It is strange he moved from seeing a centralized messenger project he founded be morphed into a monster, only to double down and invest in yet another privacy hostile centralized messaging system hoping for a different result.

Anything not decentralized is going to get abused eventually. The US government could seize the client signing keys, release s backdoored client, and dump the SGX keys and gag order everything in the name of national security. We have seen similar play out in China. Even the mighty Apple gave up HSM keys and caved to CCP censorship demands. It is only a matter of time.

I fear they are well meaning but woefully naive.

We need censorship resistant standard protocols anyone can implement and help host so there is no SPOF.

Moxie doesn't care about sellout money. As I understand it he wants to run signal as a lifestyle business, and he has private donors keeping everything afloat. I'm not sure if it'll stay independant if Moxie ever leaves, but hopefully there's a stable org structure. Source: The JRE podcast he did a couple months back.

Also if they ever sell out, the server & clients are completely opensource. It wouldn't take much for someone else to fork the whole thing and run a competing service if we ever need to.

One not implemented as a centralized service. Nobody can buy email, Jabber or Matrix.

And yet you need to be in the Google or Apple ecosystems to connect to their network.