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Comment by jjav

2 years ago

> 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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jjav

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gruez  2 years ago

>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?

  • dingnuts  2 years ago

    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

    • gruez  2 years ago

      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 He's complaining how he can't run signal on his outdated machine, not that he can't run his own private server.

godelski  2 years ago

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

  • jjav  2 years ago

    > 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?

    • numeri  2 years ago

      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.

      1 reply →

    • imkh  2 years ago

      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."

    • gruez  2 years ago

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

      source?

a1o  2 years ago

> 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.