Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

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> I _could_ go to each of my contacts and explain why I don't want them to do things like use the cool new Element service with Signal. But 1) I (finally) have a lot of contacts using Signal, so that would be a pain to manage; 2) to me, the entire idea of Signal is that I can pretty much set it and forget it on any relatively-modern smartphone for friends, family, etc. and not have to worry about anything but the biennial phone migration for my mother.

Yes, I totally agree that this would be a huge hassle. But what's your proposed alternative? Reaching out to every programmer in the world and convincing them to never write any software that can act as a Signal client? Or pushing for legal prohibition on any non-Signal developers creating software that can act as a Signal client?

Hahaha of course not. I don't really propose an alternative. I'm just lamenting the situation and trying to provide context to the Element CEO about why the original commenter, and people like him, might not be 100% jazzed about the democratization of technology that, in terms of message _security_, is a step backwards.

Doesn't mean I'm in favor of such ridiculous things as you've suggested here.

> jazzed about the democratization of technology that, in terms of message _security_, is a step backwards.

Well, you can always switch to Matrix and have democratized and secure native messaging which uses a cryptographic protocol comparable to Signal. ;)

Many of us have, and painfully if I might add, finally convinced people to abandon insecure messengers and move to something like Signal. Now the solution is to tell them to abandon Signal in favor of Matrix? I'll pass.

Also, obligatory xkcd: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png

The problem is Signal is not a standard unless they open up their ecosystem, so we're not actually increasing the number of standards here.

I've been through the pain of convincing people to Signal due to lack of better alternatives at the time. And I've done it yet again for Matrix. In this case, each move brought us closer to a global optimum so I'm not sorry for it.

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