Hacker News Reader

Comment by turminal | Hacker News Reader

Or they could just let people host their own server instances. Would be considerably more censorship resistant from the start.

View on HN

You're welcome to either use such a decentralised service or fork signal and add decentralisation / federation. Centralised services get more users by having a lower threshold of adoption.

What's the purpose of signal? Is it taking over the world or providing a service to people that care about their privacy and free (as in freedom) communication?

There are lots of purposes but dismantling mass surveillance is a major one. This requires 'taking over the world'.

... Creating a central point of failure / censorship?

Yeah so this latest attempt seems to want to “fix” that.

“Hey, let’s distribute connections (proxy servers) to our central point of failure so that we can get around the central point of failure. Genius!” /s

They want to have a monopoly on points of failure. We can censor but no one else.

Creating yet another walled garden.

Well... except in Iran, hence the strategy of decentralizing proxy servers.

> You're welcome to either use such a decentralised service or fork signal and add decentralisation / federation.

It's called XMPP. It predates Signal by ~15 years.

And the clients for XMPP still suck, 15 years later. You might find a good one on one OS after trying out several (install, test for a few days, repeat), but then when you want a client on your phone or another OS, you have to try the install/test cycle all over again.

In my experience, most of the clients just don’t do WEll everything a modern IM client needs.... group chat without needing to know a FQDN address, alerting on new messages/mentions, image and attachment support, encryption without wonky key management, multisession support (connecting simultaneously from multiple devices not leading to problems), on and on...

I used XMPP for years on iOS, android, Mac, windows, and linux. Hated it every day.

Conversations and it's forks are all very good clients, and their voice/video chat works perfectly once the XMPP server configures the turn server. Gajim got a lot better recently. I even managed to get Pidgin to a decent, albeit not perfect level.

And yet it hasn't become big yet.

It did, then the google reader effect kicked in. Google talk, whatsapp, facebook were all xmpp at one point, deliberately crippled, then nearly killed. See RSS.

Or just use Element/Matrix which already lets you do that.

I feel like this answer to "how to make government censorship of private communications over the internet impossible" is more complex though than just "use element/matrix"

It seems like both signal and matrix choose "Human-meaningful" over "distributed" on Zooko's Triangle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle

Matrix is federated which I'd argue is pretty different than "distributed". Certainly the fact that federation is built-in makes matrix more resistant to lazy censors who are slow to block popular homeservers, but a concerted check-any-IP-and-if-it-seems-like-it-might-be-a-homeserver-then-block-it action by a censor would be harder to deal with.

Wouldn't a truly distributed/secure/really-super-hard-to-block protocol rely on non-meaningful addresses (i.e. public-key-derived like a tor hidden service) and some kind of interesting mesh setup (i.e. like tor) to route and deliver messages?

> Wouldn't a truly distributed/secure/really-super-hard-to-block protocol rely on non-meaningful addresses (i.e. public-key-derived like a tor hidden service) and some kind of interesting mesh setup (i.e. like tor) to route and deliver messages?

Yes. You just described Briar.

Found the PM

Too bad, the Signal devs love centralization. One day people will realize Signal is just not the right solution for what they actually need.

As if it was that simple; no it's not as simple as decentralization > centralisation. You might not agree with everything (I don't) but this video provides some good points https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8

I trust Signal to try their hardest to solve communication, spitting on them is not the solution.

I didn't watch the video but his article with the same title is almost entirely bad points.[1]

Email is end to end encrypted for people who make it a priority. It would be end to end encrypted for everyone if Google or Microsoft made it a priority.

The difference between XMPP and Signal is funding. Signal supports video on all platforms because Open Whisper Systems hired people to work on it. XMPP didn't because the popular clients are developed by volunteers.

People don't like using lots of messaging apps. So switching apps is much harder than changing your email address because you have to convince other people to switch.

Even Signal is moving away from using phone numbers.

[1] https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

Signal's been "moving away from using phone numbers" for almost as long as it's been developed. They've burned tens of millions of dollars and have nothing to show for it on that front.

Also they insist of making piece of shit bloatware clients and actively kill every attempt for someone to fix it. Because Moxie is always right apparently.

I really hope the situation is just due to incompetence and hubris.

It's simple, very simple.

XMPP is by far more fluid, and "productive" when it comes adding new protocol features, or at least if you compare it with Signal.

Marlinspike is making up the problem.

A messaging client is as agile as its developers are, and in case of Signal, not that much.

Evolving a protocol, and developing new features is done by doing programming, and not by some philosophical discourses, and pooing over the competition on tech events.

The problem with this is that Signal is a huge success right now where other federated chat platforms have fallen. Sure, something like Matrix might win the war eventually but by being centralized Signal shipped and is providing a useful service to millions of people today.

There are lots of problems in matrix that hinder its adoption, federation is likely not the biggest of them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com