pull down to refresh

Signal vs Orbee chat
504 sats \ 10 comments \ @anon 29 Jun ideasfromtheedge

I like using Signal for it's encryption compared to regular sms text on my phone. But I'm concerned about it being centralized.

I found Orbee chat and looked into it some, it's only through web browser now, but it shows apps coming soon on their website. orbee.chat

My questions are:

  1. Has anyone heard of it, is it any good? pros, cons. especially vs Signal.
  2. How can they create an app, but not be centralized? Are they the same as Signal in terms of centralized, if not, how?
write
compose
related posts
1 sat \ 3 replies \ @ek 30 Jun
But I'm concerned about it being centralized.

What’s your concern? Censorship? Reliability? Hack? Subpoena?

reply
10 sats \ 2 replies \ @anon 9 Jul

All of the above.

I'm working to integrate Bitcoin/Nostr into my daily life and remove as many intermediaries as I can along the way.

reply
1 sat \ 1 reply \ @ek 9 Jul

Every nostr relay is also an intermediary that can censor you, go down, get hacked, or subpoenaed

reply
10 sats \ 0 replies \ @anon 9 Jul

Exactly. That's one reason I'm interested in orbee. It supports traditional dns with nip-05 , but it also has the option for nip-spaces which cuts all that crap out. https://github.com/buffrr/nips/blob/spaces/NIP-SPACES.md

So even if people censor, I can host on my own server and bypass icann, dns, 3rd party certificate authorities.

reply
1 sat \ 5 replies \ @k00b 29 Jun

I hadn't heard about it. Where did you hear about it?

reply
70 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 29 Jun

Anyway, to answer your questions.

  1. I haven't heard of it. I haven't tried it.
    • Cons: It's very likely insecure relative to Signal. If you haven't read the code and confirmed otherwise, at least with signal you can be certain other people have read the code given its popularity. It's very likely less reliable than Signal given it's using nostr which tends to store things less persistently and relays have variable performance/uptime.
    • Pros: It's new, ie fun. It uses nostr, ie interop if you're doing other things on nostr and could resist censorship better (if you don't trust that signal decouples id from messages effectively). It claims to use spaces, ie you get a human readable identifier that's stored on bitcoin.
  2. It uses nostr relays (ie interchangeable and generic communication points) for storing messages and stores the names as data on bitcoin. Regardless, "decentralized" is usually an overstatement. It might be safe to call it distributed because you can use more than one entity's servers.
reply
10 sats \ 0 replies \ @anon 9 Jul

Thank you

reply
10 sats \ 2 replies \ @anon 29 Jun

twitter/x

reply
1 sat \ 1 reply \ @k00b 29 Jun

from this account? https://x.com/xcuriousbitcoin

It's the only one I can see that's tweeted about it

reply
10 sats \ 0 replies \ @anon 29 Jun

I think there were a couple of posts, but could have been from the same person. They were comparing it to discord and telegram.

reply