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Comment by burnbabyburn | Hacker News Reader

I'm happy to use Signal today.

In the long run federated protocols and servers demonstrated their resilience regarding third parties and time, see irc for example.

Probably Signal is just a reference implementation, the big deal is implementing Signal protocol in different systems (whatsapp, allo, fb messenger..).

Having said that, I would be happier to not give my phone number for registration, and contact discovery but this is today a user interface well understood and accepted outside geek communities that's hard to eradicate.

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I'm surprised to see that matrix.org / riot.im is not mentioned as an alternative to Signal. They have a federated, open protocol, usable open-source apps for web/Android/iOS, registration without a phone number (even email is optional), do not require Google Play, and support double-ratchet encryption (in beta, it's not activated by default yet, but it will be activated by default in private rooms in the future).

Because, frankly, the UX around encryption in Matrix is dire, as well as being beta. I've never seen someone actually use the same keys for two conversations over as many days, due to switching devices, logging out of the web interface, etc.

> the big deal is implementing Signal protocol in different systems (whatsapp, allo, fb messenger..)

Strongly disagree. The point of Signal is not just that it's encrypted. The point is that the source code is GPL and the service is free. Holding up a bunch of closed-source, proprietary, for-profit applications as examples of success only serves to obscure what should be the real goal: decentralized, anonymous, metadata-less, encrypted communication that anyone can easily use. Signal could be much closer to that goal but OWS & moxie refuse to allow decentralization or anonymity for bad reasons.

> what should be the real goal:

You are describing what should be the goals in your opinion, not the one of Signal's developers.

Having something that works to show (Signal), was a big point to sell to those, closed and already used by many people, systems; so having a non federated Signal means they can iterate more often and change things how they more or less want.

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