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Comment by potatototoo99 | Hacker News Reader

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..

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.

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

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.

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