A fresh install of Signal takes up 410MB, blowing both Firefox and Chromium out of the water

Thanks for the correction, appreciate it. Not sure it changes much though.

Steam used an embedded browser long before it was cool.

Electron doesn’t use CEF, they directly bundle Chromium.

Eh, that's not the joy you think it is.

That's how software used to be distributed and that's where the terms DLL / Dependency Hell come from and why programs used to not uninstall cleanly and break other programs, etc.

It's more efficient, but it's also brittler and a lot more complex to manage. Conversely, bundling everything together with all its dependencies is a lot easier to manage, and a lot more robust overall, but comes at the expense of storage capacity and network bandwidth.

With Discord in browser, you lose Krisp, RPC ipc socket support (aRPC might work, no clue), and from what I remember screensharing only worked with browser tab capture.
Element will eat your RAM no matter where it's running. You could add it as a Nextcloud app to triple your RAM usage! Woo
And you can't run Steam games without the Steam client running. That's how their DRM works. (Unless you use the goldberg steam emulator, which is a whole another thing to talk about)

Using an E2E chat app in your browser necessarily makes the keys and decrypted messages available to your browser. They would have the ability to read messages, impersonate users, alter messages, etc. It would defeat the purpose of a secure messaging platform.

Hey now, the three React Native for Windows apps would be very offended if they were stable enough to read text input.

This is because they don't retain your (encrypted) messages on their servers right? Is this for storage reasons, or more just security philosophy of not being able to access past chats when you login from elsewhere?

But if I reply on the phone will it populate the desktop chat and vice versa?

Optional how so? It's a rotating key. Unless you have all of those keys to export into your computer, then you'll be stuck with the current synced key.

It means that if you have chats on one device and install Signal on another one, the chats don't transfer to it. After you link new device, new chats do sync perfectly fine.

Care to elaborate?

I use the app from the AUR and I don't think I've had a single problem in 3 years.

Yes, full disk encryption helps against intruders with device access, but not against the files being indexed by other application. My phone is encrypted, but I still use a signal client that is encrypted again.

Of course not,

with the new encapsulator all you need is to reconfigure your turbomutator to allow electrostabilizer executable to directly read instructions from your self-hosted AI model.

Who even uses python to scrab anymore? Install podman dude.

I don't have the time nor the crayons to explain that to you.

It's website seems to have had a graphic designer look over it. It seems to do the best of both worlds where you can download the default user friendly client or choose to go down the jargon route if you want to.

It's not quite that bad but it was trickier than Lemmy.

it's as easy to get into as lemmy/masto/fedi

I think you mean lazy illiterate people. just pay Google/amazon and be done with it

I self-hosted it few months ago, and it's actually surprisingly easy! Someone has made an Ansible script for Matrix with Element and some bridges, that (at least a month ago, IaaC tends to be pretty fragile) worked out of the box on a first try. I just set up some config values (mostly about enabling bridges I want) based on their amazing documentation, and then ran it once and everything is working so far. I even updated it several times already, and every time it was smooth, and it was basically just running a single ansible command. Their documentation is pretty well written, and with my basic cloud, IT and Linux knowledge I had no issues with following it. All you need to know is how to set up cloud VM, get a domain and set DNS, and set up SSH keys to access the server.

In total it took me about two hours in total, from when I decided "I'm setting up Matrix tonight" without any prior knowledge, looking up my options and finding the ansible script, setting up cloud and getting Matrix up and running.

I'm renting a VM on Hetzner for like 6$ per month, and it worked without issues so far. I use it for Discord and Messenger, although the Meta bridge does have some problems, for example I didn't figure out how to message someone with whom I haven't had a conversation since I set up the bridge, since only then it creates the room for it. But that can be solved by keeping the Messenger app or usign the browser to send a first message, and it immediately shows in your Matrix bridge (and stays there forever).

Thanks,welcome to the club! It can be a bit "tricky" at times (and I use a container manager,cloudron, meanwhile as I got too deep into the rabbit hole and now host too many things to maintain them myself) but once you get it set up it's rock solid.

And I am really optimistic for Element X/Matrix 2.0.

It's a great standard.

Yeah, 115 Million users atm. And as I said - you can easily bridge it to other services so you only use Matrix but communicate with others.

I'll give you a little anecdote. I joined a casual server on Matrix recently. Two minutes into the conversation, it turns out the person I was talking to is installing some Linux stuff and watching an episode of classic Doctor Who. That's two of my biggest interests right there that we immediately connected over. If there are only two users on Matrix, they're the only two I need.

You can still have separate processes and everything else with a shared runtime, you just save having all this wasted storage with every application bringing its own bundled runtime.

.net or Java applications work in a similar way, one Java app crashing won't take out another just because they're sharing the same runtime

Um, no? The 336 megabyte usb installation media contains everything you need to install base Debian. Most people will want a desktop environment and other packages, they can connect to the network to download those additional packages.

Even the how-to says the network is optional.

https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ch02s04.en.html#idm368

me when i spread misinformation

"android is good" mfers when they have to manually set a calendar task to notify themselves to manually delete the bloated information for an app that they have installed.

no shade to you specifically, but it pisses me off how much android users circle jerk over it being better than IOS, even though it's like, moderately less annoying.

Your phone has bigger problems if it cannot take 170mb apps, this isn't the 1990s

Totally a typo lol

three times over, no less.

synapse also tried to automatically install itself through windows update, which i didnt appreciate, though im pretty sure that was windows fault, not synapse, though it still sucks so fuck synapse.

Back in the day Signal was a Qt app, did that change?

Yeah, I had to move away from Arch Linux because lots of apps you have to build and Electron was one of the biggest culprits for using tons of disk space and time because it builds Chromium in its entirety from source. Electron is a great way to shift the cost of cross platform development from you to your customers.

That's the point. The storage is a bad metric. While it might indicate poor performance, it's not a direct indication of poor performance. The bloat and optimization comes from the usage of Electron. And people use Electron because it's far easier to make cross-platform deployments for Web and desktop using a framework like Electron. Show me the QT/JavaFX app that mimics Signal and we can compare the cost to develop it. Electron isn't the best choice for memory usage and reducing bloat, but it's the best choice for quick development (in my opinion but also proven out by the market share it has)

Why are you installing Signal Desktop on your phone?

Writing less code costs more money. The programm is large because they slapped some existing stuff together instead of writing everything from scratch

Personally, I'm a big fan of XMPP, due to the inherent resiliency in being decentralized/federated, and due to the security provided by OMEMO (based on signal's algorithm). Don't have to worry about third-parties messing with my data if it stays on my server that's in my house.

People want a chat app. If your secure chat app sucks as a chat app, it doesn't matter how secure it is. It failed the primary use case it was meant to be developed for.

But keep in mind, Signal's nature is no excuse to have shitty app implementations. In particular to have desktop apps as second-class citizens (and tablets as exterminated not-citizens). You can be a secure chat app. Signal got the secure part done, they're just struggling with the chat app part.

Signal is not an alternative to telegram and vice versa. Telegram has too many public communication features that people often use. The nature of signal will prevent it from having similar features.