Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

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Signal needs a phone, even with the desktop client. A better alternative is Wire (wire.com), which you can signup for with your email address OR phone number. It doesn't mandate a phone number. All chats are end-to-end encrypted, just like Signal (not with the exact same protocol and implementation). You can have group chats, just like on messenger or any other chat platform.

Wire also syncs conversations across devices, unlike Signal that's tied to one device (a phone).

You can have multiple accounts on Wire, just like you would use multiple email addresses, each one for different purposes.

Wire is still way behind Telegram on UX, but is a good option for those who don't want to use a phone number or give their phone number to some centralized service. You set usernames and can @mention them (a recent addition to the client — I'm mentioning this as an example to indicate how far behind it is from Telegram, which had this a long time ago).

Lastly, Wire also allows you to backup your chats and restore them on another device. Signal explicitly blocks this from being done.

What's the funding situation like for the company? The GPL/AGPL model does offer some protection, but it's cold comfort to the typical user if the central server goes away and we're left with a fragmented ecosystem of free replacements.

Part of the appeal of Signal is that it's supported by a well-endowed non-profit.

I have no idea about the funding situation of Wire. I thought I'd read about it being VC funded. It also has paid subscriptions for businesses, though how big that is and how fast it's growing are not known. Signal's funding is only a recent event, and one could ask how long that would last too, since Signal doesn't even have a paid service.

Having seen may messaging services come and go, I wouldn't in the least bit be surprised if either of these disappeared in a decade or a decade and a half from now.

That makes Wire an especially hard sell, since it risks not just going away, but also being converted to something more nefarious.

> Signal's funding is only a recent event, and one could ask how long that would last too, since Signal doesn't even have a paid service.

Recency doesn't make a difference for users considering joining it now (only for why they may not have joined previously). $50M should be plenty to run a service for, say, 10 years, assuming they don't hire a huge number of employees.

As Wikimedia has demonstrated, a paid service isn't required to survive long-term. Certainly, users (and maybe companies) would be willing to donate to a non-profit foundation, whereas doing so to a for-profit company like Wire seems implausible.

Especially in the context of the OP article, the source of the funding of the app and service is pertty important, as it informs the motives, and for-profit motives generally seem to have been, historically, not in the best interests of the users.

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