>> I don't think this is what Moxie wanted.

> I think this is exactly what he wanted

You think, users should be required to carry a cell phone or make use of a debit card or credit card, in order to message another user, is exactly, what Matthew wanted?

A self-described anarchist who described the original cypherpunks as his teenage heroes?

When XMPP+OTR had already been, among competent people, the prevalent norm for over half a decade when he gave that DEF CON 18 talk?

That is just crazy, man.

In that DEF CON 18 talk, Moxie talked about scope of choice and how the scope of choice changed to "do I want to carry a cell phone, or not?". A notion that Matthew's dream was to impose on the world a demand to carry a cell phone or a debit/credit card transaction on others, such a tax, to enjoy what he and his friends and colleagues already on top of pure Internet Protocol, is on its face absurd.

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> Spam is not a plague because registration remains expensive

The issue of spam is fully mitigated with an invite token, a 16 byte string ; "is", not "can be", because other systems in production have already been doing this.

The way it works is simple. If Alice wants to receive a message from Bob, Alice can share a connection string username+token to Bob. Then Bob can message Alice and for that time not other users of the hosted centralized namespace.

Very simple concept.

Simple enough for a mediocre dev to implement without an LLM.

The spectre of spam does not justify the demand for "checking in" with your local PSTN tower, nor the friction involved with an uninvolved and unwanted third party named Google (love Google overall but this is such a bastardly and disgusting concept), nor does it justify demanding a debit/credit card transaction become involved.

The spectre of spam does not justify any of this horse shit.

"Hey Bob, here is my username to message me, provided you subject yourself to this horse shit", where such horse shit antithetical in a fundamental way to the values espoused founder of Signal.

The new, grossly degenerated Scope of Choice.

Perhaps some who call themselves "hackers" or software developers may have been actually fooled by this false spectre of spam. I was never among them.

Even worse, the phone numbers, Google Play accounts, debit cards and credit cards, these are cheap. Among the scammer underworld these are a plenty and fungible.

An invite token personally sent by Alice or read aloud by Alice to Bob, is not.

But if somebody wants to harass a specific user on Signal, that's relatively cheap to do.

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> Not to mention that sending ongoing traffic to your own server tells everyone where and when you're posting

Uncle Jeff, AWS, who doesn't tell exactly everyone but a lot of people, not excluding ICE at any given time, knows when you are posting, from where, and to what other users. The last of which is specifically obviated by a separate namespace hosted on a separate server.

On the occasions I have run Signal's server software, I and other users did mitigate these concerns. We do appreciate that others also have these means, or not.

Another messaging system, you may have already read its name actually, has already solved these problems in a way that they are successfully mitigated in a wholly transparent way for casual users.

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> Alternative servers are not sapping user metrics.

This imperative is not the users' problem and runs counter to the best interests of the users.

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> Its tradeoffs all the way down.

Right. In Matthew's view, the horse shit is a tradeoff.

I believe there are other tradeoffs available that are ethical, not more ethical, but ethical, and carry much less technical complexity.