The frogs have been boiled enough by now gradually and very efficiently. They have been primed well.
(In another news Signal still has focus on crytpo. Is this Firefox+Pocket level of stickiness and “we are right!”?).
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(In another news Signal still has focus on crytpo. Is this Firefox+Pocket level of stickiness and “we are right!”?).
But yeah, I might agree that the third party clients thing is a bigger issue. Especially when the official client insists on not officially supporting Linux on ARM64 and not playing nice with Wayland. (Seriously, Signal on Linux is so blurry!)
Now part of the problem with LibreSignal was the trademark violation of using the name Signal. But Moxie is clearly against any third party using their servers, as we can see in this comment: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...
IMO that's an unforgivable stance towards third party clients.
I have read (well, skimmed) through their terms of service and haven't seen anything against using their servers from third party software, yet they'll evidently shut down third party software for interacting with their servers. If you're gonna have policies like that, at least outline them in your ToS.
I think my perception has changed in the last ≈ 10 years, to be more leaning in moxie's direction. It's hard enough to design something secure and usable, having to try and support all different implementations under the sun makes most federated approaches never reach any mass adoption.
Even though it's not a one-to-one analog I also think e.g the lack of crypto agility in Wireshark was a very good decision, the same with QUIC having explicit anti-ossification (e.g encrypted headers). Giving enterprise middle boxes the chance to meddle in things is just setting things to hurt for everyone else.
I don't even think they have to officially support third party clients or provide a stable API. I'd have no problem if they just occasionally made API changes which broke unofficial clients until their developers updated them.
But I really don't like that they're so openly hostile to the idea of other people "using their servers for free", with the threat of technical blocks and legal action which that implies. Especially not when their official client is as bad as it is. (Again, it's fucking blurry!)
It isn't, or wasn't, optional. They used to MITM crypto into your Twitter feed after decrypting the SSL. There's also the famous Tom Scott controversy where they were pretending to be him and collecting donations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736888
I uninstalled it in 2017 or 2018 when they started this crap and haven't looked back.