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Comment by martin_a | Hacker News Reader

Please no. Not another messenger nobody will use. We need to improve the existing, safe solutions like Signal instead of pushing new ones out there.

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Signal intentionally breaks interoperability and disallows forks and alternative implementations. Let's not standardize on something that backs us into a corner.

So general public will always use fb messanger / whatsup forever. Awesome.

Signal is only atleast somehow secure app that regular people use because it has great unified ux and just works.

Just use Signal. Please

I refuse to use a messenger that is spearheaded by a man who adamantly refuses to participate in the wider FOSS community. Moxie only wants others to play by his rules.

I might use it once it allows federated access, otherwise only WhisperSystem can control the fate of the protocol. I mean there are much worse company out there, but I don't want to put my eggs in the same proverbial basket.

Yeah no way. WhatsApp already does e2e. Signal doesn't bring anything else that's significant for me as a techie, much less the general population.

Matrix can replace Slack and the various mobile messengers, meaning there's a hook for companies as well. I don't think it's ready yet, but I'd rather be a condescending preachy asshole to my friends and family only when there's a very compelling reason.

Facebook ads: Coming soon to your WhatsApp conversations!

"The perfect is the enemy of the good."

Onboarding friends and family to Matrix or XMPP is almost impossible. Signal is dead simple and automatically discovers your contacts, while being secure, open, and developed by a non-profit.

Ideally I'd like it to be a federated system, but I'm not going to use untrustworthy systems like Messenger/WhatsApp because I'm not getting every feature I want.

Signal is not open. That's the problem. You are forced to use the official client.

Thats also probably the main reason why it is sucessful. Everybody gets the same. They focus on one thing and don't delute it with funky in a year maintainer lost interest rust clients.

I don't care. Give me ethical, privacy minded software not some phd experiments.

You don't care about freedom, got it.

>Yeah no way. WhatsApp already does e2e. Signal doesn't bring anything else that's significant for me as a techie, much less the general population.

You mean besides freeing them from the Facebook ecosystem? That alone is worth it to me.

Sure, WhatsApp does e2e encryption.

Guess what company is also on both of those ends? If people could stop parroting this as if fucking Facebook was trustworthy, that'd be great.

"Great unified UX" does not include their Mac app unless there have been big changes since last time I tried it.

I'm not a heavy multimedia user, but Signal's Mac and iOS apps have been working wonderfully well for me and my friends.

You have to pardon me. By unified i meant mobile. I am not sure about state of desktop. I from time to time use mac app with no issues but Signal in my eyes is sms alternative.

It works OK, but it's no iMessage.

I miss using Adium as my native Mac chat client for everything, alas AIM is dead and Google killed their Jabber interoperation.

You mean whatsapp ?

This. Matrix/Riot is federated and works. Lets please use and support systems with open standards that have the perspective to interoperate in that space (irc, telegram bridge etc)

Considering the fact that Signal devs refuse to improve several glaring user experience holes (things like losing all group chats when switching phones, which are deal breakers for many people), we might need another messenger.

Use the built in backup and restore and you dont lose your groups. Signal's primary design direction is encryption and privacy, you're going to have to compromise somewhere.

Signal forces you to use a phone number(unlike facetime for example)

Which requires to use apple id.

And what's your point? An apple id can be anonymous.

You probably missed the point here. Messenger is just a use case. The license is pretty liberal and you can reuse the code in pretty much any app, not necessarily Messanger. social, dating, customer support.

Moxie personally rejected to allow to use it's code in mobile apps (since they are GPL) even when we was also open source (MIT) project.

Are you seriously objecting to someone just asking for the license the code is distributed under to be followed?

i am saying that he enforces that no actual fork can be done and don't allow even simplest exceptions for AppStores.

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