this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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Good, I've been a regular donor for almost a year now.
I donated, and planned to continue yearly, but then they added a cryptocurrency in a very obvious pump and dump scam — MobileCoin; brand new, untested, for-profit startup owned, VC funded, in which the Signal CEO was an adviser and potential investor, with all "coins" privately pre-sold to VC's and other investors.
I haven't recommended Signal since, and refuse to donate until that shit is removed.
IMO Signal should only be seen as temporary until a stronger competitor is built. Being centralised and US based is a deal breaker, long term. The permanent communication service, that humanity should ultimately rely on, must be completely decentralised and capable of transacting via a client-based P2P mesh network, that is independent of commercial internet infrastructure... e.g. it can continue operating phone to phone, router to router, etc, using wifi/bluetooth if the internet is cut, whether by government action or natural disaster.
Nothing is black and white or pure. The list of features of a large-scale system like this includes its popularity. Signal excels at that compared to many alternatives and personally I think that's worth a few transgressions. I too dream of a P2P system but I can't see how underfunding Signal would help reach that goal. If anything having one popular open source non-profit platform could make it easier to get P2P. For example by pushing the popular platform to implement it.
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For something less centralized, Matrix already exists. In my experience, the UX isn't as smooth as Signal, and it seems like mainstream users have very little patience for rough edges in UX anymore.
I upped my monthly sub.