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Unpopular opinion: the silver lining in server outages is that they pull the curtain & reveal some hard truths about who is really behind some services we use... especially stuff we think are alternatives to Big Tech (spoiler: maybe they aren't).
Case in point: last year's #Microsoft outage took out #DuckDuckGo (mashable.com/article/microsoft…).
Today's Amazon's AWS outage took out #Signal in some areas: mastodon.world/@Mer__edith/115…
Oh my, is this time to convince my family & friends to move to Matrix? 🥲
Microsoft outage affects Bing, Copilot, DuckDuckGo, and ChatGPT
The company is aware of the issue and working to fix it.Cecily Mauran (Mashable)
PSA: we're aware that Signal is down for some people. This appears to be related to a major AWS outage. Stand by.
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Rob van Kan🔻
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •Amazon took out Flickr as well. I know it's a photography site for boomers but here we are.
status.flickr.net/
GeoffreyA
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •DansLeRuSH ᴱᶰ
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •Fabio Pani
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •I set up my very private one for my family: secure, light, fast, open source.
Roberto Resoli reshared this.
Thomas Bourdon
in reply to Fabio Pani • • •I also used my own xmpp server for my family. But I switched back to signal because xmpp client doesn't crypt data on client devices.
SimpleX is easy to use like signal and is decentralized (with tor relay). I tried it since weeks but I don't have my family for now. It's hard to make people switching over and over.
The big cons about Signal is it is centralized so it has a single point of failure and can be easily censor.
Fabio Pani
in reply to Thomas Bourdon • • •They **are** truly E2EE with several clients (such as Conversations.im or Monocles Chat) if you enable OMEMO or OTR.
Am I wrong?
Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to Fabio Pani • • •@Fabio Pani @Thomas Bourdon @Elena Rossini ⁂ indeed, all of the recommended xmpp clients (for regular chat¹) support omemo, including conversations, dino-im, gajim, monal and more
¹ xmpp is also used for different applications (IoT, internal communications, etc.) where requirements may be different, and there are clients that are suitable for those, but those are usually not what people mean when talking about xmpp in these contexts.
ij
in reply to Fabio Pani • • •I've been running that for years now on nerdculture.de without problems.
Zeppe reshared this.
categulario 🐍 🦀 🦎 🇵🇸
in reply to Fabio Pani • • •Hierarchy
in reply to Fabio Pani • • •Fabio Pani
in reply to Hierarchy • • •About Prosody? No idea, I just read the official doc here: prosody.im/doc
Documentation – Prosody IM
prosody.imHierarchy
in reply to Fabio Pani • • •Fabio Pani
in reply to Hierarchy • • •To give more info of this kind means to lower security of my system.
Anyway, I'm very confident about my instance because:
- default config system of my server is top-level;
- my instance doesn't connect with anyone else (since private and for my own usage).
Stefano Marinelli
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •Show them this, I'm sure you'll convince them: mastodon.bsd.cafe/@stefano/115…
Stefano Marinelli
2025-10-20 08:20:57
Elena Rossini ⁂
in reply to Stefano Marinelli • • •Werner the Werewolf 🎃
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •I'm a techie. I recently tried Matrix. I find it so clunky. Non-techies will hate it and abandon it. I'll keep pushing Signal to family and friends.
#Microsoft #DuckDuckGo #Signal
Elena Rossini ⁂
in reply to Werner the Werewolf 🎃 • • •cuan_knaggs
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •Thomas Lemarchand
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •@worldwidewerner
Whatevs
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •I struggled to get most of my contact to move to Signal, that is super easy to set up and identify contacts. Matrix would be far too much of a learning curve for most.
People loading on Meredith’s message re AWS also do not do any good, imo.
Elena Rossini ⁂
Unknown parent • • •David Peach
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •Chris 🦑
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •well, I think both cases are also valid for using these services.
There not really any non big tech alternatives to MS / AWS cloud stuff out there yet, but Duck and Signal added A LOT of privacy ALREADY until then. Utopia is still far, but we get closer.
h3artbl33d
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •@g7s
Plus, Matrix is a lot less secure than Signal is.
We might see a decentralised version of Signal one day - the fork Molly is already working on it (Flatline).
cuan_knaggs
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •Calls, chat and video conferencing with Nextcloud Talk
NextcloudMartina Neumayer
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •I read few researchers some weeks ago. What they write is frightening. They checked those young generations living in the EU and almost 34% of them can not properly write something by using their hands. Another twenty is already acting like the digital junkies. Take them phones away and you will get same effects like by the drugs.
Where the heck humanity is going?
Jana @ DENOG17
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •There is a tradeoff in everything. Having something decentralized is cool, but Signal just checks sooo many other boxes, that I can accept that they are hosted on AWS in the US.
Their encryption is top notch, so it doesn't really matter where the data is stored (and in the case of signal, they don't even store anything for long).
Plus the app is pretty easy to use for everyone and also used by enough people to make it a viable option for the masses.
Matrix on the other hand is decentralized but has so many other pitfalls and issues that I can't recommend it to anyone that's non-technical.
Helena
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •Daniel
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •I know there is a cost upfront but worth every penny.
Daniel
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •A self-hosted server is a must.
Diogo Constantino
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •jowek
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •But #deltachat wow wow wow.
People are surprised by the ease and functionalities of delta chat.
So i'll recommend to push for that, instead of matrix.
Elena Rossini ⁂
in reply to jowek • • •jowek
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •And multiple profiles and som sim-login. Really nice.
Roberto Guido
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help…
Advertise on DuckDuckGo Search - DuckDuckGo Help Pages
DuckDuckGoreshared this
Elena Rossini ⁂ e sbarrax aka Marco Frattola reshared this.
Hubert Figuière
in reply to Roberto Guido • • •Elena Rossini ⁂
in reply to Hubert Figuière • • •@hub haha excellent! I will adopt this name too 😂
@madbob
Ray McCarthy
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •The Cloud is back to the 1960s, someone's elses server / single point point of failure.
I wrote a book examining it set in a fantasy. The technology bits are real.
corvidspress.com/fiction/other…
No Silver Lining – Corvids Press
www.corvidspress.comhnapel
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •jaKa Močnik
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •leon 🏳️🌈 🇵🇱
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •adb
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •I don't think #matrix is good for family and friends, I recommend #DeltaChat for that use case, it is much more user-friendly and simple for family and friends, registration is painless, just set a name and avatar, no private information needed, no passwords, no captcha, no SMS codes, etc.
and it has good multi-device multi-profile support
kitkat
in reply to adb • • •@adbenitez
"I don't think matrix is good for family and friends"
It's pretty good actually, can specifically recommend FluffyChat, very simple UI, you don't even need an avatar
of course multi-device, multi-profile, web client, etc. and no SMS codes or private info necessary
adb
in reply to kitkat • • •@kitkat the avatar part is optional in Delta Chat as well ofc 😅
about fluffychat yeah, just installed it, first thing I am asked is to register a new account in matrix.org, Delta Chat onboarding is much easier
Andreas K
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •Well, AFAIK, ddg uses bing as their primary index.
Actually, the incestuous relationship with Microsoft has been commented on, e.g. ddg protects against anything BUT Microsoft.
Not really news.
🍐 Perivi Yohanesburgo 🍐
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •Matrix as a protocol is broken. Personally, I consider it harm reduction for public, federated group chats rather than a tool for private communications.
One of the reasons Signal choose Big Tech cloud services is because they are less likely to be censored. It is not ideal, but it is still a solid service… when the servers are operational.
If you want to selfhost an alternative, while security-wise there's none, you should have a look at XMPP. If you still use Yunohost, Prosody (an XMPP server implementation) should be there. For clients, you have Conversations on Android (which can also work as a UnifiedPush distributor) and Monal on iOS; just make sure OMEMO (the Signal-based encryption) is enabled by default.
jan Ki | 奇
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •xs4me2
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •Kris
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •Jochen Lillich
in reply to Kris • • •Elena Rossini ⁂
in reply to Jochen Lillich • • •Old Fucking Punk
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •Just wait until you discover the whole "FOSS hosted on Microsoft Github" wormhole! e.g., DeltaChat
Microsoft uses GitHub as a means to steal FOSS code snippets without following their licensing requirements for its AI, COPILOT, which also feeds ChatGPT.
Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •@Elena Rossini ⁂ in my experience¹ self/community hosting an xmpp serivce is much easier² and requires significantly less resources than hosting one's own matrix server, and people I know who use both tell me that the user experience is better on xmpp.
¹ quite a bit of xmpp experience, much less on matrix
² I'd put it in the same category as hosting a static website (running an http server on a bare system, not a managed one), and easier than hosting a fediverse instance.
Brick Duck
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •dbread
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •Enrico
in reply to Elena Rossini ⁂ • • •Everything* is on AWS. Big companies get huge discount and small companies/ startups can take advantage of people’s knowledge. In the last 10 years I worked for companies with millions of users and startups with (pretty much) no users, always on AWS.
* for a good approximation of everything, I guess someone is using Azure too, and a couple of luddites and niche companies use datacenters…