You can run Signal app forks on the Signal server. Molly is a popular one. You just can't create new servers. I wish you could, but I get the reasoning of not wanting honeypots. But that doesn't stop you from running your own network of Signal servers. So I don't see anything stopping anyone. I mean Mullvad runs their own stuff and I don't see half the complaints about them. I've always been curious why Signal is so unique here. If 1/100th the people that made these concerns developed a open community of signal servers, I'm sure we'd have a viable alternative network. What's stopping everyone?
One of the big lessons from Twitter and Reddit was third party apps are tolerated or even encouraged until they are not. Unlike, for example Discord, I haven't see any indication that third party clients are causing account bans, yet.
The status of open source, privacy respecting messaging apps looks really healthy to me, compared to where we've been over the past 30+ years (thinking starting with ICQ.) Signal was a big leap toward getting average people using much more secure messaging, although it is pretty clear even most 'tech' people don't grasp what is going on or why it is important to be able to use e2ee separate from a combined client+server provider.
Yes, but my argument is more in the realms of "why are there no projects to create an open network using the existing architecture" not "we shouldn't have an open network and completely rely on Signal forever."
I'd still appreciate a source. There's things I'm aware of that I think could be confused with this, but I've seen no indication of them actually wanting to or even caring about forks. Only in the servers.
As far as I can tell, Signal's policy is more "Do what you want, but server costs are high so we don't want to pay for your product. But if you do, here's all the code to give you a start." That's a very different policy from blacklisting.
And as I keep asking others, what's stopping everyone from making a federated Signal? If you can use the same account on both the production/official server and the staging server, why can't you on the production server __and__ a community federated server?
And if they ban you from the production server, so what? Now you're on par with literally every other federated service. Like what is Signal going to do? Stop open sourcing code? That'd be like trying to kill a mosquito by stabbing yourself in the heart. If they're willing to do that, I'd rather it be sooner than later anyways.
So I want a source because I just don't get what you all are complaining about. Is it just that someone else didn't make the thing you want? Sure, I get frustrated, but the comments more come off as Signal being nefarious and I just don't see Signal acting in any way malicious. In fact, hosting links to forks and being a common place for those forks to discuss seems like they are actively supporting them.
Who is complaining? This is confusing. The whole idea about Signal is to compete with mainstream, as well as with the federated, ecosystems by having a single implementation of both client and server, I believe the argument is that only by moving faster is it possible to compete with the more mainstream commercial messengers for the masses and still have reasonable cryptography.
Moxie wrote several articles about this and expanded on this idea in his conference talks. You are very welcome to take the code and write your own messing system, but do not connect to Signal's servers because that costs them money and they will need to take action, sooner or later.
They were very clear that LibreSignal had no future. They have also been very clear that they discourage any non-official distribution of builds. They have repeatedly told the F-Droid project that they will not publish using their reproducible build system, and any user doing the same will be kindly asked to take down their copy. The F-Droid project has complied.
This seems to be a strange thing to discuss. If the above links are representative it may be a popular subject among a subset of users, which seems misguided. Signal does not wish to be xmpp or matrix and neither should they. It must be their right to decide. There are so many chat software projects. If you don't agree with the goals of one of them, you energy is better spent elsewhere.
Lots of people are complaining. It's why Moxie wrote those many articles. It's why there's so many comments bringing up Matrix and others. People were even doing this before Matrix was E2EE! So yeah I'm tired of hearing it so calling people's complaints out. If you don't like it, fix it. It's HN and people are devs here.
