Centralization gives big corporations and governments the ability to track and control everything we do. Status maximizes the amount of devices in a network making the attack surface larger, preventing one individual or group from controlling what you can and can’t do on the network.
What makes Status different from Signal, Telegram, and encrypted alternatives?
Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, and other encrypted messaging applications are banned in countries with strict laws that go against freedom of speech online. The three mentioned above all have one problem that has led to their downfall; they are centralized services.
Being centralized means the apps connect to predefined servers somewhere in the world to transfer and store messages and the data of users. It’s easy for a government, employer, or other administrator to block access to centralized services.
What makes Status different?
Status is decentralized, and peer-to-peer. When you message someone on Status, your message is encrypted, and then routed through multiple other users, who then will get the message to the intended recipient. There are no centralized servers that handle all communications, and no central point that can be attacked or censored.
What if it goes down?!?!
This is a very real fear of many netizens ever since Google+ shut down in 2019, and more recently after Parler was shut down by Amazon in late 2020. Federated platforms such as Mastodon and Matrix also regularly face the problem of homeservers shutting down due to lack of funding, censorship, and other reasons.
How Status solves this
With Status, there’s no possibility of a #StatusDown because even if the Status website goes down or is blocked, the app will continue to function as if nothing happened. This is possible through the use of decentralized technologies, such as the Waku protocol to transfer data between users.
How can you be sure that Status is decentralized?
This is an interesting and important question; and it’s different depending on your relationship to Status.
If you’re a developer, you can read the code, and run tests to ensure that it is indeed peer-to-peer. You can also use tools like the Portmaster by Safing to check the incoming and outgoing connections and verify that you are connecting to other peers directly.
If you are a developer who wants to play with the command line and set up a Status node for yourself, you can configure one and check how many peers are connected to it.
If you’re tech savvy but not a developer, you can run your own Status node on the latest Desktop beta available here and connect to it with your phone or other device running Status to ensure that there’s no middlemen and no central servers.
Since Status is developed in the open, you can trust and rely upon those who develop the software to ensure that it functions the way it claims to. With most open-source projects including Status, you can see what changes are being made to the software and what they do. If you’d like to see what’s going on with the project, here are the pull requests for the mobile app.
What does this mean for an average user?
You won’t have to worry about downtime on the Status network, nor will you have to worry about a corporation or government censoring or removing information from the network.
Footnotes
- You can download Status here
- You can read what others have to say, as well as official development updates on the Status Community Blog.
- Have questions or just want to talk? Add me on Status and I’ll do my best to help you out.
