I cannot speak for moxie or Signal. I can speak for my own experiences, as the maintainer of a fork of signal-cli, and I have never seen any evidence that Signal's servers block signal-cli or my fork. I don't know about signal-cli but my fork clearly identifies itself in the user agent (and another field called the "signal agent") to the server. If they wanted to block me they could.
> If you think running servers is difficult and expensive (you're right), ask yourself why you feel entitled for us to run them for your product.
I don't get Moxie's stance. Aren't they running Signal as a public service? This sentence reads as if LibreSignal would be stealing profits from Signal by using later's servers. But there is no intention to raise profits / add monetization, is there?
MOB (MobileCoin) looks like an attempt at monetization, a bit shady if you ask me.
Other than monetization, I get Moxie stance, even though I disagree. If you control both the server and the client and don't allow alternative clients and federation, it is easier to make changes, keep focus, and you don't have to deal with complains from users with crappy clients.
Signal is also security and privacy-focused, and Moxie presumably want to keep that image. What if some forks throw away that aspect, for example by storing plain text message in "the cloud". Personally, I actually don't care that much about the privacy/security aspect of Signal, as weird as it may sound, for me, Signal is just a nice, no nonsense messenger with security as a bonus and I would welcome a fork that makes a convenience trade off. But these less secure clients may undermine trust for those who really see it as a primary reason.
After reviewing the thread, I think that it may just be that we have had a genuine misunderstanding over the meaning of the word enforcement due to context. moxie has made it clear that third party clients are not allowed to use OWS servers, and enforced it by having such clients removed from the internet. I feel that counts as 'enforcement' although upon re-reading the thread I can see why this happened. I am not aware of enforcement on the server-side although this is certainly enough to dissuade me from pursuing third-party Signal clients.
edit: reworded after rereading the thread a couple more times
signal-cli uses a clearly identifiable user agent [0] that could easily be blocked if Signal wanted to. signal-cli could escalate by trying to evade that kind of a block, but as it stands signal-cli has been operating without trouble for several years.
I meant they may ask some clients not to use their servers, but they don't have any enforcement mechanism in place beyond asking them to stop on github.
They can apply measures to the users. They are not doing it right now, but they could suddenly start. By the discussion on some reddit threads [1], this moxie guy looks sketchy to say the least.
But I support the devs who work on alternative clients. The official Electron app is just bad, especially on Wayland. Hope signal-cli will keep working.
Sorry what am I looking for in this 200 comment reddit thread? I don't see any comments from moxie himself, just a lot of other people claiming to know what moxie wants. Are there reports of specific issues with 3rd party clients or comments from a Signal employee or something?
I'm looking for people's experience interacting with the Signal server, not moxie. We're talking about if the server enforces any kind of client restrictions.
I haven't looked super deep, but to the best of my knowledge that's not something that happens really. I looked through that reddit thread (thanks for that BTW, whisperfish seems interesting) and skimmed over that enormous GitHub thread, but I couldn't find much in the way of people actually experiencing issues interacting with the Signal server. Again, would appreciate it if you could link me to such a thing. As I mentioned elsewhere, I maintain an unofficial signal client and I try to be aware of these sort of things.
I cannot speak for moxie or Signal. I can speak for my own experiences, as the maintainer of a fork of signal-cli, and I have never seen any evidence that Signal's servers block signal-cli or my fork. I don't know about signal-cli but my fork clearly identifies itself in the user agent (and another field called the "signal agent") to the server. If they wanted to block me they could.
edit: signal-cli also sets a user agent clearly identifies itself: https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli/blob/05abb3f9f6294677d2d...