Are there any apps that support RCS that aren’t made by Google or a crappy cellular provider (ie: bloatware Verizon apps)?
I appreciate the features RCS has, but I’d love to get that without sending it all to Google with a “trust us” approach to backdoor keys. The documentation I looked at indicated that anyone could setup an app to support RCS and communicate with Google’s RCS users, but I can’t find any apps that actually do that.
Also would love to be able to message from multiple devices using RCS, which Google has working in their web app.
RCS is all about controlling the messaging market — just like every other messaging network out there. Every implementation is proprietary and locked behind the implementer’s servers.
If you want something open source you want Signal. There are also other messaging solutions that you can self-host.
Big tech will never give you open access to their networks because that’s against the whole point.
SMS is the odd one out because it doesn’t require servers, and the reason it’s so open and universally supported is because back in the day the governments of France and Germany forced carriers to do it that way, and once it got popular it spread.
SMS is also super low level, it’s like the equivalent of ping. The GSM protocol already had a way to send small packets of data to phones for diagnostic/control purposes and someone figured you could also cram small text messages in there and thus SMS was born. It was really created as a way to monitize functionality that already needed to exist on the network for technical reasons. Back in the early days of GSM text messaging plans were a big money maker for the carriers because it cost them almost nothing to send SMS across the network but they charged customers by the message.
Signal is two things, a protocol to use over something else, and a proprietary service.
Matrix is an example of a total solution.
Signal is great, but it was unclear if I would be able to self-host my own Signal server if I wanted to support the public network and provide redundancy to my local LAN and connected networks.
Every time I look at Matrix it looks really cool and sounds great. But each time I try to setup a client or actually use it, nothing works, apps crash, and I can’t actually use the dang thing. I tried setting up my own server, even tried using a public server with the Element web-app and still nothing worked, couldn’t join rooms, etc.
Love the idea, haven’t seen a decent implementation yet. Honestly kinda wish there was PGP for sms or something like that. I couldn’t care less if the transport is insecure, as long as I can trust that only the intended recipient and myself can read/modify my messages.
You can’t. Signal’s server is closed source. Only the clients are open.I just discovered Signal open source the server. Please kindly disregard what I said. I had the old news in my mind (maybe).
Signals server software is open source. I suspect you mean the main signal network is closed and centrally controlled (it’s not federated basically) - anyone can run a private signal server (and network) but not as a node within the main signal network is my understanding.
Maybe they meant that at some point a few years ago Signal didn’t update their public open source server code for neraly a year or so while simultaneously rolling out new features.
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I thought it was something like that. What I really want to see is an open-source version of Briar.
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Briar is open source, but yeah, check out SimpleX Chat
I just checked and you’re right! I looked into Briar a while ago and ignored it because I couldn’t run the Briar-Mailbox program on Linux.
I don’t think it runs on iOS yet either, which may limit who you can contact with it.
I have an off-grid Linux box that hosts a local Wi-Fi network and some communication and entertainment apps. I want to host a chat service for asynchronous off-grid comms. Briar looked like the perfect option if I could just add the mail-box to my Linux box.
Simplex looks like it might do something similar, but it doesn’t look like it does comms over direct Bluetooth.
To add to what others have said, Signal’s server code is open source, but they took the anti-spam module closed source last year
Matrix doesn’t have forward secrecy, and signal is not proprietary, it’s free and open source,
And Matrix does not fall back to SMS (unless someone implements such a Matrix client).
It would also be silly to try to get everyone you know to use YOUR Matrix client, or one compatible with it.
Signal removed SMS support a while ago…
Indeed, making it ineligible as an alternative to RCS or iMessage