I was vouching for Signal for all my friends for years, supported them with donations, and was really rooting for them. However, I regrettably can't trust in moxie having the best intentions with Signal anymore. Lost count of the number of times this has been recycled on HN so I'm not taking the time to formulate this extremely well but:
* For the longest time, requires phone number as identifier. When asked to remove this restriction, the reply is "so we can bootstrap off the phone's native contact application". But Android and iOS contacts have natively supported e-mail addresses on contacts since forever? And those could be optional? Every time the conversation has gone this far with anyone involved in Signal, silence/ghosting.
* The whole PIN requirement debacle - where further amounts of metadata would be uploaded to Signal's servers (encrypted of course, with the PIN as passphrase of the key). Suddenly the app wouldn't start and users were locked out of all their Signal conversations (even reading them) without setting a PIN, no way to circumvent it. We were told this would be a strict requirement to be able to solve the above. After a lot of backlash they rolled it back after a week or so?
* Hostility towards alternative implementations.
* There's an open issue on GH for verified builds. Since 2015.
Signal may be good today. What about tomorrow? I think the only durable and realistic solution (because let's face it, pure P2P for the mainstream is not the latter) is federation.
Anyone feeling similarly should check out matrix.org. It may not be ready for the masses yet. But if we consider how we communicate in 5, 10, 20 years from now, it becomes obvious that we can't rely on a single actor as provider, regardless of how good they are today. The only way we get there is with people like the ones frequenting HN getting involved by using it, contributing, filing bugs, hosting home servers and using the clients.
* For the longest time, requires phone number as identifier. When asked to remove this restriction, the reply is "so we can bootstrap off the phone's native contact application". But Android and iOS contacts have natively supported e-mail addresses on contacts since forever? And those could be optional? Every time the conversation has gone this far with anyone involved in Signal, silence/ghosting.
* The whole PIN requirement debacle - where further amounts of metadata would be uploaded to Signal's servers (encrypted of course, with the PIN as passphrase of the key). Suddenly the app wouldn't start and users were locked out of all their Signal conversations (even reading them) without setting a PIN, no way to circumvent it. We were told this would be a strict requirement to be able to solve the above. After a lot of backlash they rolled it back after a week or so?
* Hostility towards alternative implementations.
* There's an open issue on GH for verified builds. Since 2015.
Signal may be good today. What about tomorrow? I think the only durable and realistic solution (because let's face it, pure P2P for the mainstream is not the latter) is federation.
Anyone feeling similarly should check out matrix.org. It may not be ready for the masses yet. But if we consider how we communicate in 5, 10, 20 years from now, it becomes obvious that we can't rely on a single actor as provider, regardless of how good they are today. The only way we get there is with people like the ones frequenting HN getting involved by using it, contributing, filing bugs, hosting home servers and using the clients.