> I don't think this is what Moxie wanted.
I think this is exactly what he wanted, as these were the complaints levelled against the service when he was still in charge.
From 2018: https://drewdevault.com/blog/Signal/
> Moxie knows about everything I’ve said in this article. He’s a very smart guy and I am under no illusions that he doesn’t understand everything I’ve put forth. I don’t think that Moxie makes these choices because he thinks they’re the right thing to do. [...] Moxie can’t come out and say it openly, but he’s made the decisions he has made because they serve his own interests.
And it looks like it's working. The Signal social network is growing. Revenue is growing (revenue pays for ongoing maintenance). Alternative servers are not sapping user metrics. It's still easy to push both security fixes and eye-catching new features because one central server, and client upgrades are aggressively pushed. Spam is not a plague because registration remains expensive - you need a genuine phone number you control, or Google to vouch for you (who in turn have their own robust defences against account creation).
If it was a free sign up where you just need an IP address to play, spammers would have hundreds of millions of accounts and you'd get as much nuisance friend requests as you get email spam. Most people would leave. You've seen the scraperpocalypse, every sketchy person on the planet has money to fund a million sign ups each from a unique US residential IP (thanks to "smart" TV vendor neglect/corruption allowing residential proxies), IP reputation is worthless.
Personal instances of Signal would hide until spammers found them but you'd better have your own locked down registration because you can't hide forever. Not to mention that sending ongoing traffic to your own server tells everyone where and when you're posting, moreso than using Signal's centralised services.
Its tradeoffs all the way down.
I think this is exactly what he wanted, as these were the complaints levelled against the service when he was still in charge.
From 2018: https://drewdevault.com/blog/Signal/
> Moxie knows about everything I’ve said in this article. He’s a very smart guy and I am under no illusions that he doesn’t understand everything I’ve put forth. I don’t think that Moxie makes these choices because he thinks they’re the right thing to do. [...] Moxie can’t come out and say it openly, but he’s made the decisions he has made because they serve his own interests.
And it looks like it's working. The Signal social network is growing. Revenue is growing (revenue pays for ongoing maintenance). Alternative servers are not sapping user metrics. It's still easy to push both security fixes and eye-catching new features because one central server, and client upgrades are aggressively pushed. Spam is not a plague because registration remains expensive - you need a genuine phone number you control, or Google to vouch for you (who in turn have their own robust defences against account creation).
If it was a free sign up where you just need an IP address to play, spammers would have hundreds of millions of accounts and you'd get as much nuisance friend requests as you get email spam. Most people would leave. You've seen the scraperpocalypse, every sketchy person on the planet has money to fund a million sign ups each from a unique US residential IP (thanks to "smart" TV vendor neglect/corruption allowing residential proxies), IP reputation is worthless.
Personal instances of Signal would hide until spammers found them but you'd better have your own locked down registration because you can't hide forever. Not to mention that sending ongoing traffic to your own server tells everyone where and when you're posting, moreso than using Signal's centralised services.
Its tradeoffs all the way down.