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Comment by wolvoleo | Hacker News Reader

True they can make their choices but it also means I won't support them in any way. Or recommend them.

I'd use something that's truly decentralised but signal is just another walled garden like WhatsApp. Just one that promises to behave better. But what's a promise worth these days?

A decentralised network would mean a guarantee that they can't do anything bad. I'll take that over promises and good intentions any day.

I don't care about the masses. If signing up for a matrix account is too annoying for them they don't really care about privacy anyway. After all it's the same they have to do for any online shop. Just create a username and password. Somehow it's not a problem for the masses if they wanna order a phone charger but for matrix it's suddenly 'too complicated'?

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People like you who equate signal and WhatsApp are also responsible for not making any progress due to ideological stubbornness it’s something that I absolutely despise from a part of HN crowd here.

Great, I'm happy to be a nail in the coffin of the signal advocacy.

Remember how everyone jumped on Google when they promised to do no evil? Now they're one of the most abundant mass surveillance companies in the world and we can't move away because they're too big to fail. The same with WhatsApp. People jumped on it because it was good, then nobody left when meta bought it because all their friends were on it.

Signal is one sale away from being evil too. They might not sell it but we've been conned so many times by big tech that I will only take technical guarantees, not promises that can be broken. We have to avoid getting locked in again.

And really, lots of progress is made in real open communications. Matrix is getting more mature by the day. NATO uses it, the French government and several others. And the good thing is, you can always run your own server and connect to the hive. Nobody can tell you what to do, nobody can tell you to surveil your users like the EU is planning to do.

We need something truly open. Not a WhatsApp light.

Signal is a small organization and nothing like Google. Signal is a non-profit and their code is open source.

Their code is open source but you can't really do anything with that. You can't run your own server on the network, and they've previously stated they don't want third party implementations of clients.

Again, I don't trust promises anymore. Eventually they're going to need more money and that money will come with strings attached. If some org like Matrix would get bought people would just decouple themselves from their network. With Signal we can't do that because they are the only operator.

> Their code is open source but you can't really do anything with that. You can't run your own server on the network, and they've previously stated they don't want third party implementations of clients.

There are third-party forks and clients. Parts of the US government use one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49678919

Also, you can audit the code.

They've previously said they would ban third party clients: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

Interesting, I hadn't seen that; thank you. Though that is dated 10 years ago and they haven't done it yet, or not fully successfully. It might be challenging to identify third party clients, though maybe each app inevitably has a unique fingerprint.

> signal is just another walled garden like WhatsApp

For me the difference is in the ownership. Who owns each. Which is BigCorp? That’s why I trust one more than the other.

Ownership can change. That's the problem. It happened to WhatsApp itself! Meta bought a network with the userbase that was already too big to leave.

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