As somebody who's used to 100KB snappy and fully featured IRC clients I'm always baffled when I use these modern clients that use 3 orders of magnitude more resource to look and behave like a cheap clone of a smartphone SMS app, but worse.
My own irc client I wrote when learning C and then re-wrote learning GTK+ is better than any of them in terms of doing what I want non-bloated as a client. But it doesn't quite match the whole signal thing somehow. :)
Signal is excellent software. Game changing stuff. Telegram (indirectly), Whatsapp (directly) owe signal a great debt. The reverse doesn't seem to be true.
End to end ecryption for the masses is a huge, huge win that Moxie can take a vast amount of credit for making happen, then improving and increasing. So there's a little hero-worship for Moxie, a man with whom politically I probably have very, very little in common. It's a good feeling when you can do that.
I do like Signal, otherwise I wouldn't put up with that software. But you can both enjoy the protocol and Android client and think that the desktop app is a pile a donkey dung.
And you can put the stated criticisms of it in proper context. Then assess the costs and risks to yourself. Compare its use along with the rest of signal to the alternatives. And examine the response of Moxies team to issues.
At least that's what I did and came up with a "Hard Disagree" on that statement. Signal desktop is pretty good. (And no I don't like electron apps as a rule - it's the only one I use).
Deviation from perfection is not donkey dung.
>Signal desktop was missing basic features like answering [voice] calls...
vs
Messaging on phone and internet everywhere was missing end to end encryption before Signal. (Yes I used OTR with like 3 people, now I encryption with almost everyone, thanks signal).
Advantage signal. By a huge margin, for mine. Picked the essential feature. Got it right. Expanded from there. I find it pretty hard to fault what they're doing. People who want to do it differently because they think it's "better" (eg federation), don't seem to actually get much done in comparison to signal's massive win they chalked up for all of us.
I find it kinda odd that here, where people understand tech, there is more sticking up for facebrick, goo, appletax etc when they screw their users yet again than there is for Signal doing the opposite. The contrast between how they view people who use their stuff is very, very stark. Signal are pretty great. We need more love for anyone who can achieve at a similar level to make computing better for us. To push competition toward being better at privacy, security and so on and away from the direction of turnkey totalitarianism surveillance that the Stasi could only have wet dreams about. Alarmist right? Could bad things really happen here? Are the interests of Cook, Zuck, Seregey, Larry, Jeff et al not precisely yours or a wider population's? They all do seem really quite friendly to despotic regimes. But I guess those reigimes are foreign?
So be it. But then when their software is crap I won't just accept the "well at least it's not Facebook" defense.
Somebody will make signal redundant one day. When I look at it I see that day has not come. When it does the world is a better place for the advances made by signal.
The decisions they've made are /why/ signal is the leader of the pack by a margin. But please do make better ones. Please do give us something better than signal. Their libraries are all capital F Free. Go for it.
Crapping on them from the sideline, sure, go ahead but acknowledge they've done rather better than /anyone/ else in this space. It's not even close. So maybe their decisions are worth considering as having some merit? Disagree sure, but really. They've done it. Well. I haven't. Nobody else has.
I don't like electron. The desktop client works well for me on linux and for non-techy family members on mainstream consumer machines. There's some merit there you're completely discounting which doesn't seem quite fair.
And it's not "At least it's not facebook"
It is: "Whatsapp now is end to end encrypted thanks to signal" and "new players have to match signal's encryption"
That's crap loads more than "at least it's not facebook" that's actually good as opposed less evil. Straight to heaven for achieving that, for mine.
I don't care about the blockchain tech in session but would session be a good candidate to a signal replacement ?
Telegram Desktop is a Qt app. Not that it offers E2E so not really comparable to Signal imo.