this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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As I recall he was the one behind the decision (for the built in wallet) to go with a privacy coin he had a stake in and not the very obvious choice of monero. As far as I'm concerned he's tainted goods.
To be honest, while crypto is probably the closest we have to an actually private payment option (Monero etc), I'm generally not a fan of it for this usage because unlike the rest of the app, it has a much steeper learning curve AND is a common target for scams, which makes it much less approachable for the average user. I love Signal because my mom can use it and I can trust that she's protected, but I would not recommend she tries using the payment option within it regardless of what coin they use because the rigamaroll of going to some exchange to buy it is already a dicey proposition.
I never thought of that, that's a really good point. I disliked anyway it because it was for one random currency where it's easy to just send a wallet address over Signal for whichever cryptocurrency you like.
He was also unwilling to allow other apps to interact with Signal servers, even if they supported a platform that he wasn't going to support. Good riddance to him.
I understand and value the idea of self-hosting or federation to decentralize services, but Signal is currently my most used chat app for the sole reason that I can tell a friend to go download it and it just works. Supporting self-hosted servers or federation doesn't necessarily mean that the UX has to be bad, but for small organizations I think the radical focus on a specific experience is the best way to make a good product, and if this is the sacrifice that was made so that we could have a simple, reliable, private messenger then I'm happy with that tradeoff.
As an example, chat protocols/implementations like Matrix have a lot of potential, but the foundational decisions around decentralization mean that it takes way more work to make it seamless to use. You can't download a client and start chatting immediately, you need to think about what server to connect to, and that's already enough of a barrier to make it a no-go for a lot of the folks I regularly chat with who just don't care enough about privacy/FOSS to put in the effort.