Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

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So finally a basic feature they should have had at the outset, and as a paid option? I'm left wondering if they just purchase a SIP DID in the background, solely to allocate a phone number lolol.

I can't argue that Signal adoption rate hasn't been fantastic, but the paternalistic "opinionated" crypto has always rubbed me the wrong way. I remember the initial announcement claiming that binding themselves to Google Play was "more secure" because it would lead to more adoption. This is of course patently absurd when Google is one of your primary threat actors.

My "mobile phone" is not the center of my digital existence, and never will be. When I am home I leave it by the door, and use different devices - desktop, laptop, and a different pocket device for photos, afk, messaging, yardwork music, etc. So similarly, this argument that Signal is super sekoor by relying on treacherous hardware enclaves etc just falls super flat. If I'm not able to choose between competing open clients for each of my use cases, then I will always consider your system as a proprietary nuisance that I just need to mitigate my exposure to and cope with otherwise.

Opinionated is good. It means everyone gets the same predictable experience and it's easy to set up. On the opposite end of the spectrum you'd have something like IRC, which nobody uses because it's so hard to get started.

If we're just throwing around straw men, then a good example of "opinionated" is websites repeatedly hassling you with CAPTCHA "security checks". They're really concerned that you suffer their exact intended "experience", rather than being able to use your chosen software tools to view/analyze per your own needs.

Open clients/protocols/ecosystems create individual freedom and choices at the edges. One size does not fit all, even if you market it as an "experience".

We've had a lot of open systems and protocols, SIP, XMPP, Matrix, desktop Linux, Mastodon. It only gains adoption from the technologically savvy and fails to capture a regular user base.

My mother, a 70 year old retired special education teacher, got me and my extended family (21 people) on Signal. I didn't tell her about it, I didn't encourage her to use it, I didn't step her through the process. She doesn't know how to make a folder.

Signal hasn't beaten WhatsApp (which still uses Signal protocol) due to network effects, but it is a great solution for everyday users.

This relies on an implicit idea that a system being closed is required for encouraging adoption, but without actually stating a concrete mechanism for that.

One such mechanism I often lament is that closed systems attract investment dollars seeking to capture a market then eventually enshittify, and that investment can be spent on marketing/polish/etc to drive adoption. I don't think this is the dynamic around Signal though, per se.

I can envision a world in which Signal still did everything they did to promote themselves, while also not binding themselves to mobile phones, Google Play, phone numbers as identity, secure enclaves, etc - where they were just as successful at gaining "normie" adoption, while also having a free foundation. This is where my criticism is coming from.

That's one mechanism, but another mechanism is what I said - an open system fragments too much, making it completely unapproachable. Or even within one "vendor" if they can't make up their mind about how it should work (i.e. if they can't be opinionated) it's just as bad as being fragmented.

If there is still one company pushing their own strongly opinionated client, how does having competing options available to power users detract from that? Like I'm not saying Signal-the-client should go away, rather that Signal-the-company who runs Signal-the-server could be accepting of third party clients, to the point where Signal was easily usable from F-Droid and whatnot. How would that undermine the mass market option?

They do accept third party clients. They don't like it, but they don't have a choice, because they don't use device attestation.

Admittedly I haven't stayed up to date on what the state of the art looks like for using Signal from the libre world, I just know it's still not straightforwardly available in F-droid, and that doesn't bode well.

The last I heard there was a "desktop client" but it was actually going through the mobile client. This could be out of date, although I haven't seen anything directly refuting it and I haven't bothered to dig.

To the original point, the proprietaryesque policies rooted in the authoritarian desire for centralized have severely hampered my interest/adoption, and I still don't see how policies disrupting the libre ecosystem in any way encourage adoption in the non-libre ecosystem.

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