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Comment by shalmanese | Hacker News Reader

Except that history has shown us that theoretically secure but feature deficient systems lose out to less ideologically pure systems that provide what users want, leaving the sum total amount of security provided to be less.

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History shows us that you can't compete by being a lesser version of something else. There's nothing wrong with trying to make the application more attractive, but at the same time trying to shoehorn in features rather than doing things where you have an advantage is less likely to be meaningful.

Surely missing features would make it the "lesser version of something else."

A feature like this doesn't really matter in the context of competing with mainstream messaging services because their value is to a large extent in things like brand and network effect. The notion that you're just one feature away from mainstream adaptation is often a misconception. In reality there's limited potential in living in the shadow of something else.

It would be more interesting if people could reply why they disagree. I'm not the first one to come to this conclusion, hemlis is a public example. You simply can't compete with large companies several years after the fact without differentiating.

I absolutely agree. Instagram/Facebook/Soundcloud have lost my interest as they've added extra features which just clutter the UI and distract from the purpose you were using the site in the first place.

If your original product isn't working. Maybe try being a different company.

EDIT: Deleted the comment because the of attacks in responses, which I can’t respond to due to "Submitting too fast".

@dang: If you want users to be able to actually discuss things, allow them to respond to comments attacking them. This is a retarded system.

Basically everything in your comment is wrong.

> The prebuilt Signal APK might in fact be completely malicious, you can’t verify anything.

https://whispersystems.org/blog/reproducible-android/

This is already more then for all other options.

> And as Signal only tries to copy the features WhatsApp and co already have

Thats simply not true. WhatsApp does not support gifs, for example. Signal also has some features that others don't.

> they’ll get exactly the same security with WhatsApp, Telegram or Threema, and exactly the same features.

Telegram is less secure by miles. Threema is less secure by yards. WhatApp is less secure by inches.

> "You can create your own federated server"

Signal has never claimed that you can "federate" the server. They only mentioned that this is a feature that they might work on in the future. Since they have publicly said that they are not gone do so.

> Telegram is less secure by miles. Threema is less secure by yards. WhatApp is less secure by inches.

Depends. For me closed-source is a no-go for security, that's why IMHO

Signal (open client and server) > Telegram (open client) > Threema (open NaCl lib) > WhatsApp

> you can’t compile your own client from source

According to the docs in the git repo, you can do a `./gradlew build` and there you have it.

> you can’t verify anything

They have docs on reproducible builds[0].

Anyway, I'd say Signal does have more security than WhatsApp because I trust OWS more than I trust WhatsApp/Facebook.

[0] https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/wiki/Reprod...

You keep repeating untrue claims in every thread about Signal, despite having been proven wrong before. At this point, I'll just have to assume that you're not interested in having a factual discussion. See, for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12689390 and its descendant posts.

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