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Posts: 764 | Thanked: 2,889 times | Joined on Jun 2014
#50
Originally Posted by nodevel View Post
Thanks for the heads up.

It's worth reading the linked discussion as well and maybe reconsider if a messenger with such a hostile developer team is the one to use. IMHO the fact that its identification is based on phone numbers, that they are against IM federation, that their priority is to have control over the clients and most of all that they rely on Google's proprietary libraries (even though they can be easily replaced by WebSockets like in LibreSignal) pretty much nullifies their privacy aims. It is understandable that they do not have an infinite amount of funding, but if their mission is to bring a secure, privacy oriented messenger, then LibreSignal was, as a client, doing a better job than they were, and therefore the hostility towards it makes their intentions questionable.

Also, judging from the linked discussion, if they find a way to ban clients like LibreSignal (they didn't have to, as they pushed the developer team to stop the client before any ban was needed), then nothing stops them from trying to be hostile towards Whisperfish and Sailsecure as well - and it's also good to mention that the developers of LibreSignal abandoned it mostly to find a new messaging service to support, as Signal turned out to be the way it did.

This applies to SailfishOS clients as well after all:
Totally agreed, but so far this is the best we have, and we can hope 'unofficial' clients are not banned in the near future, or even that moxie has a change of heart. XMPP is getting there thanks to the Conversations people, but it needs some more tweaks to be really straightforward for people who just want to talk to their friends - and that stuff needs to be implemented on Sailfish as well, unless everyone intends on specifically using Conversations with the Android layer. As far as I know, no other messaging application/protocol even comes close.

I must say moxie has a point, with control over the clients it's a lot easier to make sure that any bugs encountered are the fault of the Signal developers and not of a third party (who could be malicious, but also just lazy), and they can fix those bugs themselves and get everyone on the fixed version asap. The problem is that the solution of just not allowing any third party clients is the easy way out. Luckily taking the easy way out was not the underlying thought when they developed the protocol.
 

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