Comment by mmooss
8 hours ago
Signal's mission is to provide maximized privacy in a form the non-technical public can use.
A messaging service filled with bots and spammers is not usable, and possibly not affordable to Signal (what proportion of resources would be spent on spam/bots). What is a more private, usable solution for filtering them out than using a phone number?
Lots of security geeks want Signal to adopt practices unusable to the public. They've made clear that unsusable security is not in their mission.
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'?
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 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.
> What is a more private, usable solution for filtering them out than using a phone number?
Since when is giving out your phone number a "more private" option ?
You don't have to give out your phone number. You can mint an arbitrary "username" and give the username out to people.
If it's not, let us know a solution (to Signal's actual problem as stated in the GP) that is more private.
One possible solution is to only be able to contact someone if you have received an invitation code from them out of band. E.g. "scan this QR code to add me on signal". Such an invitation code should default to single-use but users should be allowed to generate standing invitations so that businesses and the like can print and post one in their store or whatever. Start getting spam from one of your standing invitations? Just revoke it and make a new one. Presumably the Signal folks can come up with more alternative solutions than the half baked one I came up with after thinking about it for a minute, they're clever cookies.
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