I really have no idea why everyone is bashing Signal so much here. None of the concerns listed seem even slightly technical.
The only problem I have with signal is that it is:
A. Centralized (which isn’t explicitly a privacy concern, but a control concern in-line with linux and foss)
B. Requires a phone number to register.
It is quite private in spite of that, and goes to great lengths to achieve that privacy. It is what I see people in the security community consistently suggest.
However, if this is a public group, are we to really be that concerned about many of the considerations Signal tries to tackle? Worst case scenario a bad actor simply enters the chat and backs everything up.
It seems like our threat model is moreso in the way of general surveillance economy concerns (and perhaps to have a slightly less public entry).
In this case, point A and B become even more glaring! Why not something like an E2E encrypted Matrix chat?
Why yes, friend, I will just conveniently pretend that you bringing that up is completely outside the context of whether or not to seriously consider the criticism.
And if you are trying to make a point of whether or not the ideology is seriously impacting the project, you need-only take a casual walk through the issue list, and find (among other evidence) that a suggestion to move to codeberg was criticized for… “DEI”. Wow. How technically-focused.
You are getting more and more incoherent the more of these replies you churn out. What, precisely from my point of view (which I guess apparently you know very well? the irony…) here implies that “not talking about it” is the best choice? That’s absurd.
I find it very important to understand the motivations, technical and ideological, behind a project.
I don’t spend any effort talking about in any other respect than telling people that they should likely disregard if for both technical reasons (it cuts out Xwayland, his commits frequently lead to very blatant regressions that are nontrivial, etc.) and ideological (his terrible, awful politics and motivations for making the project, to begin with!)
The reason I replied to your comment is mostly out of idle curiosity and a deepseated longing for genuineness and critical thinking of other people that I have not yet managed to kill (despite its impracticality in the modern age).
This is all such a massive and disheartening reduction of what software freedom is. I hope that you eventually manage to think less shallowly about this.
Tell me, do you have any particular, material distinction you are making by making a choice between desktop protocols? The desktop protocol is a purely technical thing, and I have not heard a single peep out of you in regards to specifics.
To elaborate, in Xorg, it is a very monolithic beast. It is very convoluted in its purview and carries a lot of preset implementation of its various facets. It contains an entire networking stack for deciding how to communicate windows over a network.
It is significantly less flexible and modular than Wayland, because in Wayland basically everything of significance is decided by the compositor.
This, ironically to your point, actually gives you more choice and freedom in how things work (this is also why tiling window managers love wayland to death, it’s pretty easy to just build upon the basic wlroots implementation!). So I have to ask you, frankly, what in the fuck do you think you’re actually saying right now?
The issue, in this way, is that you only seem to care about software freedom in the sense of the abstract concept rather than the reality. You seem to think of software freedom in the sense of “I either build and install this package, or I build and install this one”, with an all-consuming disregard for the technical aspects of freedom. Which is impractical, and arguably antithetical to the very process of trying to foster software freedom to begin with. As evident by literally everything to do with this situation. My lord.