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Comment by jjav | Hacker News Reader

> And it's one of the last bastions of internet freedom.

I don't want to be too negative on Signal since they do some good work and I do use it.

But freedom? No. It is another completely proprietary platform. A better one, but still proprietary, so the antithesis of internet freedom.

For example just earlier this month the Signal client overnight stopped working on my old Mac because they decided to no longer support older OSX releases. So I can longer use it on that machine, my primary desktop.

If Signal was in any way open or free (as in freedom) I'd just compile my own client to speak an open protocol and be back in business. But no, Signal is just a proprietary service with a proprietary client.

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>If Signal was in any way open or free (as in freedom) I'd just compile my own client to speak an open protocol and be back in business. But no, Signal is just a proprietary service with a proprietary client.

Isn't the source code available? What's preventing you from compiling your own copy?

The server is centralized -- you might be able to stand up your own but it doesn't matter because you can't use it to talk to anyone else who isn't using your custom built app that uses your server

In other words you're complaining that it's not federated? That point has been relitigated in other parts of this thread so I don't want to go down that path. More to the point, I don't think that's what the parent post is talking about. He's complaining how he can't run signal on his outdated machine, not that he can't run his own private server.

As far as I'm aware, everything is open[0]. Only issue I know of is that the server code isn't consistently up to date and you can't run your own. But you can compile the app and desktop clients yourself. I guess there's also the issue of reproducible builds but AFAIK this is a play store issue and doesn't seem that problematic since you can compile from source. I mean they even have a commit from 4 days ago for the Android app.

[0] https://github.com/signalapp

> Only issue I know of is that the server code isn't consistently up to date and you can't run your own.

Why can't you run your own? Sounds like it is not entirely open. (Never looked into it, so would be interesting to understand what is missing.)

> But you can compile the app and desktop clients yourself.

This has been talked at length here in HN before, they prohibit any clients other than their proprietary binary distribution.

If that has changed, I'd be thrilled. Can anyone point at it having changed?

I believe what the grandparent comment meant was that you can't run a server that participates in the public network, not that you can't run a private server. That was my prior understanding, at least.

I might very well be wrong, and if so, someone please correct me.

That is correct. I should have been clearer in my distinction. You can run your own server but that server won't connect to the official Signal network. You're completely fine to run your own[0]. FWIW I've seen other software roll their own servers and use the Signal protocol. I mean WhatsApp uses the Signal protocol but I think they've diverged a lot since.

[0] There's always talk about the big deal breaker for Signal being that it isn't federated. So I've always wondered why this passion isn't used to generate a federated Signal network and is more focused on Matrix (who only recently started being E2EE). I don't know how these things work, I'm not that kind of programmer, but I can't see why you couldn't modify the server code to work in a federated fashion and edit the app code to be able to connect to both? I'm actually interested to know why if someone actually has an answer.

>they prohibit any clients other than their proprietary binary distribution.

source?

There are quite a few forks that connects directly to the Signal servers, [Molly](https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android) being the most well-known I believe.

From my understanding, they're not a fan of it (not sure if it's officially against their TOS or not) but they don't go out of their way to stop them. At least as long as you don't use the Signal name and make it clear you're not an official app.

Even in this blog post about usernames, they clearly make sure to mention them: "This means that in about 90 days, your phone number privacy settings will be honored by everyone using an official Signal app."

Signal has documentation on how to reproduce their Play Store builds and compare them with what you've installed locally:

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reprod...

> old Mac

> older OSX

How old OSX are we talking? Is it older than current Xcode with Sonoma supports? If it's that, then you have your answer. If you want to daily drive and older machine Linux or even Windows should be fine, but this is not really the way with Apple hardware - if it was, Xcode would make this easier for the developer. For reference, you can still build for Windows Vista using current Windows 10 SDK - I haven't tried Windows 11 SDK, so not sure how things are there.

I believe signal is completely open source...

Here u go

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop

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