Does anyone know where this is at? I thought WhatsApp were being forced by the EU in 2024 to introduce this under the Digital Markets App? I’m googling, but am finding very little info.
It would be great if we could use Signal to communicate with WhatsApp groups. The sooner I can delete WhatsApp the better.
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Federating would mean handing off chat metadata to Meta and other for-profit companies in the future.
I don’t see how anyone excited to use Signal would like that. It very much defeats the purpose of using Signal.
The benefit would be the ability to chat with those refusing to move away from WhatsApp without having to use the Whats App. I get why they aren’t going for it, but I guess it could be handy.
Eff em.
Family, friends and most people in general I know use WhatsApp. It’s very very popular in some places.
This is not federation, this is signal being able to send message to a WhatsApp server and WhatsApp being able to interpret it to send it to a WhatsApp user. WhatsApp wouldn’t know more than what it already knows when you inevitably need to use the app to reply to your grandma or whatever.
A big plus however is that you can convince friends and family to switch since they would be able to keep chatting with their family and friends, so the entry barrier lowers by a ton.
This is not federation and it is great.
Okay, hear me out, but I think it’s actually beneficial.
Your content itself is encrypted, e2e so u don’t need to worry about that.
The signal protocol has recently introduced sealed sender. sealed sender is completely useless if all communications are going through a centralised server, such as the signal server (You can deanonimise senders easily). If the traffic travels across multiple servers with sealed sender, then it is theoretically impossible to reveal who the sender is unless you have communications with that other server give u info on who the sender was. So if you trust signal not to be collecting your metadata, then you must also trust them, not to be giving your metadata to metadata.
Signal declined, despite the EU bending over backwards and handing them the chance on a silver platter to become relevant.
IMO it’s a mistake, like getting rid of SMS support was (which is far less secure than WhatsApp yet Reddit/Lemmy seem to be angry about that but glad about lack of WhatsApp interoperability?? I guess it’s because Americans don’t really use WhatsApp so it’s not a big deal to them, whereas SMS is).
It would have been an amazing opportunity to help those that want to use Signal actually use it.
Yes, I’m aware Meta scrapes what metadata they can from messages, but if you make this clear in Signal when you talk to a WhatsApp user then I don’t see the issue, after all it’s what they did for SMS chats yet everybody loved that feature!
People trying Signal because it’s compatible with WhatsApp that everybody uses would lead to more Signal-to-Signal chats, and that’s a good thing.
The Signal foundation seems to care more about being ideologically pure for its 10 users than they do about making a small compromise that leads to far more users and far more Signal-to-Signal chats. It seriously disappointed me, and I stopped my £10 monthly donation hearing that bad news. I was so invested in Signal because I thought it was a great app, but there’s no point of financially supporting the growth of an organisation that vehemently rejects growth, I was throwing my money away.
I went from having 10 contacts on Signal down to just one after the SMS purge. I want to use this app but it’s pointless. Nobody wants to use an app that nobody uses, and Signal doesn’t seem to want any users either.
Frankly, I don’t buy their excuse. If they were truly that ideologically pure about absolute privacy, they’d never have added SMS support in the first place! And they wouldn’t have tied accounts to phone numbers either!
I think the reason they ditched SMS was down to development costs. Maintaining that functionality, as well as building RCS support, is far more expensive than simply cutting the feature out and trying to salvage some “it’s about privacy!” PR. I think the same is true for WhatsApp integration.
E: I knew this would start getting heavily downvoted once the Americans started logging on. Please try to understand that WhatsApp is big in much of the world. Everybody uses it. My bank wouldn’t let me take out a mortgage without WhatsApp. That’s how ingrained it is. Being able to use Signal and still receive messages from people would go a long way in getting people to install the app.
People trying Signal because it’s compatible with WhatsApp that everybody uses would lead to more Signal-to-Signal chats, and that’s a good thing.
75% of my signal contacts would delete signal and just use whatsapp if interOp happened… I’ve already slowly lost 1 or 2 contacts a year because i’m the only one they know on signal and they either gave up or forgot to reinstall when they got a new phone
Ok, that’s your guess.
90% of my contacts did leave Signal because of the SMS removal. And that’s SMS, which nobody uses.
People being able to use Signal without being cut off from the world would be massive in terms of getting people to use signal. Which like I said, would mean more Signal-to-Signal chats, which would bring more and more people to signal once they see that it’s an actual worthwhile platform.
I’m simply sharing my own experience. It’s not a “shot in the dark”
There would likely be fewer signal users because a lot of normies only installed signal because one or two of their friends convinced them to. Once they figure out that interOp exists, why would they keep using signal (where only 2 or 3 of their paranoid weirdo friends hang out) when they could just use whatsapp to talk with their signal friends?
Ive had multiple people tell me that they only keep signal around because of me… While i’m flattered, it doesnt bode well for signal.
There would be more people willing to try Signal because they would still be able to talk to people and not become a social outcast.
More people using signal would then mean more Signal-to-Signal chats.
More Signal-to-Signal chats is a good thing.
This a really easy issue to fix for signal.
Signal could enable it on a per-user basis. Why would your friends keep using signal? Because you would not enable it so they won’t be able to talk to you. However, they can now enable it and keep talking to everyone else, so they might decide to delete WhatsApp with in time.
The 75% of your contacts you describe sound like they installed Signal only to talk to you or at most a handful of people, while most of their social circle is on WhatsApp. These people are trapped on WhatsApp exactly because there is no interoperability.
People trying Signal because it’s compatible with WhatsApp that everybody uses would lead to more Signal-to-Signal chats
would it, though? why would anyone move away from Whatsapp if they could talk to Signal users without switching apps?
would it, though
Yes? 100% it would?
A fair amount of people don’t want to use WhatsApp, but they have no real choice because it’s practically a requirement for living in modern society.
If you make it so they can still chat to people on WhatsApp, they can go to Signal without worrying about that.
why would anyone move away from Whatsapp if they could talk to Signal users without switching apps?
Why would anybody play games on Linux via proton if they could just stay on Windows? Because they don’t like Windows.
Like I said above, plenty of people don’t like Meta, they use WhatsApp because there’s no real choice. Offer them a choice, and more will take the plunge.
And why would anybody move to Signal if they can’t talk to anybody?
The massive drop in users after getting rid of SMS support shows that people are willing to use Signal if they can still talk to people, but aren’t willing to use it when they can’t.
why would anybody move to Signal if they can’t talk to anybody?
why would anybody move to Signal if it’s no different in terms of privacy anymore? That’d be the consequence of interoperability.
You’d have better privacy when talking Signal to Signal. Interoperability would be towards those using WhatsApp and then it’d be either using Signal to chat with them or being forced to use WhatsApp’s app.
I’m assuming they’d have two different ways to communicate instead of just switching it all to WhatsApp’s system.
Because more people would be on signal, which means more Signal-to-Signal chats.
As I explained in my post.
Would they? Signal could make this a choice per user. As in, you as a signal user don’t enable it so they can’t msg you, but they can enable it from signal to talk to you and their social circle all at once.
I doubt it would lead to more signal-to-signal chats. With interoperability, they would be handing off their data to Meta, at which point users will just keep using WhatsApp as most are today.
If getting away from Meta and other for-profit companies is no more, what will be the selling point of Signal?
How could it not lead to more Signal-to-Signal chats?
The biggest problem with signal is that nobody uses Signal. Everybody uses WhatsApp.
If you make it so people can switch to signal without it completely cutting you off from the world, then more people will use it, which will lead to more Signal-to-Signal chats, which will lead to signal becoming widespread enough that people shift from WhatsApp.
People that do use signal value privacy or just want to get away from predatory companies
Once interoperability breaks this, what’s going to be the reason for people to use it?
There’s a good chance Signal will have even less users than it does today if that happens, because the few users who care will leave.
Everybody uses WhatsApp.
and there needs to be a reason for people to switch; what’s that then?
As long as you have a way to know if it’s a Signal to whatsapp conversation, I don’t see the problem.
If you only want to talk to Signal users, you could just deactivate the interooerability option.
It’s incredible that everybody was fine with SMS in Signal behaving this way, which is vastly less secure.
I wasn’t. Like a WhatsApp integration, I think using SMS defeats the purpose of Signal. My phone can handle SMS just fine, I don’t need that feature. But when you take a feature away, you only hear about people who used and liked it to there’s a clear bias to think there was a huge backlash.
I haven’t seen numbers to support the alleged “mass exodus” that happened when they removed it.
You are very very much in the minority. The backlash was enormous and the user count plummeted.
There’s no way to argue that it defeated the purposes of Signal. Nobody forced you to use SMS.
There will be more privacy, because there will be more Signal-to-Signal chats.
Also, SMS support is vastly less secure, yet Signal users loved that, and there was backlash/mass exodus when they dropped support.
and there needs to be a reason for people to switch; what’s that then?
As I already stated: privacy. People want privacy, but they also want people to talk to.
If Signal can only speak to Signal, nobody will get Signal because then you can’t talk to anybody. And there’s no point of a chat app where you can’t talk to anybody.
Add interoperability and suddenly people are more willing to try Signal because you won’t be a social outcast with nobody to talk to anymore. Suddenly you have a few contacts that are on signal and find the app convenient to use. Then the users grow from there. Meaning more Signal-to-Signal chats.
I’ve started that 3 or 4 times now.
I also don’t appreciate how you appear to be acting like speaking with WhatsApp users is mandatory. It’d be an optional feature just like the (vastly less secure/private) SMS was. Even for those people, this change would be a major win, because they’d have more people to talk to as more people join the app.
Yeah I also found that decision to be really disappointing. Before you could just use Signal for all your messaging and it would smartly use its own protocol if you both had accounts. Now it’s relegated to dedicated Signal users, which yeah I’ve got like 4 contacts left.
I also am waiting for news on this. I think many users lack of an european view. In Europe Whatsapp is a monopoly for Instant Messaging, look at https://www.statista.com/statistics/1005178/share-population-using-whatsapp-europe/. And you do not break a Monopoly with “remove whatsapp and use only signal”. I only have 1 contact in Signal, two years ago I had 5 contacts. If I remove Whatsapp, I lack of IM. Period.
Signal has E2EE encryption, Signal collects very few metadata. If they collect very few metadata, they have very few metadata to expose to Whatsapp. If Whatsapp forces them to provide more metadata, they could argue and even ask for arbitration with the European Comission.
But the lack of interest to ever consider the interoperalibity seems to me they are not interested in the european market. They do not want to grow in Europe to become the best privacy-respectful IM solution (with users).
Matrix being federated and interoperable from day 1 was pushing for this and there was a blog post on this:
So, Matrix (federated) and XMPP (federated) would also have “metadata leaks”. I imagine there would be metadata exchanged between federated servers and in addition the E2EE of XMPP and Matrix is not so good/modern as Signal’s. When Signal-Whatsapp interoperability is mentioned, all people is worried about metadata leaks but it seems that concern dissapears when federation of Matrix or XMPP is mentioned.
Apart from that and one very personal opinion, I always connected Matrix to IRC, I mean, it is used more for the groups functionality than for the person-to-person functionality. And IRC was never considered an Instant Messaging alternative. But this is a very personal feel.
So it looks like the problems are on the WhatsApp side. The EU should force them to get the finger out and come up with a proper solution.
it requires Whatsapp to open up interoperability with other services if they request that. Signal has already mentioned in the past that they wouldn’t be interested.
I’m looking forward to the day when I confederate my own fucking messaging server. But I doubt that’ll ever come.
I think a lot of the fediverse should introduce Matrix as part of their deployment for private messages directly.
I have no idea, but I’m also interested. Thus said, remember that’s only inside EU. I remember that Meta said they won’t apply this outside EU.
Hopefully never. Just stop using whatsapp. Be the change.
When facebook bought whatsapp, I walked through the list of chats I had on whatsapp and asked them what other apps they already used. Most people already used something other than a facebook owned thing or were willing to start.
WhatsApp is ubiquitous in Ireland, if only it was as easy to get away from it. Everything from clubs, schools, kids sport is done via group chats on WhatsApp. Absolutely hate Meta as a company, WhatsApp is the only app I use of theirs and only because they bought it from under us. If we could get proper interoperability, we could use a non WhatsApp app, but it’s not looking good so far.
Sounds awful, sorry to hear that
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No thanks.
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Signal had SMS support and dropped it. I imagine any argument for Whatsapp interoperability would face a similar fate.
Now that iPhones have RCS messaging, is something like this still desired? Can’t everyone just use RCS instead (assuming that everyone has a somewhat modern phone/OS that supports RCS). Or am I not seeing something here?
Well except that RCS is locked up by Google. I don’t believe there are any foss implementations.
Interesting point. Does that mean iPhones and Android can now have a shared group over imessage/whatever it’s called in Android? Are those messages encrypted?
