The arrogance of the owner directly transfers to the arrogance and lack of control in the software which is fundamentally limiting its usefulness for everyone.
Life is about compromise. Complaining that someone else's compromise doesn't work for you is not particularly productive.
This idea that "someone built a thing, has strong ideas about what that thing should look like, and some people don't like that because they don't share the same values" being somehow "not ok" is peculiar to me because it's at the very heart of fundamental freedoms around speech / association etc. If you don't share Signal's values, or disagree with how they balance competing interests, go use something else!
This is not what the OP said. It's not just opinions. You are forced to use the only client and the only server. You are forced to not have backups, and so on. You are forced to use an Android or iOS phone (security? really?).
This is a fancy way of saying that the protocol is private and that their instance of the server has a ToS. There's also nothing stopping you running your own server instance (I know of a handful of private Signal server deployments).
> You are forced to not have backups
I literally juse restored my signal backup to a new device in the last 10 mins. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> You are forced to use an Android or iOS phone (security? really?).
I'm interested in hearing about what other client platforms they should invest in supporting that would increase the "security" of their users and service.
What's frustrating is that these sorts of rants can generally be summarised as "I want to use someone else's service on my own terms, even if the service owner explicitly doesn't want that".
No-one's forcing you to use Signal.
> This is a fancy way of saying that the protocol is private and that their instance of the server has a ToS.
No, this is a "fancy" way of saying that they are actively fighting against decentralization. It makes me suspicious of their intentions, to be honest.
> I'm interested in hearing about what other client platforms they should invest in supporting that would increase the "security" of their users and service.
How about a normal desktop GNU/Linux client? Is Android more secure than Linux? It depends on what threats you want to defend from, and Signal developers think that Google/Apple are not my threats. They force their own threat model on me. It makes me suspicious, again.
I don't really see them "fighting" anything? They've made a decision that they want to build a centralised service, and as far as I can see they've been pretty open about why they want that and quite happy running a centralised service. Are they going round trying to convince other people to choose against decentralization in their systems?>
If anything, the "fighting" here seems to be from people who really really care about decentralization and really wish Signal would just adopt their value system and do what they want, as though it's some sort of objective good.
> They force their own threat model on me. It makes me suspicious, again.
This is true for literally every company running any service you use. The people who pay for, design, engineer and run a service "forces" their threat modelling, feature prioritisation, colour scheme etc. on you. If you're suspicious about it or don't like it, simply stop using it.
Yes? For a while moxie would show up in every matrix topic to talk about "But matrix is federated and federation is slow moving and therefore bad". The most commonly quoted argument against decentralisation is hosted on signal.org: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
Also, grapheneOS can be 100% google-free.
Since Signal doesn't federate, your own server instance is about as useful as a glass hammer.
To other people, it's quite useful.
I agree with your other points, but not this one. Mobile OSs are so ahead of the competition in security it is not even funny. Like, as much as I like my linux systems, they are a huge pile of vulnerability not even making the task of a hacker hard.
As I wrote in this comment in the past [1]:
> Additional irritants that nobody in the development team has thought about for years:
> * I decline Signal’s prompt to turn on notifications with the “Not now” button (there is no “No thanks” button). It responds with “We’ll remind you later” and nags me again in a few days.
> * I decline Signal’s prompt to share my contacts with it using the “Not now” button (there is no “No thanks” button). It responds with “We’ll remind you later” and nags me again in a few days.
> Signal may be good at security, but whoever designed the app has no respect for users’ time, and it doesn’t seem like they respect a user’s privacy choices either.
Siloing is bad.