[motohagiography]

Judging by Mahar's TED talk about the diminished value of truth vs. alignment circulating on twitter, it looks like the Signal Foundation has finally fallen under the influence of the nihilists as well. FOSS doesn't need non-profit orgs, and people in tech aren't equipped to secure them from the people trained to take them over.

[dredmorbius]

This video?

<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=r2gsj0EEE3I>

[captn3m0]

Being a non-profit is a huge advantage to Signal as they are not beholden to profits or shareholders. A messaging app that is used by millions worldwide, is a very juicy target for profit making via advertising otherwise. Meredith (Signal president) equates it to a a rampart against tech surveillance gobbling up Signal

> signal is an 501c3 nonprofit and that's a sort of you know an incorporation of you know in the US where you you agree not to take you know profits you get Revenue you can get Revenue but you're you not for profit and you have kind of a charitable aim and that requires that you do certain transparency protocols so there's sort of forms we file that show our finances that also means that we don't take sort of investment in the classic venture capitalist sense and that we cannot be acquire we could be acquired but you know the executives and the the board would not get a payout so if we sold signal for billions of dollars to say you know Palantir here or something evil like that um we would have to reinvest that money in charitable causes um now why is our incorporation structure important well it's actually one of the key barriers or key protections I would say like a rampart that allows us to keep fully focused on our mission of providing you know meaningful private Communications and in Tech that is you know particularly important because the barrier we're protecting against is the fact that the business model in Tech is monetizing surveillance so if we had investors if we had you know you know limited partners breathing down our neck if we had you know shareholders who were sort of hassling that one old guy on our board about you know increasing revenues or growth or this doesn't look too good the Privacy thing that seems a little dated we're not getting the kind of growth we need um we would be pushed to compromise our privacy Focus because the money lies in surveillance

There’s older blog posts from Signal explaining the same, but I feel the current Signal team is very well equipped to avoid hostile takeovers.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=HIhLQrldq0s

[motohagiography]

I have tremendous respect for Whittaker. The alarming change is that the founder (Moxie) is no longer on the board, and one of the board members is someone publicly opposed to the freedom signal provides, who is also member of organizations who advocate against what signal provides, and appears to be a former employee at agencies with an interest in mass surveillance. Even Peter Theil would be a more reliable and trustworthy board member than Maher after what's come out about her views.

The other problem is Signal is now in a tacit monopoly position because neither the Apple or Google app stores will allow an app that does not do content moderation, and there is zero chance of them being challenged on that by the current US admin. I'm not sure what the current status is, but Element/Matrix was quietly cut out of the mobile market through that coordination. Judging by the stakes and the players, to me there's something very, very sinister about Marlinspike's exit as well.

Imo, the canaries for some very serious political problems are dropping like flies, and one of their tools is stacking boards of software projects with assets from compromised institutions.

[omnimus]

Or Moxie just got bored (and paid). Signal is now in position where main issues are not engineering or crypto but social, financial, political.

[omnimus]

How was element/matrix cut out?

[Arathorn]

Element (or Matrix in general) hasn’t been cut out. The comment might be thinking about https://element.io/blog/element-on-google-play-store but it got reverted after we explained what decentralisation was to Google.

It is true to say that Matrix is more at risk than Signal, though, given Matrix allows for public chatrooms - whereas in Signal you have to invited into whatever abusive content rather than being able to selfinvite (ie join).