[Vinnl]

The motivation presumably is that if people start using Signal, but half their messages don't arrive because their contact is using a half-baked third-party client that hasn't kept up with Signal's development, then that's a great way to lose potential users.

[simias]

Instead I lose half my messages because the desktop application won't sync correctly and/or corrupt its database every other week.

Surely there's a version header in the protocol that could be used to reject outdated clients outright?

That wouldn't be much of an issue if the official clients worked better and had the features I expect from a modern IM client. For instance I never really considered using a third party Telegram client because the official one works really well in my experience.

But apparently proper syncing will have to wait while they implement a cryptocurrency payment system. Priorities.

[Vinnl]

Yeah, I can imagine that especially if the team with full access to the back-end already has problems making everything work properly, they don't want to add additional developers with less hands-on involvement to the mix. (Even if those say the adhere to the same version.)

Look, I'm not saying you have to agree with the reasoning or that you would've made the same trade-off in their stead, but at least personally I always prefer to understand how they came to a decision and recognise that, even when I don't agree and am affected by the consequences of it, they're not doing it to spite me.

[simias]

I'm not ascribing malice to their decisions, but I think they're really shooting themselves in the foot with the way they handle their PR.

Maybe I'm wrong but my theory is that it started with "end-to-end encryption means that you don't have to trust us" and it seems that many among the Signal team and fans took that to mean "we can behave as shadily as we want and not communicate well since it doesn't really matter anyway".

But there's more to trust than end-to-end encryption. I also need to trust that the project will keep improving and that I'll still want to use it three years from now. The fact that Signal is not federated and they keep such a strong hold on the project makes it even worse, I really have all my eggs in moxie's basket.

I used to actively tell people to use Signal, now I say nothing and these days I find myself using Telegram more and more even though protocol-wise Signal is clearly the superior option.

[abstract_put]

I won't presume the relative weighting of motivations, there's a notable blog post here [0] that elaborates on Moxie's dislike for federation. E.g.:

> So long as federation means stasis while centralization means movement, federated protocols are going to have trouble existing in a software climate that demands movement as it does today.

While my initial reaction was "omg, I hate it", I don't 100% disagree. I think one of the biggest drivers for adoption in Matrix world would be a streamlined on-boarding to a central server (matrix.org?), so that it "just works" by default. Like the front page of Reddit, get people in the ecosystem, then they can discover the subreddits and engage more deeply with the platform.

[0]: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

[Vinnl]

Agreed, although at that point, what's the point of the decentralisation?

As a comparison, email is technically decentralised, but if I were to move off of Gmail, 80% of my emails would still be on their servers because that's what their recipients use.

(This is of course somewhat of an exaggeration - it's still better than if email were a proprietary Google thing. But it's less of a utopia than my decentralisation-minded self had in mind in the past.)

[eptcyka]

I'm using telegram-foss and it definitely works better than Signal's first party Android client.

[idclip]

Telegram here too. Signal has event propagation and rekeying issue

[idclip]

Messages dont exactly arrive on time with the iphone client. There seem to be propagation and rekeying delays. Its very frustrating

[JeremyNT]

Alternate hypothesis: maybe he only wants people to use clients that advertise his cryptocurrency.