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.
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.
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.
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.
So? Those of us who have switched to signal clearly don’t want our data going through meta. Just stop using WhatsApp.
I’ve even got old people using it.
I mean I love the passion and I love Signal too but I’m not going to stop messaging my family and friends over their decision to use WhatsApp. Can’t get everyone to switch.
And if they had interoperability towards WhatsApp and had their own stuff too those not using it wouldn’t have to have anything to do with WhatsApp
Fair enough. There are plenty of mostly distant relations of mine who I no longer hear from at all because I don’t use Facebook. So it goes.
I see what you’re saying, but it really undermines Signal’s purpose and their integrity.
Take Telegram for example, they used to have a secret chat option, where you could send a message with E2E encryption. Telegram would tout this secure feature, but it was somewhat hidden away and no one used it.
An even better example is Signal removing its ability to handle SMS because they thought it was confusing to people that some messages it sent were secure, and some weren’t. This WhatsApp integration would again muddy the waters and the average person wouldn’t care to look into or understand the difference.
At the end of the day we as people who care about security need to take on the burden of having multiple messengers for different purposes. The ones that want to join us on Signal can, but if we compromise Signal to meet them where they are, we compromise the simplicity of Signal and no one can say it’s secure and private without listing caveats.
I get why they aren’t going for it, even though it could be handy