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> The only tangible evolution of signal in the past year has been new cat and dog stickers that no one asked for.

Oh come on, that's just not true (and I don't mean by that that the most common complaint in every thread about Signal was that lack of sticker support was hindering people's efforts of getting their friends to use Signal, although that is also true). Things the Signal team worked on in the past year include group management without revealing information about the group (including its existence) to the server (https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/) and secure value recovery (https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/), which lays the groundwork for abandoning phone numbers as identifiers and secure cloud backups of messaging history. Just because these haven't been rolled out yet doesn't mean nothing is happening. Signal also added iPad support in the past year, which is something many people have wished for for a long time.

A little bit further back, Sealed Sender (https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/) means that the server no longer needs to know who is sending a message (previously, it did to prevent spoofing and for rate limiting and abuse protection). Private contact discovery (https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/) allows matching of address books without revealing them to the server.

Until quite recently, there were fewer than a handful of people working on Signal, but with the funding they have now, they've ramped up hiring and have started working on features like the above. It just takes some time.

Also, Signal works without Google Play Services installed.

If they were security and privacy first they would not implement groups the way they did originally.

Mmm? The existing groups were secure and private, but lacked some useful functionality. That's exactly what I'd expect to get implemented with "security and privacy first" as priority.

For example Signal didn't have a way for a group to boot out a member against their will. If you didn't want to be in a group with Mary any more, and she wouldn't voluntarily leave, you would all need to go form a new group. Signal's servers can't know who is in a group (privacy) so it took a bunch more heavy lifting to develop this feature.

Surely the other way around to do this would indeed not be putting "security and privacy first" ?

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2018/01/11/whatsapp-signal-g...

> For example Signal didn't have a way for a group to boot out a member against their will.

This article says just as much. Sure, you could brute force a 128 bit key to get into a random group. And if you were kicked out of a group, you could re-add yourself if you had saved the group key. But even the article says it's not super likely.

> The only tangible evolution of signal in the past year has been new cat and dog stickers that no one asked for.

This is not true. Signal has been adding some very novel and bleeding edge privacy enhancements, such as sealed sender (https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/) and private groups (i.e. encrypted group state, https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/).

That said, it's also untrue that federated services are stuck in time. See Matrix (https://matrix.org/).

> The only tangible evolution of signal in the past year has been new cat and dog stickers that no one asked for.

I've been asking for them! I've been asking for them for years, in fact. I'm chuffed that my tiny little crusade finally bore fruit, and that the implementation they landed on is precisely as I always envisioned it.

It was the #1 excuse friends made for why they wouldn't consider Signal. But also, personally, I really do get a lot of value out of the sticker system in, say, Telegram, and it's great to have available for my Signal conversations, too.

What are the use cases for stickers? I cannot seem to get them. They seem to express the ~same thing as emojis while being non-standard and not guaranteed to be available. I guess there might also be some overlap with "gifs", but with less flexibility.

Sticker are fun and can convey nuances and intended personality emojis don't in the same bandwidth. Also always just two taps away in the same place, as opposed to gifs. Depending on your communication style, this may or may not be a feature for you.

I have also seen stickers as a hurdle for Signal adoption for years.

AFAIK, LINE was the first IM platform to make sticker-use widespread. Imagine you're about to meet up with a friend downtown for a Sunday brunch and the different situations and moods you can encounter on the way, check out their initial starter pack and I think you can see how this can actually make communication more efficient.

https://www.line-stickers.com/moon-james/

So a kind of middle ground between emojis and gifs? That makes sense.

I'll admit I still don't find it appealing from any examples I've seen so far and I've never encountered sticker usage "in the wild" with my contacts to get a hands-on feeling of it.

Yeah, I first encountered them living in East Asia where the majority use them consistently (including foreigners who generally pick it up pretty fast).

I'd probably have your stance if I hadn't experienced it IRL.

"It was the #1 excuse friends made for why they wouldn't consider Signal."

I keep reading this claim about stickers and it seems like one of those wishing "if we cover 80% of the feature desires of 100% of the people" delusions.

They won't migrate. If the privacy pitch isn't enough, nothing else will succeed.

Which is why I agree with GP. Signal's entire raison d'être is privacy. Yet increasingly the updates are "look, we're a kind-of-shittier-version-of-imessages".

As an aside, they update way too often. No one would complain about updates for actual privacy or security issues, but the virtually daily updates seem to be primarily "moved stuff around".

All nice and true (thus upvoted), but it's not really the point he's making. The point he's making is that most modern applications require more than 1-3 developers, and therefore you need to consider the development cost and infrastructure as part of the whole consideration. So he advocates to work on decreasing these costs instead of finding another high-level distributed architecture that is running on centralized infrastructure (the internet) and that is either forgotten in a few months or built by a centralized development organization.

> new cat and dog stickers that no one asked for

These happen to be important tools for a "social" thing like a messenger for helping the average person want to use it. People (generally) like stickers, and adding them makes signal an easier sell to people who might not understand the value of encryption.

> In the United states players like Cloudflare have demonstrated twice the can and will de-platform entire communities for controversial speech.

What are the two instances?

The Daily Stormer and 8chan, AFAIK.

Some Nazis were briefly inconvenienced.

And a lot of people gave Cloudflare a lot of grief for not de-platforming them sooner.

But, hey. This person sees that as a fatal flaw.

https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-cloudflare/

they're legitimate problems if you value transparency and free speech.

But I get it. We've seen this before.

    First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—

         Because I was not a socialist.

    Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
         Because I was not a trade unionist.

    Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
         Because I was not a Jew.

    Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

> The only tangible evolution of signal in the past year has been new cat and dog stickers that no one asked for.

That's only true if by "no one" you mean "99% of people". All my friends care about is that Signal doesn't support stickers, "privacy-preserving" doesn't help convert people from Facebook as much as you'd think.

> the greatest concern to centralized systems like Signal is not ease of use, its censorship and de-platforming. In China, Signal servers are outright banned. No servers, no secure communications.

Funny thing, one of the only western apps that worked without a fuss in China (with Chinese mobile internet) was Signal. I did not test many others, but WhatsApp/Viber/... were blocked.

I am not 100% happy with Signal, but it is one of the best solutions currently available for my constraints. And even if I don't agree with some choices they make, I can at least understand why they made them. Hopefully they can continue improving and evolving.

Increasingly Moxie seems to value the developer experience over any project goal for Signal.

Where are the official project goals for Signal? All I was able to gather is please use our app instead of not ours.

They have the reputation of being secure and private. Even in circles who really should know better.

Signal has always focused on functionality that would get them the most users with the least amount of effort.

Decentralized or privacy and security first platforms dont get 50 million dollar donations. Everyone has a business model.

Matrix is well-funded and decentralized. Insinuating sinister goals because Signal received funding is tinfoil nonsense.

>Signal has always focused on functionality that would get them the most users with the least amount of effort.

But that is extremely important for a messaging app.

It's irrelevant how secure it is if nobody is using it. Unless you are into just talking to yourself.

Signal keeps on upgrading its security feature as well, they are not being left behind, and until quite recently, they didn't really had enough devs.

It's important for Signal's goals, "secure global communication" but it's not important for people who enjoy tinkering and like to play at James Bond once in a while.

For example, if you have Signal's goals you want Henry your hairdresser, Peter the guy who sells you untaxed vodka, and Betty the local baker to all have the same secure system for messaging and it just works even though lots of the messages are mundane and don't "need" to be secured.

But if you want to play James Bond then it's _cool_ that you had to download a alpha preview version of a clunky app and then Peter had to keep rebooting his laptop so he could tell you "The merchandise will be delivered to the usual place tomorrow night". You felt like a real bad ass turning on "Advanced Crypto: Experimental" in the Special Features preferences window and seeing it say "These messages are now secret!" in your chat window. Being interrupted with Betty's broadcast reminder of the discount on sour dough loaves through January stops it feeling special.

What a cynical comment. Signal has bleeding edge cryptography. It's virtually the most secure way to exchange messages available right now for the average person. And they keep getting better.

You're chastising them for trying to get users. Right.

Signal's 501(c)3 not-for-profit describes its mission as:

developing open source privacy technology that protects free expression and enables secure global communication.

> Increasingly Moxie seems to value the developer experience over any project goal for Signal.

This has always been the case.