alt Hacker NewsThe incorporated 501c3 named Signal is, in IT terms, a vendor. Is it not?
The Signal client software is open source and some of the clients have reproducible builds. The Signal server software is open source, though has a history of being over a year out of date at some points. Other deployments of this server software for production use are rare.
Suppose you configured an instance of the Signal server software and others you know ran also a somewhat modified Signal client that could access that instance of the Signal server software.
But the centralized namespace of the hosted Signal service hosted by the incorporated 501c3 named Signal would not be accessible through that server instance now would it.
And, as dictated by the incorporated vendor of the centralized namespace, and other reasons, in practice, this client would have to run as a separate piece of software. "Another app".
This is vendor lock-in.
The service hosted by the 501c3 named Signal seems widely open yet is a permissioned namespace. A physical location tracking number aka phone number or a credit/debit card is required to access the namespace. This is for slaves. The profane.
Open Signal on your phone to keep your account active
And, I don't think this is what Moxie wanted.
Signal 501c3 is a centralized service. XMPP and Matrix are decentralized/federated. SimpleX is distributed.
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> Signal 501c3 is a centralized service. XMPP and Matrix are decentralized/federated. SimpleX is distributed.
Session is a decentralized Signal fork that creates the account on the device without associating it with a phone number.
See also maqp2's comment here regarding Simplex:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250302182017/https://reddit.co...
> And, I don't think this is what Moxie wanted.
Moxie as far as I know is still involved in the project and is the source of decisions such as requiring a phone number. My understanding is he is leaning hard on "encryption for anyone and everyone" over all other considerations such as decentralization.
A common criticism is "huh, not very anarchist of him!" Which, maybe? If decisions like that can get Signal into as many hands as possible, and if Signal can continue to operate in such a way as to have basically nothing to offer governments that demand data other than account join date, I think that's an improvement in material conditions.
Your bio has a pretty frank indication of the maximally decentralized, encrypted alternative, and how user hostile that still is:
> If you want to DM, I am generally open to chat. Generate a https://SimpleX.chat invite and paste it into a file simplex-invite.txt, then run the commands below and include pasted contents of DM.txt in one of your comments in any thread we're both participating in.
> 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.