| ▲ | komali2 3 hours ago | |
> 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. | ||
| ▲ | jon128 6 minutes ago | parent [-] | |
> other considerations such as decentralization. I'll steelman this a bit and mention there was a broad argument against software fragmentation. This can be overcome with API versioning under the hood. If you have worked with backend services you may recognize prefixes in paths like /api/v1/ or /api/v1.2/ along with a holistic approach that doesn't fail to gracefully signal disparities and their implications however small or big. The holistic design and initial implementation does need to be there. I am not optimistic about it but I'm willing to say it should be striven for, in lieu of an existing satisfactory implementation, rather than give in to vendor lock-in, even if that vendor didn't have the same abusive behavior cited in the comment at the top of this thread. _ > If decisions like that can get Signal into as many hands as possible The phone numbers were useful for leveraging existing contact graphs. How that has been twisted into excuse to abuse the users, demanding sustained participation in the PSTN (not the initial friction, the sustained friction), which is not an open network and user neutral network like Internet Protocol, is something different. It does not pass the smell test. Something is wrong on a fundamental level there. In the other comment I posted, the false spectre of spam is knocked down. _ > 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 Signal can't hide which users talk to which other users. This metadata is visible to Signal's servers. Users using the centralized namespace functionally can not opt out of this. Other systems have solved this problem and other larger problems surrounding it. _ > an improvement in material conditions. It was. That was a long time ago. We are in this decade now. _ > Your bio has [..] the maximally decentralized See the graphic here _ > and how user hostile that still is: Look at the two words at the top-left corner of this website. Do you see "User News"? The use of GnuPG there renders the potentially posted data as functionally a "direct message" that other users can not see. This approach also confines the message to originate from the specific account of this site, which eliminates the potential for unsolicited+inauthentic messages. You can probably surmise as I have there are many on here who aren't "hacker", who aren't even really software developer, or worse ought be more cautious posting in a place labeled like such. The approach with GnuPG is extra, and a reasonable IQ filter. Among not excluding below-average IQ users of SimpleX, sans those who truly can not locate their own asshole, copying and pasting a string to onboard for the first time really hasn't been a problem. It has been far less friction than Signal and with absolutely zero exposure of individual users to spam. | ||