WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem

• LibreSignal

  49 258 0.0 C

  LibreSignal • The truly private and Google-Free messenger for Android.

  

Moxie's argument can be found in its essay "the ecosystem is moving"[1], which is highly fallacious. Moxie's Signal is about control and building for himself the same kind of monopoly as others currently enjoy. You can find evidence of that through the libresignal issue tracker on GitHub where he rationalizes barring access to 3rd party clients or servers[2].

He sees federation as the technically superior approach (and as beneficial for privacy and security), but also as a threat to himself, which makes the point that he doesn't have your best interests at heart.

[1]: https://gultsch.de/objection.html

[2]: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

• syphon

  21 1,021 6.2 Dart

  ⚗️ a privacy centric matrix client

  

Here's another I haven't tried it but it looks slick https://github.com/syphon-org/syphon

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• ringrtc

  6 520 9.2 Rust
  

Signal is still an improvement over other non-federated messengers in that it's open-source, so you actually can try to improve the situation, although it's notoriously difficult. As an example of more platform support: https://github.com/signalapp/ringrtc/pull/12

signal-cli is an example of a 3rd party client which is tolerated for now: https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli

The main problem right now is that they don't have enough developers to take care of everything, but it's not specific to centralized services (no developer == no code). If you care about it, you can develop your own client using their library (à la signal-cli).

Regarding your last paragraph: I could probably list 20 features I'd like to see in Signal. That doesn't mean I want somebody implementing them with no guarantee about how securely they are implemented. One of the main goals of Signal is to provide guarantees against dragnet surveillance, and that constraint takes precedence.

• Signal-Server

  200 8,817 9.8 Java

  Server supporting the Signal Private Messenger applications on Android, Desktop, and iOS

  

Open Source but not actively accepting contributions is not a great place to be. Especially when you can't federate, so you are stuck using the central server which basically doesn't accept code contributions. Take a look at https://merge-chance.info/target?repo=https://github.com/sig...

Also it is somewhat interesting that this Open Source centralised Signal server, where centralisation means you can move quicker, hasn't seen a commit in 10 months.

Compare it to Matrix Synapse https://merge-chance.info/target?repo=https://github.com/mat...

The story with the flagship clients in both spaces is very similar.

Suggest a related project