations in a privacy-preserving form, refreshed every day; giving you the ability to restore your chats even if you lose access to your phone. Signal’s secure backups are opt-in and, of course, end-to-end encrypted. So if you don’t want to create a secure backup archive of your Signal messages and media, you never have to use the feature.

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.

This is the first time we’ve offered a paid feature. The reason we’re doing this is simple: media requires a lot of storage, and storing and transferring large amounts of data is expensive. As a nonprofit that refuses to collect or sell your data, Signal needs to cover those costs differently than other tech organizations that offer similar products but support themselves by selling ads and monetizing data.

Anatomy of Secure Backups: Privacy First, Always

At Signal, our commitment to privacy informs which features we build and the ways that we build them.

Using the same zero-knowledge technology that enables Signal groups to work without revealing intimate metadata, backup archives are stored without a direct link to a specific backup payment or Signal user account.

At the core of secure backups is a 64-character recovery key that is generated on your device. This key is yours and yours alone; it is never shared with Signal’s servers. Your recovery key is the only way to “unlock” your backup when you need to restore access to your messages. Losing it means losing access to your backup permanently, and Signal cannot help you recover it. You can generate a new key if you choose. We recommend storing this key securely (writing it down in a notebook or a secure password manager, for example).

These choices are part and parcel of Signal’s guiding mission to collect as close to no data as possible, and to make sure that any information that is required to make Signal robust and usable cannot be tied back to the people who depend on Signal. This is why wherever there’s a choice between security and any other objective, we’ve prioritized security.

Enabling Secure Backups

If you want to opt in to secure backups, you can do so from your Signal Settings menu. For now, only people running the latest beta version of Signal on Android will be able to opt in. But soon, we’ll be rolling this feature out across all platforms.

Once you’ve enabled secure backups, your device will automatically create a fresh secure backup archive every day, replacing the previous day’s archive. Only you can decrypt your backup archive, which will allow you to restore your message database (excluding view-once messages and messages scheduled to disappear within the next 24 hours). Because your secure backup archive is refreshed daily, anything you deleted in the past 24 hours, or any messages set to disappear are removed from the latest daily secure backup archive, as you intended.

Backing up, moving forward

We’re excited to introduce secure backups, making sure you can retain access to your Signal messages even when your phone is lost or destroyed. But secure backups aren’t the end of the road.

The technology that underpins this initial version of secure backups will also serve as the foundation for more secure backup options in the near future. Our future plans include letting you save a secure backup archive to the location of your choosing, alongside features that let you transfer your encrypted message history between Android, iOS, and Desktop devices.

Secure backups are available in today’s Android beta release. A full public release, along with iOS and Desktop support, is coming soon.

Android 16, Pixel 7 Pro. My Signal data was getting too bloated, so I backed it up, moved the backup to PC, and verified that signalbackup-tools can decrypt and extract the backup. Cool. Now I want to wipe the data in the app while not losing any settings or contacts or anything.

In the app, I went to Settings > Manage storage > Delete message history. It pops up two separate confirmations, and I hit "Yes" to both. After waiting a bit each time, I did this three time. It hasn't gone well.

• Signal storage settings still says it's using almost 9 GB of data.
• However, Android says Signal is using just 154 MB of user data.
• All of my conversations and messages are still in Signal, but the media in each conversation shows a broken icon.
• The "Review storage" screen in Signal still shows tons of media with thumbnails, but none open. Tapping on one just shows a blank camera roll and black space.

So, I went to "Review storage" and it let me do a select all and delete, saying, "Are you sure you want to do this? This will delete 9 GB of messages". I said yes, and it's still going. I hope this will at least delete the ghost media.

I suppose I could set a message duration in settings and let old chats expire, though I'm not really against keep the text messages. It was just years of cat photos and videos taking up way too much space.

But why isn't this feature working?

Update:

My phone screen turned off and when I re-opened it, the progress spinner on the delete progress is frozen. I can't cancel or anything. I can give it more time, and force close the app if I have to, but it's not looking good.

Update 2

I swiped the app away from the app switcher, and I was able to open it again and see conversations and such. When I opened settings, it showed that it was using 4.7 GB, and when i closed and reopened settings, it was s tiny bit smaller. Sure enough, after waiting a full hour, it now says it's only using 67 MB of storage, and all the thumbnails are gone from the media list. So... success?

I still have years worth of plain text messages, and I guess I don't mind that.

Hi! On the official web page for "Proxy Support - Signal Support" they mention that setting a proxy is not supported on the desktop clients.

However, when did such labels ever fully deter skilled Linux users?

My question is, did anyone succeed in rootless SOCKS5 configuration for Signal? I know it can be done with e.g. a new network namespace by executing a series of root commands. For example, like whonix does to put Signal-desktop in Tor. Is there anything a bit more gentle and localized? Ideally I'd include it into a bubblewrap (bwrap) configuration that I already have around.

If you've looked into that at any moment but didn't find any straightforward solutions, please write as well. It's OK, but still valuable to read.
Thx!

Found on the community forum: https://community.signalusers.org/t/group-chat-polls/3474/173

When I tap "invite friends", it's only to email a link to the app download webpage

When I tap the pencil button, it only allows me to send a message to an existing contact

I am missing a step, where is it?

Thank you

Unfortunately WhatsApp is large in the EU. In order to slowly try and transition away from it towards Signal, I was considering putting my Signal username and/or QR as the status and profile picture on WhatsApp. Any noteworthy downsides to this approach?

Signal for android was never able to do this, and eventually they removed sms.

But this new entitlement, only available in the EU, lets an iOS app of the user’s choice take on all handling of carrier messaging features, including e2ee RCS

I keep reading on articles, even those from this year, that Signal has an offline communications ability.

The articles talk about "Signal Offline" as an app. But that seems the same as the main Signal app?

Additionally, is there some functionality in Signal that allows you to connect with nearby users in the event when WiFi and cellular networks are down (like via some sort of a mesh network approach or Bluetooth)?

Edit: Thanks for the information to those who replied.

New feature in 7.54.0 (2025-05-13) on Signal Desktop now adds translated emoji names, :smile: to your language

Sadly, this throws off previous learning of emoji names. I personally only know the english names. It would be nice to switch back to english. Anyone feels the same?

I was wanting to share a Hoopla Digital link with someone and it immediately declared "link preview unavailable" without even trying as it usually does. This library-backed website is harmless. Signal's preview generation can be a little bothersome at times.