Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerry1979 | Hacker News Reader

jerry1979·

Anyone know of a fork of signal that disables this keeps the SMS feature?

Not likely to happen. While it's OSS, there's still a central Signal backend, and they don't like clients other than their own to connect to it. Any fork would eventually need to have their own backend, and now you're basically no longer using Signal since you won't be able to communicate with anybody else not using yours.

Federated Signal servers!!!

I think that's called Matrix and we already have that.

Anyway, good luck getting Signal to federate with you until you have enough of a user base that they're losing users to your backend. They have zero reason to want to do this, and it introduces some privacy issues (what if your server doesn't respect deletions, etc?).

We even had it long before that. It's called XMPP, it's the internet standard for instant messaging and modern clients implement Signal style encryption.

Signal is just XMPP implementing the Axolotl ratchet.

XMPP is just SMTP and some protocol addons on top. SMTP is just FTP with RFC 469 and others. Etc.

There is a fork called "Molly" that has been around for a long time.

I haven't used but it is supposed to be a hardened version of signal.

Not that it supports SMS, but it _is_ a fork that uses Signal's servers.

Dunno about stories, but Johann's fork has no APK expiration, so just keep version with SMS support prior stories added and you should be fine.

https://github.com/johanw666/Signal-Android/releases

You can just go into settings and turn it off...

Silence. It's not very polished, but it's basically old signal.

Nobody is using SMS outside the US.

Okay, well a lot of people actually live in the US.

And also a lot of people outside the US uses SMS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com