There is really only one thing keeping me tied to Google stuff: the fact that I don't really know how to use Signal without having an Android'y device.

[cwebber@social.coop]

@olasd I'm okay with needing the phone number even if I don't prefer it, but I don't want to have to use one of "the two mobile platforms"

[maryjane@social.coletivos.org]

@cwebber I use signal-cli (https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli) unofficial signal client to register the account, and act as the main client.
And then I link it to the official signal desktop application so that it is not all cli.

It is annoying to setup, cause, captchas, and pasting URL into the cli client to link them. but works.

EDIT: And to add to the annoyance, signal expects that you open the main client often so you need to open the cli client and fetch messages like once a week. pfff....

[z3r0fox@mastodon.social]

@cwebber Apparently this is Coming Soon(tm)

[bouncinglime@spanner.works]

@cwebber subscribing to this thread

signal is the major thing holding me back from switching to a LightPhone

[hypostase@bsd.network]

@cwebber
If googevil carries out it's Evil September threat I may end up going back to apple as the lesser evil, just for this reason.

I think SailfishOS tries with Whisperfish but I'm not that confident I understand the holes.

[fireye@peoplemaking.games]

@z3r0fox @cwebber +1 here I saw some standalone work done here recently

A few updates for the standalone registration flow · signalapp/Signal-Desktop@0fb80a2

A private messenger for Windows, macOS, and Linux. - A few updates for the standalone registration flow · signalapp/Signal-Desktop@0fb80a2

GitHub (github.com)

[sprocketclown@mastodon.social]

@cwebber are you on a Linux phone then?

[mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe]

@cwebber There working on making it possible to use signal desktop without a phone right? Linux phones are getting close to usable these days, too.

[betarays@p.changeme.fr.eu.org]

@cwebber Does Waydroid count?

[timorl@social.wuatek.is]

There's dozens of us! Dozens!

Anyway, here: https://gist.github.com/gruz/37ecc18353121759f7104f6a23f7fbc5 . Ignore the "Windows" in the title, it's irrelevant and the instructions translate trivially to whatever distro you are using.

[linear@nya.social]

@cwebber@social.coop there's an unsanctioned CLI tool that lets you do this, but Signal has been known to be hostile towards users using such tools in the past.

supposedly they will be adding an official way to do this soon.

[thufie@social.pixie.town]

@cwebber After reading this thread: https://forums.ubports.com/topic/11451/cant-install-whatsapp-or-signal-on-waydroid/14

You could probably install Langis or whatever non-gapps version of Signal in waydroid via a custom F-Droid repo. I'd stick to a non-android phone OS with waydroid support at the very least, so you can try this. However it might be worth setting up waydroid on a computer and testing this is still possible first. Might be possible to setup waydroid with a Google-Apps android image as well, but I'm not sure how restricted that is. Unfortunately none of these Signal forks support alternatives to gapps push notifications, though, so your notifications on new messages will be delayed. Hopefully one of these will support Sunup as a push notifications provider someday. I think it should be possible, people in the thread I linked have done something similar before fairly recently.