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Comment by awestroke | Hacker News Reader

You're welcome to either use such a decentralised service or fork signal and add decentralisation / federation. Centralised services get more users by having a lower threshold of adoption.

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What's the purpose of signal? Is it taking over the world or providing a service to people that care about their privacy and free (as in freedom) communication?

There are lots of purposes but dismantling mass surveillance is a major one. This requires 'taking over the world'.

... Creating a central point of failure / censorship?

Yeah so this latest attempt seems to want to “fix” that.

“Hey, let’s distribute connections (proxy servers) to our central point of failure so that we can get around the central point of failure. Genius!” /s

They want to have a monopoly on points of failure. We can censor but no one else.

Creating yet another walled garden.

> You're welcome to either use such a decentralised service or fork signal and add decentralisation / federation.

It's called XMPP. It predates Signal by ~15 years.

And the clients for XMPP still suck, 15 years later. You might find a good one on one OS after trying out several (install, test for a few days, repeat), but then when you want a client on your phone or another OS, you have to try the install/test cycle all over again.

In my experience, most of the clients just don’t do WEll everything a modern IM client needs.... group chat without needing to know a FQDN address, alerting on new messages/mentions, image and attachment support, encryption without wonky key management, multisession support (connecting simultaneously from multiple devices not leading to problems), on and on...

I used XMPP for years on iOS, android, Mac, windows, and linux. Hated it every day.

Conversations and it's forks are all very good clients, and their voice/video chat works perfectly once the XMPP server configures the turn server. Gajim got a lot better recently. I even managed to get Pidgin to a decent, albeit not perfect level.

And yet it hasn't become big yet.

It did, then the google reader effect kicked in. Google talk, whatsapp, facebook were all xmpp at one point, deliberately crippled, then nearly killed. See RSS.

Well... except in Iran, hence the strategy of decentralizing proxy servers.

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