Hacker News Reader

Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

Even if I agree with the principles of the anti-censorship people, to be an activist to apply pressure on Signal for features instead of forking and building solutions is suspicious to me. Signal does a great job of frustrating mass interception, which I think was its original point.

Inventing new criteria and re-framing their product as inadequate for this scope change as an activism play seems insincere. We can expect this kind of pressure to be applied to all BDFL-run software projects, as I think there is an emerging organized play to insert new governance over foundational internet software.

View on HN

> instead of forking and building solutions

What would you fork? The signal server code that hasn’t been updated in almost a year[1]?

If that is truly the same code that we use with signal today, would your fork work with this same network? Or would it be it’s own 1-server network all alone?

[1]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

Either fork the code, or fork a new effort that implements the things you want, and then share it with people who also want it.

That these people think it is more viable to co-opt an existing product using organizing pressure for their ends than to build one someone actually wants and share it is indicative of their strategy and attitude. Project leaders need to recognize this tactic coming from afar and then exercise their prerogative to reject meta- and political ploys. Sure, talk to users, get features, but pressure? Treat it like a weed.

> That these people think it is more viable to co-opt an existing product using organizing pressure for their ends than to build one someone actually wants and share it is indicative of their strategy and attitude

Ironic, considering that Signal itself co-opted the existing network of SMS to build their product on top of. Even having the signal app on android manage regular SMS messages.

Point being that products aren’t created in a vacuum and they need network effects to be successful. In fact, that was a design philosophy of Signal from the start. Paraphrasing: “Don’t let people choose, but rather give them the best defaults”

I think we should ask this guy how he build it ?

https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/l5dug8/signal_serve...

Has the year-old code somehow "gone bad"? At worst they can roll back to year-old versions of the mobile clients as well, and start with that as a base.

Would it be better/easier to have an up-to-date server? Sure, but they don't have it, and that's life.

Signal is open source in the same way pfsense is: it is impossible to actually build everything current from publicly available source.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com