New Year, New CEO
signal.org
signal.org
Are they still doing the crypto scheme? I stopped donating when that started, but would be more than happy to pick it back up if they reversed course.
Why?
This has been ongoingly why we have bad encryption technology. No one wants to taint their ideological purity by trying to solve problems for organizations that can pay for them which would actually solve problems for private citizens, and simultaneously ensures that good technology doesn't secure important social interactions for private citizens.
Why should I not be able to verify I'm talking to my bank through Signal? Why can't I have messages from my local government secured to me via Signal?
It's a 2-sided problem, and one side is this bizarre rejection of any attempt at enterprise marketing for a platform with enterprise utility.
The biggest customers of a company inevitably shape the incentives and behavior's within that company. easy to dismiss as a "slippery slope fallacy" but it's historically true. No one who's using Signal to get away from the shitty enterprises that built/own FB Messenger wants a repeat of the same thing. Even if you don't agree, many Signal users probably do, and it would be silly for Signal to piss off their customers.
Also, payments with free floating crypto like MobileCoin and bitcoin really isn't practical in most of the western world, due to the requirements of capital gains tax reporting, not to mention the instability of the price.
MobileCoin is seriously behind the ball on this, even though it's a problem being actively solved on bitcoin's lightning network, https://seekingalpha.com/article/4459757-biggest-bitcoin-dev...
I have nothing in principle against crypto currencies and I am very much in favour of strong privacy for personal communication, but mixing the two is obviously contradictory. It completely defeats the purpose of Signal.
That was as of last April, the page has now been removed.
I guess I'm just worried about perverting what makes it a good messaging client, and would rather they get money from people that support that cause so they aren't as tempted to chase some other path because the alternative is to shutter.
That said, that can happen even if they can sustain themselves through donations if the management/board decide to do so. Just have to hope it stays the course.
Good sources to read?
https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-secu...
https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/gmwheu/introducing_...
https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/hkl914/welcome_to_t...
https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/giqxug/whats_happen...
https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/hkle3d/forced_pin_b...
https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/ghsj5b/pin_cloud_st...
https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/hm2fwx/why_i_think...
Signal then announced that because of all the hate they'll make the feature optional, but opting out would just set a pin for you and upload your data anyway. This also caused a bunch of confusion.
https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/hnok10/moxie_on_twi...
https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/hrlmoe/pins_now_opt...
https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/hoh7e9/moxie_marlin...
/u/PriorProject has a comment far down which sums up my view pretty well in this one:
https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/htmzrr/psa_disablin...
It's worth pointing out that they're collecting the type of data they still brag about not being able to turn over because they "don't keep user data".
https://signal.org/bigbrother/eastern-virginia-grand-jury/
In fact, this was posted just one month before all this went down: https://signal.org/blog/looking-back-as-the-world-moves-forw...
Between that and not updating their privacy policy it's a pretty massive red flag, but so many people don't even know about the data collection. Look at the answers this guy gets:
https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/q5tlg1/what_info_do...
same with the top comment here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/qpb8eh/mlat_order_...
It's insane, and I hope every user who has to learn what signal is really collecting from some random internet comment thinks long and hard about what that says about how transparent and trustworthy signal is.
Yes it seems they are still doing the MobileCoin thing. I'm against cryptocurrencies, blockchain, NFTs, etc also, but nothing is forcing me to use it. I'd be curious to read some case studies or blog posts about how it is being used. For example, are people using it to pay for milk in rural India, send money to family in Myanmar, split dinner bills in New York?
Regarding donations, I would be happy to donate, but it would be great to see some financial reports. Other initiatives like Software in the Public Interest (SPI) and the OpenStreetMap Foundation publish yearly reports, which makes it easy to see how the projects spend their money, how much cash they have in the bank, etc. Pardon me, but I don't want to donate to Signal if they still have $50 million in the bank, or if their CEO is taking home a huge salary, or if they spend the money on fuse-ball tables. ;)
> In February of 2018, Acton invested $50 million of his own money to start the Signal Foundation alongside Moxie Marlinspike > > https://signalfoundation.org/en/
He's worth at least a billion dollars, so one imagines that Signal will continue as long as he's involved.
If you're rich you get all kinds of people in your life soliciting your money, you gotta watch it like a hawk, it's easy to lose a billion dollars.
And it’s probably sound for Signal to not rely on one single wealthy donor.
To be fair, that applies to non-billionaires as well.
:O
You can give away 50 mil a year and still get tens of millions dollars richer if you're sitting on $1B.
It's only "easy" to lose $1B if you have absolutely no idea what you're doing.
Whether or not you want to invest at that rate is entirely a separate conversation.
The reason not many rich people lose their money is because becoming rich is hard and you have to be smart to do it. You don’t have to be good or moral but you have to be smart. Even then there’s a ton of washout among new millionaires. But you don’t get to a billion by accident. Look at all the people who make tons of money through some other means than intelligence — lottery winners and football players — they all lose their money even if it’s millions. Sorry bud, the system isn’t rigged. Life is just hard.
Buying SPY returns on average 10% or so, year over year.
Do you consider the S&P500 to be "extremely risky"?
>Sorry bud, the system isn’t rigged.
I feel like you replied to the wrong person? Between you and I, the only one who brought up the question of whether "the system" is rigged or not is you.
How do you lose what 500 people make in their lifetime?
Just physically moving that amount of cash is difficult and takes time. Even those lottery winners don’t blow the whole lot in less than a year.
...that's why it isn't moved physically?
I think people that say it's easy to lose 2b$ don't have a clear understanding of the amount of money that is. It's a crazy amount for one person.
You know, same problem as everyone else, really.
With doors that go like this or this and not like this
Can you cite some examples? If it were easy, presumably a lot of people have done it.
[0] https://www.thesportster.com/basketball/15-nba-players-who-w...
You know what they say: a million here, a million there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.
Alongside the other examples in this thread, Donald Trump lost at least $1b during the first two years of his term.
> If it were easy, presumably a lot of people have done it.
The easiest way to lose a billion is to start with more than a billion, and there aren't really a lot of people in that position.
People forget this far too often. No matter how much money a person or an organization has, it can disappear in the blink of an eye if you view it as an unlimited money pot that you can keep going back to.
It is somewhat difficult for one individual to consistently single-handedly support a charity in the US without causing the tax status of the organization to change detrimentally.
With that said, if I'm interpreting their 2019 filing correctly, it appears that they are making enough in donations that they may have a legitimate claim to being able to eventually repay the loan, and they are now including imputed interest on the (interest-free) loan as revenue.
> The foundation was started with an initial $50 million loan from Acton, who had left WhatsApp's parent company, Facebook, in September 2017.[8] The Freedom of the Press Foundation had previously served as the Signal project's fiscal sponsor and continued to accept donations on behalf of the project while the foundation's non-profit status was pending.[4] By the end of 2018, the loan had increased to $105,000,400, which is due to be repaid on February 28, 2068. The loan is unsecured and at 0% interest.
Appears it wasn't an outright donation. I've always wondered about the details behind this. Don't think I've seen something like this before.
For all intents an purposes, he owns Signal. He's the org's benefactor, lender, founder, board member, and now CEO.
If you have millions of people giving a small amount of money, chances are the organisation will try to preserve the users' best interest.
Now I get it that the person who gave a lot of money also happen to be the interim CEO, but you gotta start somewhere.
In Germany there is now a party running on a program trying to forbid political parties from taking donations from any individual above €5000 per year, and barring politicians from staying in office longer than two terms of 5 years each. -- This is roughly the standard I expect from any charity that wants to have any shot at getting money from me.
The guy's worth 2.5B. I sincerely doubt he'd go to all that trouble to just make even more money. There are easier ways, with less scrutiny.
This is similar to how Google Docs competes with Microsoft Office. It hurts Microsoft's cash-generation and thus benefits Google as they compete with Bing.
If Google had been even smarter (or poorer, so as not to be able to afford footing the bill for Google docs entirely on their own), they could have established Google Docs as a 501c3 foundation, benefitting from tax exemptions and donations from individuals and just dominated that foundation through large donations and putting the right people in charge.
This may or may not be an accurate analogy for Acton's true motives with Signal, but I just can't know the truth of it and am therefore not taking that risk with my cash.
[0] https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...
Just five years later, the endowment passed $90 million, and the $100 million mark, now described as an “initial goal,” will be reached this year.
https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/tides-foundation/
Which partly explains Wikipedia's political stance.
The fact that they declare themselves center-left is not a violation of 501(c)(3)?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/politics/irs-targeting...
I'm curious to hear what you think Wikipedia's political stance is?
I can think of one family of scientific subjects where the "progressive" side is almost as unscientific as the "conservative" side, and a particular case[0] where the "progressive" agenda was loudly denying the scientific state of the art.
But I cannot think of any cases where the "conservative" side had actively better scientific grounding. But that, of course, is probably due to my bias, my thought bubble, etc. So please, if you can rise to the standard you're setting, I'd like to learn about it. (If nothing else, almost all of my friends and family are left of me, and it's nice to be able to reality-check them, when social mores permit.)
[0] I'd provide my example, but I'm sufficiently afraid of progressive culture to not want to discuss the particular case under my own name. But I checked WP on the subject, and while it's not incredibly detailed either way, I don't think it supports the progressive side of the case w.r.t. the science. (In my assessment, the alleged progressives were wrong about the science in this particular case, although they may have been right about everything else, I dunno.)
Neither of these positions is The Truth, as usual, but the result is that some of the things the right has been saying have been accurate but previously disparaged. For example, the difference between dying of COVID and dying with COVID, or accurately pointing out that the large majority of fatalities have been people with comorbidities.
This is literally an irrelevant example because it's not related to Wikipedia. New, evolving science (especially as it intersects with many governments' policies) is always going to be wrong to some degree.
rel·e·vant /ˈreləvənt/
closely connected or appropriate to what is being done or considered.
appropriate to the current time, period, or circumstances; of contemporary interest.
> New, evolving science (especially as it intersects with many governments' policies) is always going to be wrong to some degree.
Now this is an irrelevant criticism. Nobody asked for an example that isn't in dispute.
New, evolving science is the thing you would expect there to be the most political disputes over because the uncertainty causes people to believe whatever most benefits their coalition.
The classic example is CAGW. If I know a person's position on that, I find I can predict their position on most any other contentious issue.
The average people on the street have plenty of received opinions that they are happy to share, but know little about the actual science relevant to them.
But, we were discussing Wikipedia science articles. The issue with Wikipedia is what is permitted to be said on some science pages, and what is quickly reverted.
Everyone is political. Good scientists (and good encyclopedists) ought to try hard to suppress that.
In case anyone was curious, it seems to stand for "catastrophic anthropogenic global warming" [0] (or Citizens Against Government Waste, which seems an equally stark signifier of the invoker's political position -- who better to exemplify "waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government" than, uh, Bernie Sanders?!).
"CAGW", for "catastrophic anthropogenic global warming", is a snarl word (or snarl acronym) that global warming denialists use for the established science of climate change. A Google Scholar search indicates that the term is never used in the scientific literature on climate[104][105] except in reference to denialist tactics.[106]
It’s not a “snarl” word. It’s an acronym which is used because the whole fully qualified set of words is too long.
All four words are necessary to state what’s being discussed. Anything less is trying to deflect the debate.
Working backwards, Warming: it’s a rare scientist that thinks the world isn’t warming. We are still coming out of the last ice age. Fifteen thousand years ago, there was ice a mile thick where I’m sitting. We are also coming out of the Little Ice Age. A couple of centuries ago, you could walk from Manhattan to Staten Island on the ice in the winter.
Global: local climate change happens all the time. No one disputes that. The discussion is about global climate change.
Anthropogenic: significantly caused by humans, specifically by emitting excessive CO2. This is theoretical, because by itself, CO2 can’t account for the projected warming. There must be a feedback to the real greenhouse gas, water vapor.
Catastrophic: The amount of warming is going to alter the global climate to the point that the Earth’s ecology and human civilization will be seriously affected.
The last two points are in scientific dispute. The computer models, which have many knobs, predict a bad outcome.
Historic satellite measurements of the global tropospheric temperature show that nothing unusual is happening. The increase is 0.14 C per decade.
https://www.drroyspencer.com/2022/01/uah-global-temperature-...
It appears to me that the CAGW hypothesis is disproved.
Global climate change is a topic for some very interesting science. The solar system's position in the galaxy, for example. Or, the effect of the sun on the intensity of galactic cosmic rays.
The climate models can't address even recent pre-industrial global changes.
>The last two points are in scientific dispute
I don't think that's true. I think that a casual google will show that climatology is actually in overwhelming agreement that human activities are driving climate change, and here's one I did earlier [0]. To the reader: this is a testable hypothesis!
>It appears to me that the CAGW hypothesis is disproved
Argument by personal incredulity isn't always a fallacy. Sometimes, smart people are intuitive and well-informed enough to jump directly to conclusions without needing to cover the intervening intellectual distance. Maybe this is happening here, and I'm just not an exceptional person, but if I were you I'd consider wondering why the likes of Dr Roy Spencer and I couldn't turn our ability to outthink entire scientific disciplines to a more profitable end.
The issue is that stupidly oversimplified models from 40+ years ago have been borne out, sourced from both capitalist and Soviet science [1][3]. By all means, there are many, many inputs into the grand planetary system, but the inconvenient truth, if you will, is that atmospheric CO2 increases seem to track with temperature increases, in both modeling and the historical record. I think, by "many knobs", that you're trying to suggest there are many variables that can be tweaked -- nope! It's actually very straightforward. Are there complex, "more realistic" climate models that produce unorthodox results when their knobs are twiddled? Probably! But for every one of those you fixate on, remember that there is one big, simple one that continues to track with the thing we're trying to measure: observable reality. Bald-faced denial of observable reality is a pretty good signifier that some aspect of science has been politicized, whether in a Wikipedia article or in a congressional hearing.
You've made a lot of claims, but haven't really backed any of them up, or even explained them; "CAGW" is pretty clearly a snarl word.
[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966
[1] https://eos.org/features/a-50-year-old-global-warming-foreca...
[2] https://xkcd.com/1732/ <- "This is just a temperature chart!" That's right, but its sources, which track the CO2 rise, aren't
[3] https://www.climatefiles.com/exxonmobil/1982-memo-to-exxon-m...
There is research to support all kinds of propositions regarding the vaccine's efficacy and safety. Of topical consideration is its efficacy in reduction of transmission. The article has been scrubbed (and all updates are being removed) which cite the current research that the vaccine is less effective at reducing transmission against more recent strains of covid-19; and especially compared with typical live-attenuated and inactivated vaccines.
Citation: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2108891
Further, all citations have been scrubbed (and all updates are being removed) which explain that mask efficacy in reducing transmission for children is questionable at best, and also demonstrably harmful.
Citation: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Further, all citations have been scrubbed (and all updates are being removed) which explain that vaccine efficacy wanes rather quickly compared with typical live-attenuated and inactivated vaccines.
Citation: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110345
Further, all mention of "natural immunity" has been scrubbed (and future updates are being removed) discussing the reality that those who have already recovered from covid-19 possess natural immunity to the virus which is at least as effective as vaccines.
Citation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8627252/
These are all relevant and credible citations to an article discussing many aspects of the virus, yet they are being actively removed.
I feel the need to postface my comments with the disclaimer that I love vaccines and have three covid-19 vaccines already, and am prepared to receive more. My comments are purely to provide a relevant and factual example to support OP's premise that there is some form of bias present in moderation of Wikipedia now. This bias is extremely difficult to quantify and qualify because there are millions of layers of bureaucracy built into Wikipedia's moderation system. It is almost ungovernable now, and those who have attained sufficient power and coordination can and do use that power to affect bias.
... Except if it is donations and esp. Brian Acton's, or even say Firefox with most of their money being one Google or Bing search bar deal... the sustainable business isn't there yet. A replacement CEO can be good just for that. Marlin as a CEO found amazing product/user fit, and as a tech leader, hired enough and built enough for a great dev culture. But there is no sustainable product/customer fit yet, esp if they view the user as not the established product: the market isn't paying. A CEO focused on solving that would be quite healthy for achieving sustainability! Hopefully Brian and his successor will have more room now to figure that out, it's not easy, esp given their privacy mission!
(And still congrats and a lot of respect to Moxie for building something people want & helps security, and growing a team to deliver it, and everyone else for pushing into the next phase!)
https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-cryptocurrency...
I could send someone the recovery keys for a bitcoin wallet and launder money via any messaging service. If we need to regulate that then privacy goes out the window, you'd have to know what the content of my message was to know if it was allowed.
But I consider that bundling to be a bad thing.
And I wish large-scale money laundering was easier to deal with in a privacy-preserving way.
And because privacy-for-commerce is morally wrong for almost all definitions of morality, then I guess privacy-for-speech is also morally wrong.
https://amycastor.com/2021/04/07/signal-adopts-mobilecoin-a-...
Was it an overreaction? I don't think so. I feel dumb stuff like this, massive conflicts of interest, happens too often these days, and I'm voting with my wallet.
Yes, and who has a better reputation for fighting for principles than Brian Acton, one of the guys who made Whatsapp and subsequently sold it to the most morally correct company in the world: Facebook.
I'm reminded of the old gag:
Would you sleep with me for a million dollars?
Yes, of course!
Would you sleep with me for one dollar?
What kind of woman do you think I am?
We've already established that, now we're just haggling over the price.
Acton already whored himself out to Zuck for $19billion. We've established what kind of person he is.
Sell out, sure, but who did he betray?
And also $1 billion is quite a lot of money.
Honestly this action was one of the things that really made me like Acton. It was more than words. Granted, he already had a few billion dollars at that point -- and I'm under the opinion that $2bn isn't much different from $1bn (except bragging rights) (current work 2.8bn[0]) -- but it shows that money isn't his (only) motivating factor. It is also pretty hard to tell people to leave something you built.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/profile/brian-acton/?sh=13ea0bdb5cfc
Turns out he was still employed [2] despite saying it was time to “move on”, in order to get his remaining money...lol
1 - https://fortune.com/2018/05/01/jan-koum-whatsapp-facebook/
2 - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/15/whatsapps-jan-koum-left-face...
I am very doubtful that very many people here would turn down that sort of money if given the opportunity. Its very easy to wax poetic about virtue when nobody is trying to tempt you.
Indeed, not a lot of people would be able to turn that down. Moxie? That's one of them, that I like to believe they would though.
Since the sale he has criticized the hell out of Facebook, too.
Sure, he isn't a martyr. But there are way way way worse behaviors in the valley.
MobileCoin, in time, I hope grows up to be a credible alternative to Facebook's USDP (Diem), like how Signal is to WhatsApp. I don't think its inclusion a head-scratcher at all. If anything, I hope it serves its purpose well, and isn't unfairly regulated to oblivion.
[0] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
I hate most of the cryptocurrency-bs, but mobilecoin seems to have been designed carefully to avoid most of the objectional aspects of blockchain stuff.
The CEO has posts in the thread as well.
Funny how he avoids answering any questions about financial incentives and token sales.
Edit: Also note how the mentioned primary goal of MobileCoin is to "fund Signal", not to be a payments layer for it.
I'd like to think about Moxie as the most honourable person in all of this. Leaving the CEO role could be a sign that he doesn't agree with everything that's going on.
I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing but it is an important fact that is being left out.
Those in app type payments are a huge part of message app usage in some parts of the world where I am sure Signal would like to increase uptake.
In a way, crypto has given non-profits a way to take profits out to personal accounts.
[In my region we already have a good system for mobile payments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_(payment)]
That is to take the transfer of money away from old and large institutions.
Meanwhile bitcoin serves that same purpose and much mire efficiently with lightning.
Moxie just bought a $5M house in LA.
It does not protect metadata.
It requires a phone number to work.
The servers are centralized and it does not do federation by design. Development is centralized and not community-driven.
Respectfully, please don't paint Signal as some champion of Internet freedom and privacy.
It’s a fun read.
I hope the next adventure is as fruitful as this one was Moxie. Cheers!
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24824956
> In early 2018, Acton and Marlinspike announced the formation of the Signal Foundation, a nonprofit. Acton, the foundation’s chairman and sole member, seeded it with a no-interest, fifty-million-dollar loan.
additionally from Wikipedia:
> By the end of 2018, the loan had increased to $105,000,400, which is due to be repaid on February 28, 2068. The loan is unsecured and at 0% interest.
What's particularly odd is that, if they were they a private foundation, as Acton is a board member (who also appears to have sole power to determine board members), I think the loan itself would be a prohibited act of self-dealing.
Better late than never. Never seems more typical.
The difference is that Signal is a walled garden and suddenly somebody pays for that.
To align sustained development and ongoing maintainance with a FLOS licence model.
Because the alternative is to have volunteers spending their evenings and weekends on hobby projects that sometimes grow way over their hobbyish status. Which is both scary and sad.
They got the coin up to $60 from something like $3.
This starts to be another hustle (and with the money folks can make exploiting a nonprofit in this way no surprise really).
Normally the nonprofit would own the asset it is improving in this situation or get a BIG cut of the upside for leveraging an asset like the Signal network (just as any crypto coin company would).
In this case it all seemed very very shady.
My guess is someone wants to cash out somewhere on using the nonprofit to pump things up perhaps? I'd pay attention to what they are doing in the crypto space recently to see if there are any correlated activities
MobileCoin patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200184467A1/en
One of the men listed on there was the subject of a wild gossip thread that had to be deleted here recently. One is the MobileCoin CEO. The other is dead.
But there is something about nonprofit pumping a crypto which may benefit directors of the nonprofit that strikes me as weird with signal.
I think you mean "was censored."
But with the new CEO I hope a slight change in core principals including but not limited to
- Allowing Bots (I'm tired of running another self hosted messaging app just to send me movement data from my security cams at home)
- Allowing the use of third party clients (like CLI)
I imagine at Signal this is not decided based on the whim of a CEO, but on how to implement it secure,privacy friendly and free enough. E.g. if you havd to upload your private keys to some bot service, that may work but is terrible. Or if the service can easily bd flooded with bots spamming us. Or if the security model requires some apple alike central checking comittee. And so on.
I'm curious why he wants to vacate post haste, but I'm used to not having my curiosity satisfied when it comes to Moxie. :)
Important for users, but also important for policy makers and other people in high places that are typically tech-illiterate and may assume that trillion dollar valuation implies TINA (there is no alternative).
Moxie and that tiny group of developers @ signal have been granted a moment of extreme leverage and they made great use of it.
Godspeed
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/4408365318426-S...
If you only get the badge via app I think it's better even if a chunk is taken by the app store, because then people ask "wtf is that heart thing?" and then I can tell certain contacts what it is get them to do it too.
I'm sure you don't remember this story, but I remember years ago (2011?) having a drink with you and Stuart while we were working out of I/O Ventures. I was talking about buying a cheap sail boat and you very calmly told me that the ocean will kill me. That it was always trying to kill me.
Anyway, I think about that conversation nearly every time I'm in or on the water and it's definitely kept me alive.
The 100Rabbits folks are tech people who live at sea:
I used to race/rally $500 cars and had mentioned we had planned to do something similar with boats in the Caribbean and Moxie looked like I slapped his mother. Moxie and Stuart are arguably some of the kindest and smartest people I've crossed paths with in SF.
* step 2: Publicly declare your regret for that decision.
* step 3: Take leadership of big competitor to previous app.
* step 4: Goto step 1 for double profit and to continue tearing down functioning attempts at large scale private communications platforms.
You need proof of regret, and $800 million seems to have been enough. Cheap money if you can make step 4 happen such that it nets more than 0.8 billion.
That's a crazy sale price, I'd like to see you turn it down.
It can be true that he didn't want to sell and regrets it and just couldn't reject that offer, the opportunity costs available to you at the level are nuts. This is a risk with centralized services, it's why we need systems that don't require benevolence: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...
Most people don't have principles valued at 19B.
I think Urbit is a potential way to get there, but a lot of the web3 ownership model points in this direction.
That said, I think Matrix is cool and appreciate what they're trying to do. I just think without solving the upstream problems you won't be able to succeed beyond a niche audience.
Even if I'm off by a magnitude (and I think I'm not) - that's life changing money for everyone that helped him build Whatsapp.
Yes, they sold to Facebook. Yes, Facebook is doing everything it can to get the contents of WhatsApp communications so they can monetize. But it is impossible to not see the change they made on the landscape of communication privacy.
Like what?
Social/public good will is a kind of money itself that can't easily be measured in dollars. That's a big part of the reason extremely wealthy people engage in philanthropy.
Good will is a currency that opens some doors that no amount of raw dollars can open.
Obviously, the offer from FB was worth selling out for.
Making Signal a messenger on equal footing would go a long way to increase adoption.
PS. On Twitter Moxie mentioned that Usernames and e2ee Statuses are coming soon -- last missing pieces IMO, what a legend, huge respect and thanks for changing the industry Moxie!
I think Moxie is right, federation will lead back to recentralized services (for the reasons Moxie outlines in his recent Web3 post). People don't want to run their own servers. In that world you'll have federated services that are mostly centralized with a much worse user experience than centralized competition. Signal's real competition isn't Matrix, it's FB messenger, Whatsapp, and iMessage.
The incentive failures are actually upstream from the application layer of the web. Running a linux server is too hard, spam and auth are issues with the current tech stack, dependencies are a mess of complexity and federated systems built on the current stack can't really solve these issues so end up recentralizing to sysadmins that do (at best). This is the reason I started working on Urbit, I think to fix this for real you have to fix problems farther up the stack.
Given the current landscape, Signal is the best available option imo for most people. Hopefully if Urbit succeeds we can have the federated system we want with UX that's actually competitive.
Email is an example of this class of failure. Almost everyone uses a centralized provider (mostly Google) and even if you do go through the effort to run your own server since nearly everyone you interact with is using gmail it's mostly pointless anyway.
Signal is not controlled by the USG (see recent doc about what metadata they have access to via Signal). I ran a Matrix server for a while, the UX around setting up encryption is bad (not for lack of trying, it's just a hard problem given the constraints). Most people just use the Matrix.org server and will never run their own (which is the recentralization risk I'm talking about) - at best you'll have a couple providers, and dealing with spam is still a problem. You'll also have a system that adapts slowly because it's harder to make changes to this kind of system, it'll always be worse.
To escape the incentives that lead back to recentralization and to create a federated system that isn't just another niche nerd hobby, you really have to think about the issues that lead back to centralization from first principles. I think Urbit's design and the tradeoffs they make do this.
https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progr...
No. This is a false dichotomy. There is a very healthy market for email service providers. Basically every domain registrar runs one, a good amount of ISPs... there can be a cottage industry for service providers.
> Almost everyone uses a centralized provider
Because the large companies make it free to try to make their money by either exploiting the data or by using the email service as a loss leader. Signal can not do either, so they will have to rely on some other revenue stream, or they will end up like Mozilla.
I think this is just not true, my grandmother would use whatever I tell her to use she doesn't care if Signal has "better UI" according to some people. The reason in my opinion why people don't use Element or other Matrix clients yet is because people aren't aware of them. Signal has a billionaire behind them and that means they advertise the shit out of Signal.
> Email is an example of this class of failure. Almost everyone uses a centralized provider (mostly Google) and even if you do go through the effort to run your own server since nearly everyone you interact with is using gmail it's mostly pointless anyway.
Why can't Moxie and Signal just run a Matrix server and offer this service to people? Your point seems to be - we lost the fight already so there's nothing to do. I think there's a lot to do and Google/Facebook/Apple have not yet won. Even if they have most people at least the people who really care have the opportunity to stay private AND free. Many people still use Hotmail, Yahoo, university accounts, business accounts, privacy concerned providers, government accounts and even famous country specific providers. Gmail is the most used one but it's by far not the only one and the way to fight that is not by giving up on a free world.
> Signal is not controlled by the USG (see recent doc about what metadata they have access to via Signal).
Signal is a company registered in the USA they will have to abide the US law when push comes to shove, so this is not a long term solution.
> I ran a Matrix server for a while, the UX around setting up encryption is bad (not for lack of trying, it's just a hard problem given the constraints).
It's getting better and it's partially like that because it's more private(no phone number) and secure(no US company) than Signal, it also contains an encrypted backup on the server which is a huge feature that Signal just does not have.
> Most people just use the Matrix.org server and will never run their own (which is the recentralization risk I'm talking about) - at best you'll have a couple providers
Most people use WhatsApp maybe Telegram, not Signal and definitely not Matrix the future will tell us if this catches on or not, so let's just stop speculating. There is already now some governments using Matrix and a lot of projects, so there are already many servers and many providers, you can also just pay for your own server at Element and you're already not using Matrix.org
> and dealing with spam is still a problem.
That's a general problem that you'll have with any platform, Telegram and Facebook are still fighting spam with little many failures. If anything this is something that I see a good future with Matrix since a lot of different companies/individuals will try to fight this together instead of a big company trying alone and failing.
> You'll also have a system that adapts slowly because it's harder to make changes to this kind of system, it'll always be worse.
Or better because many people are working on it compared to 30 people (!!)
> To escape the incentives that lead back to recentralization and to create a federated system that isn't just another niche nerd hobby, you really have to think about the issues that lead back to centralization from first principles. I think Urbit's design and the tradeoffs they make do this.
I heard of this project before, it sounded cool at the time but I didn't get enough info the details to remember much, I don't really understand how this is relevant though, care to elaborate?
I don't think Element or Matrix is aiming to be a niche nerd hobby, they have a lot of money invested in them (last I read it was 30 million) and the UI is super cool (much cooler than Signal)
At the end of the day Signal and Matrix are both niche and it's just such a pity that we don't go for the obviously better choice but instead put all our eggs in one American basket yet again.
Protocols are slower to change, this is why XMPP lost to competing messaging services. Maybe grandma is a bad example, but a highschool kid is going to use the messaging service that has the emojis and crap they like - not one with a crappy app and confusing encryption setup. I don't think it's lack of knowledge I think it's just harder to create an experience as good and you're at a perpetual disadvantage to roll out new features.
> "Why can't Moxie and Signal just run a Matrix server and offer this service to people?"
Moxie mostly outlines the reasons here: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ - the answer is mostly the same as above, it won't be competitive and it'll lose.
> "Most people use WhatsApp maybe Telegram, not Signal and definitely not Matrix the future will tell us if this catches on or not, so let's just stop speculating. There is already now some governments using Matrix and a lot of projects, so there are already many servers and many providers, you can also just pay for your own server at Element and you're already not using Matrix.org"
This is kind of my point? Except that I'd go further and say most use FB Messenger, iMessage, or Discord. I did pay for an Element server for a while to support the Matrix devs. While I want them to succeed I think the existing incentives are such that they will remain niche. Most will use centralized options because they provide a better experience and most users don't care about federation. The UX is everything.
> "[Spam] is a general problem that you'll have with any platform"
Unless you think about it from first principles and actually come up with a way to solve it: https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit - if you have NFTs as a permenant pseudonymous ID with a low but non-zero cost, moderation becomes trivial and spam is no longer economically possible. Today centralized services have an advantage fighting spam (email is the easiest example) and decentralized services struggle with this.
> "Or better because many people are working on it compared to 30 people"
I think this has been shown to be empirically false with this kind of service. Not because of the number of people, but because of the reasons federation on the existing stack is hard.
> "I heard of [urbit] before, it sounded cool at the time but I didn't get enough info the details to remember much, I don't really understand how this is relevant though, care to elaborate?"
The pitch is basically that the problems that cause federated systems to fail (at the application level) run pretty deep. To fix it you have to rethink some assumptions with modern operating systems and how you handle identity across the web. If you fix these issues, then it becomes possible (but not easy) to solve the UX problems that causes federated applications on the web to fail and provide a better experience than the existing web for applications. If you can fix the incentives then you can escape the trap we're in.
> "I don't think Element or Matrix is aiming to be a niche nerd hobby, they have a lot of money invested in them"
You're totally right - they want to take over the world, and I want them to win too, I just don't think they can because of the current local maximum we're trapped in. It's moloch (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/).
Thing is, Signal has the exact same issue: the top post of this thread is about how people are feeling compelled to donate to Signal so that it does not rely on one kind benefactor. If people want to donate to Signal, why not donate/hedge a bit by donating to Matrix or to the Conversations (the best XMPP client) developers?
> Signal is the best available option imo for most people.
Signal is still centralized. It is "open source" only in name, as the client code was constantly out-of-date and it is basically impossible to fork it or run your own server. It has a very poor record cross-client vulnerabilities and it forces everyone to be dependent on the security of their smartphones. How many times do we have to re-learn not to put all of our eggs in the same basket?
I don't think Matrix will be able to compete. I think Signal is the best available option today for most people, but the risks you outline are real. I think Urbit is our best shot at a better future.
Matrix is already competing. It's just taking a different strategy (going after governmental institutions and enterprises) than the one you'd like. The fact that Element is going after a market with a very long deployment/usage cycle makes me believe that Matrix has a lot more staying power than Signal.
Signal is nice, but it all it takes is one catastrophic bug - or one Government pushing to break it, or some good amount of years with lots of developers on payroll without any real revenue - away from disappearing or selling out.
> I think Urbit is our best shot at a better future.
No. The problem to "fix" is not a technological one. It's socio-economical. When (if?) individuals and SMBs learn TANSTAAFL, we´ll be able to have a diverse/healthy (and cheap) industry of professional service providers.
Sure, s/compete/win - I don't think they'll win (hence why they'll be a niche).
> "The problem to "fix" is not a technological one. It's socio-economical."
It's both - if you fix the bad incentives, you can fix the behavior. If you don't then you won't.
Because my idea of "winning" is one where there is no central entity controlling what should be basic infrastructure. My idea of winning is one where we have more options and that we can hedge one player against the other.
I don't (necessarily) want Matrix to grow to a point where it goes unchallenged. I want it to grow enough to the point where none of the other players has a clear upper hand.
I use Matrix already to talk with my immediate family, a good amount of my friends also managed to install it. Does this mean that I got to use Matrix exclusively? No, far from it. But I do have the option, and in the past when there were issues with WhatsApp and Signal, a lot of my friends were glad that all my nagging gave them an alternative.
"Bad UI", "complex onboarding", "technical issues"... those are all things that are easy to fix compared with the "issue" of having a oligarchy controlling all of the communication platforms of the Western Hemisphere and then China trying to encroach in.
I guess my idea of winning is like the web vs. gopher. I want the good, federated protocol to become the default. I want my friends to be using it not because I have to nag them to, but because it's just objectively a better experience. The federated nature of the thing being invisible and irrelevant to them.
I think today that's impossible - not because of issues related to Matrix, but because of deeper problems with our computing stack and the web. Federated systems can't match the UX of centralized ones and when they come close its often because they've recentralized anyway.
I think we agree more than we disagree probably. I just see Signal as good given the current tradeoffs.
Any attempt at establishing these comes through some central planning which leads at best to some cookie-cutter "one-size-fits-all" Apple-esque design that while functional, it's just a local maxima that destroys any kind of creativity and makes everything uniform and bland.
> Federated systems can't match the UX of centralized ones and when they come close its often because they've recentralized anyway.
I think it is easier to see it as an issue with the amount of resources that the big companies have vs the "underdogs".
If Element had the same amount of resources as Facebook, it wouldn't be hard for them to say "we will build a client that is just like WhatsApp for those that think that WhatsApp is the benchmark. For those that want something like Discord, we will build another client. And those that want to use Matrix to replace Slack will get another client that does exactly the same".
It does not matter if it is federated or centralized, what matters is that Element does not have those resources, so they can not develop as fast as their competitors and then are seen as "lagging".
it does not, see Email
You could argue that's better than trusting one service (debatable imo), but you're still a thin client vulnerable to the whims and data protection capabilities of that provider. Even worse, if everyone is using just 3 or so main providers then since you're communicating with people centralized primarily on these other services you're also vulnerable to their security practices too.
All of this is because of a few core problems with the current stack. Linux servers are too hard to run. Modern dependency requirements are a mess, operating systems were designed without an eye toward the web or identity so spam is a problem. You can't fix this without thinking more deeply about these issues, I think Urbit might be a way out. Without fixing these issues the options available in the current system are niche communities or centralized services. The idea of people running their own decentralized nodes at scale given these constraints is dead on arrival. PGP is a failure - even when people's lives literally depend on it they cannot or will not do it.
Trust me, I wish this wasn't the case - but I care about winning more than I care about idealistic purity. You have to think pragmatically about what the best option is today and what crazy changes are required for this to succeed in the future. Today with the existing tech stack I think Signal is the best we can do at scale in competition with whatsapp, fb messenger, and iMessage. Tomorrow I hope urbit gives us a way out.
There are thousands if not millions of companies participating in the federated network, not including some nerds who self host
Ultra-cynical take: I wonder if there's an element of avoiding conflict-of-interest accusations regarding Mobilecoin.
Seems kinda risky to push the reins onto someone new to me. Unless I am missing something?
To the HN crowd, please become a sustainer (monthly donations) of Signal through the app. You get a badge that way, which is an opportunity for those you communicate with to learn about becoming a sustainer too.
Then how to make this good thing sustainable is a question. Users would think donation is fair enough. But the fact is a world-class IM platform needs an exceptional engineering workforce. Those people are not just looking for users' donations at will.
Sell the server to secret squirrels, etc.
Another thing I don't like about Signal is how they conduct their development, doing everything in their own private repo and just throwing the code at GitHub to say they are open-source and trustable (remember when the server code wasn't updated for months because they were adding the mobilecoin feature ?). The only way you can really discuss some bigger thing is in the beta testing forum posts.
I hope the new CEO changes some things.
[1] https://community.signalusers.org/t/reporting-cp-groups/4005...
[2] https://community.signalusers.org/t/could-signal-become-the-...
[3] https://www.theverge.com/22249391/signal-app-abuse-messaging...
Best of luck to them, and to the rest of the team at Signal.
No matter how we cut it in these comments, competition to the incumbent(s) is a positive for humanity.
With only 30 people, I am glad things are delayed. That is necessary if Signal doesn't develop and release them before they can be done right.
Export isn't delayed. The Android app has export and import already. They said it's likely they'll remove it once the Android app has history transfer like the iOS app.
I Really need to join a startup.
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/4461#issu...
It opens way, way faster than the Intel version.
Check the about page, it should say "M1". If it says "Intel", reinstall the app (replacing the old .app with the new should be enough).
And he was attacking web3 because these same investors pushed cryptocurrency features into Signal, and he was wildly against it.
Who?
Thoughtful critique is welcome, of course, but it would need to contain a lot more information than this.