A Message from Signal's New President | Hacker News Reader

A Message from Signal's New President

signal.org

113 pointsfeross125 comments

> My support for encryption and private communications has been consistent and unwavering

So tell me about that support. I use signal for security. That is priority number one. This is the only statement in the message that explicitly mentions any support for security. Most of the rest of the message in fact focuses on aspects other than security.

She is very good at saying thing's that have no substance. For example, "So I bring a clear understanding of the environment shaped by the dominant tech business model, and of what it takes to build tech that rejects this model", is not explicitly stating she rejects that model, just that she is familiar with it. The message is full of implied, not explicit statements of principle.

I am a little disheartened. This message serves to make me pay more attention.

Yes, would have been nice if the statement had been more about the product and the product strategy than about the author.

What I expected is a concise message of goals.

What I found is that my eyes glazed over.

>She is very good at saying thing's that have no substance

Jives with her qualifications, which are a bachelor's degree in Rethorics.

The Rhetoric here is terrible though. That or we're not the audience.

Jennifer Widom was chair of the CS department at Stanford and is now Dean of the Engineering school there. She has a bachelor's degree in Trumpet. Criticizing people for their undergraduate degree is foolish.

You mean mentioning someone's qualifications in order to inform a conversation, like you just did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32781073?

Jennifer Widom has a PhD in computer science from Cornell, btw. I don't see how they are comparable in any way.

Let's see if she can get rid of this ridiculous MobileCoin that has somehow embedded itself into my Signal app. I won't hold my breath.

Does anyone actually use it? I seriously wonder why they put it in there. Moxie doesn't strike me as the type of guy who would fall for this cryptocurrency nonsense, so I'm seriously wondering if anyone uses it. The Signal project should do some case studies if so. For example: some farmers use it to pay for petrol in India, or some students from Myanmar use it to send money back home, etc.

> I seriously wonder why they put it in there.

Doesn't Telegram have some kind of payments features (I don't use it, so I don't know). Maybe it was an attempt at feature parity.

Indeed. Some five years ago, one could have excused a venture into cryptocurrencies as idealistic support of some bold, pathbreaking, liberating, enabling technology. Today, not so much.

I like the idea of anonymous payments, although I fully understand how alluring this is to criminals as well.

MobileCoin has significantly lower environmental impact (PoS) and good anonymity features. Technically, I don't see what there is not to like, and no one is forced to use it?

I would not excuse a "buzz word" feature, but I do not think that is one, I think it has a lot of potential.

Hopefully. Got donor’s remorse from that decision and became hesitant recommending signal as a result.

Unless something has changed, all three board members have been responsible for running Signal Foundation within past year, which is highly unusual.

Signal’s list of board members:

https://signalfoundation.org/en/

Wish Signal would be more transparent and timely about there technical and financial status and plans. For example, might be wrong, but their most recent 990 should already be available, but they have not posted it (or any of their past 990s) on their own site. Tech wise, given users in mass have asked for it for years, feel like they owe the users a public explanation of why they only allow numbers.

Since signalfoundation.org mentions that

> Before joining Signal as President, she was the Minderoo Research Professor at NYU

here are her publications, for anyone who wants to read up on what she's been up to:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Meredith+W...

She joined Signal 2020; I personally do not care what she has been up to — Brian and Moxie know her, have worked with her for years, and agreed she was a fit for Signal’s needs.

Another political activist, I'm not certain how I feel about this. Seems like this might not go well, looking at what happens to companies with “activism” at their heart.

Isn't the very existence of Signal "activism".

Exercising the right of privacy is now activism? Good grief.

It certainly felt that way to me in the beginning, before Signal got some traction. It didn't even have voice calls originally. I think a majority will never care much about right to privacy and just use something.

The thing is, for me to exercise my right to privacy, it helps if I can practice that right with more than one or two people in my address book.

I'll provide a counter-anecdote that almost my entire social circle - at least 30-40 people, mainly middle-aged non-tech people - has migrated to Signal from WhatsApp in the last 2 years.

And it didn't take much effort. The desire for a cross-platform (iOS/Android) group chat system, Signal's features like desktop apps and ease of use, and a generally growing dislike for Facebook/Meta made it pretty painless and organic.

Why not? It depends on how you exercise those rights.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcC0RNsallc Crypto Wars

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

Yes? In a tech landscape dominated by surveillance capitalism, very much yes.

As if privacy isn’t political.

The fourth amendment exists for a reason.

An activist in charge of a privacy tool, not often a match made in heaven.

I would say moxie shared many qualities of an activist.

I would say that moxie would describe himself as an activist rather than just sharing the qualities of one. Signal has obviously been a project driven by principles of free and secure communication from the get-go rather than a traditional revenue-driven organization.

Biggest issue with Signal IMO is that not enough people use it. (and, technically, the horrible dependency on PSTN addresses, but I don't expect the Signal foundation President to fix that).

Someone with wild consumer app adoption experience (100mm+ users globally) who is ALSO super into privacy/self-sovereignty/security seems like the ideal fit. Not sure if there's anyone who fits the bill there, especially not anyone who would want this specific job.

And it is facilitating in using a privacy-based cryptocurrency and forcibly shoving it in the app, just like what Keybase did but with a different crypto project.

If guess it has given Signal more of a use case for scammers, terrorists and criminals to hide and now fund their illegal activities with no trace. [0]

[0] https://www.theverge.com/22872133/signal-cryptocurrency-paym...

I keep hearing about this crypto stuff but as a daily Signal user I don't think I've ever seen anything "forcibly shoved" at me about crypto in Signal.

Just my experience though..

Yeah this is my experience too. I went looking out of curiosity, and I guess it’s if you press + on a message, then “payment,” and then you’re prompted to set up payments, which then pops up a modal to set up a thing to send MobileCoin. Certainly wouldn’t have seen it if I wasn’t looking for it, but if you’re messaging use case involves a lot of payments, I could see it feeling more forward

I use Signal daily to communicate with family and friends via text, audio and video.

I remember reading about this crypto stuff when it launched but I see no mention of it in my usage of the app.

> but I see no mention of it in my usage of the app.

I understand it is country-dependent. Not sure if it users a whitelist or a blacklist, but not everybody will see it.

Funny this actually makes me like it more. Any feature with no potential for abuse also provides no privacy and security.

We're all activists.

*An activist-but-not-security/privacy-activist

she's literally been fired/quit her old job at google for protesting against surveillance programs and she's a longstanding advocate for whistleblower protection. two minutes on Wikipedia would have brought that up.

Wikipedia is not a good source for anything even tangentially related to politically sensitive subjects which this clearly is. If you have to use it make sure to check the Talk and View history pages which tend to give some insight into the level of ideological control maintained by the page editors.

Not enough people know this.

I would hate being called an activist, because that puts me in the same bucket as some really obnoxious self-promoters...

I dislike being put in the same bucket as obnoxious developers, yet here we are.

I play a lot of video games, built a pc for gaming, and despise being called a "gamer", yet some might consider than an accurate label.

No, we're not. Some of us are activists but most people are conformists who care more about being accepted by their peers than they care about leading those peers towards some goal. A conformist may join the parade when this is required to be accepted but it does not matter much what the parade is for since the reason for joining it is not activism but conformism.

Does this mean signal has to pay back that loan and this will lead to further monetization of the app?

Greed will come for Signal if it gets big. Which is probably the reason why you wouldn't want it to become the replacement for WhatsApp.

Y'all remember how well Mozilla getting taken over by activists went? Witch hunt firings followed by years of failed product launches and loss of market share while leadership basically just checks out and collects their salary?

Do you mean since 2007, when Mitchell Baker wrote the Mozilla Manifesto?

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/

> Witch hunt firings

Translation from conspiracy speak: there was one resignation

Yup. My first thought was “why does a messaging app need a board of directors?”. I guess I just don’t understand tech.

Nonprofits need boards of directors by law, and a free, open-source app needs a nonprofit to back it, because the alternatives are probably a for-profit or abandonment.

her profile links to an empty Github profile created days ago too

If Signal stop requiring telephone number, its popularity might skyrocket. The scheme is easy: to prevent spamming, you can have a pool of registered numbers that are NOT associated with accouts. This is enough to check if a number is already in use. That's all we need!

(almost. subjective. required, but not limited to.)

From a sudden high and then a consistent low, none of my contacts are using Signal. It has become irrelevant. Almost completely irrelevant.

No phone number required, decentralized network and third party apps allowed when? That's only information I care about Signal, until then Element (Matrix) FTW.

Matrix and Signal are apples and oranges.

> no phone number required

Signal has never claimed to offer anonymity AFAIK. The only reason this would be on their roadmap is if anonymity is one of their goals. Anonymity and privacy are both important, but they aren't both necessary at all times. Anonymity isn't desirable in some situations.

> decentralized network

After trying some of the decentralized chat apps out there, I'm glad Signal made an app my friends actually want to use, rather than a half-baked, slow, prohibitively complex Discord clone.

I see you use Signal for short time, I used that POS for years, asking for years when I can send more than one photo at time and they just fixed it recently, before you could select only one photo at the time. When I stopped using it the mssage delivery was extremely unreliable when you switch between WiFi and mobile network, Whatsapp send message within seconds, Signal needs minutes/hours to realize network changed to send it properly. There was major downtime because their US admin slept overnight so people in Europe could forget for hours about sending messages. Last drop was requiring PIN to use app with nagging prompt taking 1/3 or even full screen making app without PIN unusable, until they backpedalled on this nonsense. But it was already too late, uninstalled that user hostile POS from phones of my (extended) family where we used it.

If 2 years is a short time, that's fine by me. All I can say is that I've never had any of the issues you describe.

I appreciate the monthly reminder for your PIN- without it, I probably would have forgotten about it! And it doesn't stop you from using the app, it's just a little blurb at the bottom.

it did stop you, it took 1/3 to whole screen and you could not use the app without creating one, they only abandon that retarded area when users like me left, so good luck encouraging me to use this POS app

yes, 2 years is short time especially since it's just recent 2 years, I don't think there is even one app in my phone which I would be using just 2 years (besides 2 games)

I never understand modern corporate communication strategies.

I'm not interested in her feelings or whether she thinks she is qualified. I would like to know her name so I can find out for myself what she has done before.

I also don't need to be told that Signal is important. If I didn't think that I wouldn't be reading their blog post.

> I'm not interested in her feelings or whether she thinks she is qualified.

Maybe not, but a lot of people will be, particularly if their favourite thing is being 'taken over' by said person.

>I would like to know her name so I can find out for myself what she has done before.

Kind of unfortunate that the link in the blog entry is to a currently-empty Github account (in terms of public repos, anyway).

However, a brief search turned up her Wikipedia page [1], and going on what's in there it looks as if she's better aligned to what she said on the Blog page than if you just looked at her briefly and saw she was an employee of Google for some time.

> I also don't need to be told that Signal is important. If I didn't think that I wouldn't be reading their blog post.

You may not need to be told (and neither do I), but there are oceans of people out there who don't know that there is a workable alternative to using WhatsApp. It took me a long time (and leverage via a friend-group holiday) to get my friends on Signal (I'm not on any Meta properties, by principle), and most of them hadn't heard of it. Most people just use WhatsApp because it's become the default, and most of them don't care about Meta (or anyone else's) policies or warping of society. They just want to communicate, and don't want to use SMS/MMS (because of the limited features or cost), or can't use iMessage (because they aren't on an iPhone).

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meredith_Whittaker

> Maybe not, but a lot of people will be, particularly if their favourite thing is being 'taken over' by said person.

Wouldn't those people rather be told what her plans are?

This isn’t written for you. It’s for investors and middle managers internally.

If you click on the author you get to her github profile that contains her full name. It's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meredith_Whittaker

You can find her name (Meredith Whittaker) in 2 clicks from that article. I agree the name should be present but it's not exactly difficult for someone semi tech-literate to find.

That was my first instinct, to look what she had done/write before.

I have to admit, being anti-woke myself (not American), that this article caught my eye:

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/tech-labor-progres...

Not the kind of person I would expect to be in charge of Signal, TBH.

> Not the kind of person I would expect to be in charge of Signal, TBH.

Actually, to me, it seems fairly consistent with Signal’s mission.

She appears to be fairly qualified (including a mindset, as she is in a leadership role) and I wish her well.

_The Signal Foundation’s mission is to develop open source privacy technology that protects free expression and enables secure global communication._

_The left must vie for control over the algorithms, data, and infrastructure that shape our lives._

I don't think these two staments match very well. Caesar's wife and all that....

Edit: BTW, I wish her well too. I don't think that she's going to hinder Signal's crypto just serve to the left's interests, but she hasn't a clean record.

Fair ‘nuff, but the second quote was taken out of context, as the whole article was about “taking control,” in order to stop manipulation.

She is quite left-leaning, though, so I could see why some folks would find her ideology grating. I believe that a fair number of right-leaning people also use Signal.

Control in this context is very clearly control by the users and communities as opposed to government and corporations. Rainbow capitalism isn't left and never has been.

The type of people who can take on big tech barely exit.

She has proved she can be a pain in the ass. These type of people are rare and they required.

Most outside big tech who can do something are already bought and paid for by big tech.

There are very few who have the combo of the right values, the ambition, the technical pedigree, the financial independence and are well networked.

Which is why we have an ever expanding exploitative shit mountain range of tech being produced every year.

I read a few paragraphs but had to stop for fear of wasting my time reading through the whole thing and coming up empty handed. To save some time: what parts of it specifically signal wokeness to you?

I don't know if I have any chance of convincing you (or anyone) given the current political entrenchment, but I will try.

That it took this long for Big Tech companies to take fascists seriously enough to remove some of them from social media should serve as a wake-up call: Elites tend to realize the dangers of fascism only when violent flash points hit close to home. It is workers and historically marginalized people who are—and always have been—the anti-fascist front line. If progressives are to ensure that technical systems aren’t yoked to a far-right agenda, they’ll need to stop relying on legislative maneuvering or entreaties to corporations and, together with these frontline actors globally, vie for control over the infrastructure itself.

I read this as "I believe that Democrats have a grip on Big Tech" (that's the point of many trumpists, she seems to agree with them). But instead of presenting it as a bad thing, she thinks that it's not enough and the control over the infraestructure should be stronger.

The fact that she professes a need to defend the left's position rather than remaining politically neutral is a red flag.

Furthing the myth that fascism only exist on the far right is also a dangerous position. It ignores the existence of authoritarians and fascist tactics and desired outcomes all along the political spectrum.

I'd have felt much better had she been a liberal rather than a progressive.

Wait, is that actually verbatim what she wrote? Not a uncharitable paraphrasing?

There is a difference between uninformed/reactionary “woke” views and this, which is just someone explaining a few of their personal convictions and political beliefs.

She’s not “parroting republicans” by saying tech is largely operated by people who are elite and (ostensibly) liberal. As far as I know, this isn’t controversial amongst liberals - just a projection made up by Fox News anchors and talk radio hosts as they shout “hypocrisy!” while being funded by the likes of Rupert Murdoch.

Didn’t you read the part about fascism? She’s talking about republicans lol, you realize that right?

> She’s not “parroting republicans” by saying tech is largely operated by people who are elite and (ostensibly) liberal. As far as I know, this isn’t controversial amongst liberals - just a projection made up by Fox News anchors and talk radio hosts as they shout “hypocrisy!” while being funded by the likes of Rupert Murdoch.

I don't watch Fox News, just read comments on american dominated forums like this one and reddit (the regular subrredits like r/news or r/europe, not obscure ones). And I my impression is that the average left-leaning user does not openly acknowledge that there is a leftist bias on Twitter or Youtube. On the contrary.

> Didn’t you read the part about fascism? She’s talking about republicans lol, you realize that right?

I don't understand what you mean, I'm sorry, but I have read the whole thing.

They don't recognize the bias because for them it's normal. When views don't align with theirs that is what stands out and that is what they attack. This is true on both sides of the American political spectrum but their responses to them used to be more different.

Would you agree that you don’t have a very nuanced understanding of American politics? I’m not trying to be rude, but you’re picking sides in a discussion you don’t seem to fully grok and I don’t really have time to explain the dramatic/stressful shift that has occurred in American politics since the oughts.

Collecting your sample from the internet is collecting an inherently biased sample though - please don’t do that. Or if you do, don’t bring it into a discussion like it’s somehow useful information and not noise.

there is more depth to Americans than sensationalist culture war click bait would have you believe.

I'm consider myself well versed on american politics, and I'm not picking sides. Believe or not I read more about american politics every day than about politics of my own country.

Reading random guys in the internet it's not the only thing I do and I don't think I implied that. It was just a data point to support that the notion that it's not widely accepted that leftist bias is present in some tech platforms.

I have the impression you are trying to "defeat" without the need of presenting any argument just because I'm not american. If you want some kind of victory it's yours. If you have convincing arguments I will be delighted to hear them. Still waiting, though.

> I don't watch Fox News, just read comments on american dominated forums like this one and reddit (the regular subrredits like r/news or r/europe, not obscure ones).

> I'm consider myself well versed on american politics, and I'm not picking sides. Believe or not I read more about american politics every day than about politics of my own country.

If you aren’t watching (and I’m presuming reading) Fox News , one of the most large republican primary source of American Politics , what exactly are you watching/reading to be well versed?

No - I said what I said, which is that I don’t have time to get into everything you may not know about. Call it a stalemate if you need to.

For what it’s worth, I respect that American internet culture is perhaps inescapable for non-Americans and am not refusing discussion based on that. It’s mostly about how you didn’t know she was referring to Trump supporters as fascist (a concept I imagine you would disagree with, based on your statements so far), but well - a good deal of Trump supporters became radicalized fascists resulting in the events of Jan. 6.

Not to mention the bulk of the Republican Party incorrectly believes that the 2020 election was stolen.

> was referring to Trump supporters as fascist (a concept I imagine you would disagree with, based on your statements so far)

Now we're making progress.

Yes, I guessed she was referring to Trump supporters. And that's exactly the problem I have with the article. It's hard to disagree with someone who argues for formulae to fight fascism, until you realize that term means something different for every person, specially if she's in the left.

How do you know she doesn't apply that label to every Trump supporter and not just the kind of one who stormed the Capitol?

And after reading that article. Are you sure she would be ok with the fact that trumpists were using Signal to communicate on Jan 6 and wouldn't try to undermine its usage among them? Sure, there are multiple interpretations of her words, but certainly it raises a doubt. And that and no other was my point.

> Not to mention the bulk of the Republican Party incorrectly believes that the 2020 election was stolen.

Come on. You don't sincerely believe that.

A majority of republican voters do:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/poll-finds-65-of-republica...

What party members believe, I can only infer from what they say. But if anything, it seems even more extreme.

The questions wording doesn't explicitly mentions voting fraud. People could be referring to the handling of hunters' laptop or something like that.

There are two words that I suspect are very difficult for you to say - “you’re right”.

You just lost, plain as day. Your “rebuttal” is pure conjecture, clearly informed solely by your biases and lack of knowledge.

But no, it’s _totally_ Hunter Biden’s laptop (eyes roll harder).

You would be into a real civil war if a third of the population would definitely think a president was elected with fake votes.

Take it as you want.

Have a nice day.

I agree with you, and many people say that we are heading towards civil war. Fun fact - this country already had a civil war in the 1800’s. But you knew that, I’m guessing, didn’t you? ;)

Again, I suggest you stop being so overconfident about subjects you’re uninformed on.

Don’t know what to tell you… Not at all interested in hashing this out. My mental health has already suffered plenty because of it since Trump was elected. I’m deeply uninterested in helping you see my perspective when you respond with “you don’t seriously believe that” - signaling that you think my viewpoint is laughable to the point of being unrealistic to you.

edit: If you don’t know how contentious this issue is (for both sides), it’s perhaps worth realizing that Americans have been fighting a lot lately, to the point of exhaustion. This is well past the point of “healthy public debate” and a lot closer to “2+2=5”. So if you see anyone else like me who just isn’t interested, try to remember that they have already had the same argument a hundred times with others, maybe even loved ones.

Edit 2: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/at-least-120-republican...

You’re simply way too overconfident. A sibling comment just posted an article and your response was your personal pet theory conspiracy about hunter bidens laptop??

Please, just stop. You clearly have a set agenda and just want to try to “catch hypocrites in the act with FACTS and LOGIC”. This isn’t YouTube, the standard of discourse is higher than that here.

Can you please stop taking HN threads further into flamewar, and particularly please edit out the personal swipes in your comments? Those things destroy the kind of discussion we're hoping for here, and your comments in this thread stand out along both of those lines.

In fact there were gratuitous personal swipes in literally every comment you posted to this thread. Please make your substantive posts without any of that in the future.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

> I have to admit, being anti-woke myself

What does anti-woke mean? Also not American.

From this commenter, it means “I think America is exactly like Reddit/Twitter, because that is literally my only exposure to American life “.

well said

I’ve learned that:

Signal is best at keeping your message content off of their server

- well-guarded against network-based MitM.

- Need work on hiding association with others.

- Your Signal message content remains retrievable only at and on endpoints, hence the timed message deletion.

Telegram is probably best at keeping your identity safer (than Signal)

- but needs work on hiding associations with others.

- well-guarded against network-based MitM.

- your message remains readable by Telegram at their server because Telegram holds your keys.

So, I’d gladly give up association for privacy and use Signal.

I could envision a private Signal server to deal with the anonymity part but that would require ample assistance of anonymized router hops.

Dear Signal's presidency

May you consider priority to get client published to f-droid (or debian):

https://forum.f-droid.org/t/signal-wickr-on-f-droid-2021/122...

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/127

Meanwhile I'll recommend freedom lovers to use matrix|XMPP|IRC (which can be also used on web or linux computer)

Freely yours

Can't you install Signal without an App store? Directly via apk?

Yes, and it checks for updates by itself (though that's still more cumbersome than it being managed by F-Droid of course): https://signal.org/android/apk/

yes that's something I'd like to avoid... because it hasn't been rebuilt from source (and audited)

https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/search/org....

She's the lady who was fired by Google in retaliation for organizing the walkouts that protested the big payout Andy Rubin got despite being found guilty of sexual harrassment.

So she's got both principles and guts, good to know and a positive sign for Signal. Not enough to overcome the taint of its initial funding by the US Government, its unnecessary and privacy-busting requirement for phone numbers and the stench by association of cryptocurrency, but who knows, she may be able to influence away from that.

> its unnecessary and privacy-busting requirement for phone numbers

https://signal.org/blog/building-faster-oram/

> It lays the groundwork for the introduction of usernames and phone number privacy which will offer new privacy controls around your phone number’s visibility on Signal.

So not so much unnecessary as it is hard to implement privately. But it should be on its way.

Does "initial funding by the US Government" really matter? Tor was funded by the US Government and it at least looks like they struggle to break it.

The phone number requirement is asinine and the reason I use Matrix, as I refuse to tie any identity of mine (even those I don't care about keeping private) to a phone number. Has Signal never heard of SIM swapping?

> and it at least looks like they struggle to break it.

As I understand, that depends entirely on where you stand on the theory that the US government owns most of the exit nodes.

That said, the practical threat profile for most people is lower-level criminals and advertisers, so Tor is probably still a good idea in any case.

Ok, but we can agree that doesn't seem to be a designed-in defect, right? The fact they took funding from the US doesn't seem to have ultimately mattered for the answer to this question.

>it at least looks like they struggle to break it.

Do they? Their FAQ basically says that if your adversary is a nation state we aint gonna be much help.

I think they focus much more on anonymizing against ISPs and have basically thrown the towel in on defending against, say, correlation attacks by nation states.

“Has Signal never heard of SIM swapping?”

Of course they have. Signal also has opt-in protection for that.

So by default Signal accounts are vulnerable to a known security issue? Great design!

Are you aware of any secure messaging systems where no trade-offs where made? If so, please let us know.

My family has been using Threema, which doesn't require a phone number.

Proprietary? No thanks. Even Signal open-sources their client.

I'm not sure what is proprietary...https://threema.ch/en/open-source

Oops ... :/

I can't edit my comment to correct it now, but in my defense Wikipedia says it's proprietary

https://github.com/orgs/threema-ch

Is the whole internet tainted due to it having its root in a US goverment funded project?

Or she'll lead Signal on the same path Mozilla went after Mitchell Baker took over where political signalling has taken the place of product market share - not to mention personal remuneration taking the place of development funding. The fact that she gained name recognition through political activism does not bode well in the former respect, as to the latter we´ll just have to see.

I will keep on using Telegram with XMPP (prosody running on the server-under-the-stairs) as a backup for when they go bad. If Signal truly opens up, adopts federation and the client ends up on F-Droid I may reconsider but until such a time I'm happy where I am right now.

Why not Matrix?

I agree the way Brendan Eich was treated is a disgrace, and Mozilla's governance and misplaced priorities are at the root of its increasing irrelevance.

Not Matrix because I've been running XMPP since it was a thing, also because it is a standard which works everywhere. I'm not opposed to Matrix but XMPP+OMEMO do quite well for now so I have not had a reason to jump ship. If I feel that need Matrix is one of the options, as is something like Delta Chat which uses SMTP and as such interacts with everyone and his dog without the need to convince them to install some app or open an account on some site.

"trust us"... yeah, right...

That’s wonderful. Will they make a proper desktop app already?

The desktop app seems good in my experience ?

It's ok, but not great.

The biggest issue is that Signal is really designed to be tied to your smartphone and managed from there. I, and I suspect a lot of other folks who use the desktop app, would prefer Signal to be more platform and device agnostic, like email.

There are ways with the signal-cli utility to make your desktop Signal application the primary signal client, but then managing contacts and groups becomes a real hassle - you have to message with a bunch of json config files and the cli utility doesn't always work as expected.

I'll freely admit, this is probably not an issue for most regular users, but it's still something that could be improved.

Yes, this is exactly what I am getting at. The cell phone number is the user identity, and this is flawed thinking. Some people have more than one phone number, and some people use more than 1 PC. Signal fails miserably here, and so I think it has been relegated to a niche market.

Everyone I know that tried Signal, also tried Telegram. Anecdotal, but we are still communicating with Telegram.

Am I the only one who found the "Taproot" [1] hint interesting?

In this sentence: > As President I will dedicate myself to helping Signal build a long taproot so it can grow and thrive in dynamic climates.

[1] https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/bitcoin-taproot-upgrade...

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