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Wrong signal

it-kollektiv.com

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Re: Wrong signal

#81
post #80
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the interest in the FOSS community is relatively low given the centralized format in which Signal is offered. How is Signal offered in a 'centralized' way? There is a free and open-source implementation that already (according to Moxie) supports federation. And a standing offer from the authors to help anyone doing further work on federation. What more could one reasonably expect, short of demanding OWS…

Do read the linked article. It describes the situation quite a bit better than I can.

I've read the article and am asking about your comment. No amount of reading the article is going to make it clear.

Re: Wrong signal

#82
post #73
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there is no central directory of identifiers to public keys, there's no way my mom will use it to send me anything She'd never use an app where you two bump phones with NFC?

I don't think her phone has NFC, it might but she wouldn't know if it did. But I don't always see her in person that often, which means we'd have to wait until we were face to face before we could even try to see if she had NFC etc.

Could also scan a QR code.

I think an IM which relied on in-person seeding and then bootstrapped with mutual contacts could be quite powerful, and easy to use for newbies too.

Re: Wrong signal

#84
post #79
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But "their own needs" are completely out of bounds for you, and it seems pretty clear that this isn't something that's going to be fixed in patches and code, so expecting them to come and fix it because you have an open code base is rather disingenuous. Many of the things listed in these articles, such as making GCM optional, or supporting distribution outside of Play, are not "completely out of bounds." We've expr…

> Many of the things listed in these articles, such as making GCM optional, or supporting distribution outside of Play, are not "completely out of bounds." We've expressly indicated support for them and enumerated the work required, but nobody has committed to doing the work. > I don't expect anyone to do the work, but I do think it's strange when someone from the FOSS community complains that we haven't done it for…

> Reading through the comments that are linked it looks like you mostly had technical concerns about the work. Is that correct?

> Clearly the perception of your actions is different than you intend. In your comment here you make it sound like no one had even attempted to do resolve these issues. But that's not what the author of the article believes, and given the public record I'm inclined to agree.

From that original discussion on LibreSignal:

"If the only thing that the remaining people here want out of LibreSignal is a websocket-only solution and gmscore isn't an option for whatever reason, I would consider a clean, well written, and well tested PR for websocket-only support in Signal. I expect it to have high battery consumption and an unreliable user experience, but would be fine with it if it comes with a warning and only runs in the absence of play services. However, I also realize that still won't help people that are trying to build a Google-free experience on Google's platform, since we still don't have the things we need to be comfortable distributing software outside of Play."

I have repeated that many times. That was June. Nobody has done the work, but plenty of people have written articles like this. The latter is definitely easier.

> Your key point is that you're content if people do federation in their own, outside of your domain. That's fair. But what I'm saying is the dream of a federated secure messaging system that's also popular is something which you have the power to chase if you commit to it by making it a core feature of Signal.

Again, we already committed to making it a core feature of Signal, and it was a disaster. We've learned from our mistakes.

If it's something that you think is important, please get involved in the project and come up with a plan to introduce federation in ways that actually deliver on the promise of metadata hiding, anonymity, and censorship circumvention as well as avoid all of the problems that we documented based on our initial attempts.

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