Elon Musk’s X blocks links to Signal, the encrypted messaging service

Been using Signal for years. Love it.
Makes sense than an anti-free speech dipshit like Elon Musk would oppose it.
- same. No stupid gimmicks and whatever. Just secured messaging.

It's not easy to leave WhatsApp. I've transitioned to Signal a month ago and lost contact with a lot of people. My friends and family think I'm going crazy for attitudes like these. "You can't change the world on your own".. like that was the plan 😅
Thanks Musk, that was the motivation I needed to keep away from WhatsApp.
Obviously not a X/Twitter user, I'm not a fkin idiot.
- I’ve never used whats app and I never plan to. Recently I’ve been trying Line for messaging my family abroad and I like how it’s a Japanese/ Korean app so I can get away from American corporations
- You can't change the world if you don't try at all. What a braindead take..
  
  And they wouldn't be alone if their family came with them
- "You can check out any time you like... But you can never leeeave."
- It’s a slow and constant process of onboarding people to signal. I managed to onboard my local gaming group into using Signal after Trump got elected.
- Leaving is never really an option. But running the two apps side by side still works.
  
  It varies, I guess. Some people might not be able to leave due to their job for example.
  I left, it's an option for me. And I'm not coming back, I don't want to admit defeat.
  I'm in an island now, it's annoying how these companies penetrated our lives.
  
  If someone is only willing to communicate with you through WhatsApp, they don't value your friendship.
- I managed to get my parents and brother to switch to signal two years ago, never switched back and it's always working, very easy to use. I'm pretty sure whatsapp will enshitify at such a rate that signal will absorb the users.
- Keep on pushing, I've been transitioning to Signal and now I've got a handful of good friends on there. People are realising what's going on but be mindful that a lot of people have businesses and work that depend on it.. They are hostages. But if everyone changes gradually it will reach a point they won't be anymore. Keep on preaching brother!

You know, for a free speech supporter, he sure seems to hate it when people speak freely.
- He wants to speak freely, but he doesn't want to afford anyone else the same right.
  It's not an uncommon stance, but it's a hypocritical one.
  
  And when you say freely you mean hate.
  
  Not really true. His supporters are allowed to speak freely as well.
- "Free speech absolutist"*
- He absolutely wants to support the speech he agrees with. The rest can get fucked.
- hes quite the selective speech supporter

New certified Signal classic

Only the cool kids know where to get FOSS.
- Is signal foss?
  
  Yeah look: https://github.com/signalapp
  
  It's source-available

Supposedly they're unblocked again, but there's been no explanation from Xitter about the issue. Definitely seems suspicious that this happened while DOGE is having trouble with whistleblowers using Signal, though.
https://gizmodo.com/x-briefly-blocked-then-unblocked-signal-links-as-federal-workers-seek-security-2000564966

The best endorsement you could get for moving to Signal.

I was waiting for such endorsement, maybe my friends will switch now.
- Agree this reinforce that signal is good for now.
- In kinda pissed with them not agreeing to the chat app interoperability protocolo though, i want to delete whatsapp so bad...

They also block any content, even private messages that contain Bluesky for example.
- Time to create redsky, yellowsky, and pinksky URL forwarders
  
  Redground
- I think we need laws against platforms censoring discussion of their rivals, particularly with shadow bans and shadow delistings.
  
  You wish. It's not gonna happen with these douchebags in power.
  
  like anti-competitive laws? We have those. They tend to rely on certain people enforcing them though

It was never about free speech

I've blocked Twitter on my Adguard Home DNS already last year, so no "X" shit in my house/our mobile devices anywhere.
- I don't think it is a good idea to block twitter completely. Some countries use twitter for official announcements, including emergency warning.
  
  My country doesn't and hopefully others will follow.
  
  That’s a weird reason to keep using X. Hopefully these places also does other forms of communications, otherwise it’s a sad state of affairs.
  
  It's always a good idea to block racist platforms lorded over by a troll who will delete comments that oppose him.

I would really like to know who is using 'X' now ? I mean apart from Musk and his bot army
- Dude most European heads of state and institutions have Xitter accounts and just kept on using them.. It's a disgrace..
- A lot of people unfortunately. Specially people outside the US, I think mastodon is ready for people to switch, but nobody does, the most they do is switch to bluesky
  
  Unfortunately fedverse isn't really ready for the general population, it's why so many people flocked to bluesky over mastodon. I know I prefer blueskys UI and features over what Mastodon has to offer.
  Though Tumblr is planning to enter the fedverse so maybe that'll help somehow.
- Racists and other easily influenced weak-minded individuals.
- Unfortunately, a lot of official government services and representatives are still using it. I saw someone reference a Twitter post about that Canadian plane crash, for instance.
- Lots of people still use it, obviously musk fans, people who actually make a living off of content creation it's hard to move a entire fandom to a new platform. People who aren't from the US probably don't care about the whole mess and stick around because everyone they know is still on the platform.
- A bunch of undecided voter types that pay zero attention to anything that isn’t their hobbies.
- No one outside the USA cares about the politics of who owns what social network
  Crazy I know
  
  I am outside of the US, and I do care. Biggest army and economy and so on. Even if not, I would not want to be associated with, idk, Australian wannabe tyrants either.

Very free speech absolutist of him.

Didn't Signal get big after Musk endorsed it? What gives?
- 4years ago yeah https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-signal
- Yup. I started using it in part because of his tweet
- Yes, but then last year he started saying it had known vulnerabilities that weren’t being fixed, around the same time Telegram was attacking Signal’s credibility. I seem to remember him outright endorsing Telegram but have only done a quick search and that hasn’t popped up.
  
  saying there are unspecified "known vulnerabilities" within Signal
  His source: Trust me bro
- Not really. It's still not big. It definitely got bigger after he supported it though.

Twitter should have been regulated as a common carrier and one rich asshole shouldn’t have been allowed to buy it, regardless of their politics
- Most social media should be public domain or at least have standardised open APIs, it's the logical way to go for a free society with healthy governments and institutions. As it is right now it's like private companies owning the streets..
- Honestly I feel all news and social messenging services would be better served if they were forced to be public owned.

Here are some workarounds:
Don't use Xitter
Use your phone number
Use a URL shortener
He's not doing anything except getting more bad press for himself.

Free speech but no Signal? Red flag.

@cyrano The "problem" (actually, the feature) with those censorship algorithms is that they rely a lot on the "exact contents" of the message ("Scunthorpe Problem"), so X is probably programmed to detect the Signal's domain and block due to the presence of such link (similar to how Facebook was/is blocking links to the largest PixelFed instances, and then they also decided to block links to DistroWatch and official websites from various Linux distros), so it's not programmed (yet) to censor just the "hexadecimal/base64/whatever" portion of the link alone. And there's where Tox could shine: a handle is literally a hexadecimal sequence, without Tox's domains, without URI Schemas, just a bunch of digits and letters from A to F.
I don't know why Tox isn't mentioned as a "instant messaging platform for whistleblowers": it got Onion (Tor) tunneling possibility (as well as tunneling it through I2P outproxies because it actually accepts any kind of SOCKS5 proxy), it's registration-less (even Matrix needs registration) so it's effectively anonymous IMO.
SimpleX seems to be that, too, although I didn't have the opportunity to use it more than I used Tox. But from the little I've used it, it's similar to Signal in the sense that it's a link (and a large link) and not simply a hash/hex sequence.
- Tox is nice. My favourite flavour is qTox.
  The typical pattern over here: if someone uses Signal, you guess they're some military type (wants things to be secure, doesn't care much about anonymity, wants things to work one way and simply).
  If someone uses Tox, you guess they're some hacker / anarchist type (wants things to be secure, but also anonymizable, wants things to be flexible, even if it can backfire).
- Interesting, I did not know about that app https://tox.chat/index.html

Sounds like that censorship conservatives are all up in a row about... Oh not anymore fancy that

So what’s the opinion here between Signal and SimpleX?
Signal gets all the attention, and seems more approachable but ties to a phone number which can be a big deal.
SimpleX ties to nothing but I could absolutely see people I know fucking it up and wondering where their “account” went.
So, Signal as an common man’s adoptable compromise and SimpleX to nerd out with full “opsec” and disposability? That about right?
- Signal has been under way more scrutiny than SimpleX. In both academic papers and security audits.
- SimpleX sounds like herpes.
  
  So now we know what he kid's nickname will be when he gets herpes in high school
- I'm trying to use simplex, mainly for the instance's chat. 2 things to say:
  notifications work perfectly even without play store
  every device has a separate account - I can't reuse the same one. Not the end of the world, but it's really annoying
  
  From the looks of it, the variety of ways you can purposefully or accidentally destroy your local database, and the strict limits on accessing your profile, really gives me the feeling SimpleX is intended to be extremely disposable and deniable.
  After playing with it I just don’t see it being used for anything expected to be convenient or ongoing. Regarding the one device per account thing, I think the whole point is you just protect your one app, nobody is sneaking in your laptop or tablet, no remote leaks possible from a sync engine. On iOS you can link to a desktop app, but your phone must remain not just on, but in the app and on the pair screen. One twitch out, PC disconnects.
  Feels like something for journalists, whistleblowers, protesters, and all the bad ones. It’s a burner app for your burner phone.