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Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive (www.blobstreaming.org)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

To put it bluntly, as a nonprofit we don’t have investors or profit-minded board members knocking during hard times, urging us to “sacrifice a little privacy” in the name of hitting growth and monetary targets.

Good, I've been a regular donor for almost a year now.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

I donated, and planned to continue yearly, but then they added a cryptocurrency in a very obvious pump and dump scam — MobileCoin; brand new, untested, for-profit startup owned, VC funded, in which the Signal CEO was an adviser and potential investor, with all "coins" privately pre-sold to VC's and other investors.

I haven't recommended Signal since, and refuse to donate until that shit is removed.

IMO Signal should only be seen as temporary until a stronger competitor is built. Being centralised and US based is a deal breaker, long term. The permanent communication service, that humanity should ultimately rely on, must be completely decentralised and capable of transacting via a client-based P2P mesh network, that is independent of commercial internet infrastructure... e.g. it can continue operating phone to phone, router to router, etc, using wifi/bluetooth if the internet is cut, whether by government action or natural disaster.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

Nothing is black and white or pure. The list of features of a large-scale system like this includes its popularity. Signal excels at that compared to many alternatives and personally I think that's worth a few transgressions. I too dream of a P2P system but I can't see how underfunding Signal would help reach that goal. If anything having one popular open source non-profit platform could make it easier to get P2P. For example by pushing the popular platform to implement it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

deleted

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

For something less centralized, Matrix already exists. In my experience, the UX isn't as smooth as Signal, and it seems like mainstream users have very little patience for rough edges in UX anymore.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I upped my monthly sub.