> It's 2016 and our best crypto messenger options are worse than what we had 10 years ago when Skype was peer to peer, or Jabber with federation.
I strongly disagree, Skype has always been a black box. The usability of Signal's crypto is a lot better than it has ever been for Jabber.
> I can understand the reasons for not supporting federation, but I disagree.
Yet you don't address any of the problems with federation.
> What Open Whisper Systems and Wire need to do is open source the server components of their solutions, and try to remove the reliance on servers as much as possible.
I saw a BBC documentary in the mid-early 2000s (sorry, can't cite it right now) about law enforcement and intel having a really tough time with suspects using Skype, only being able to collect metadata and not call content due to its split routing protocols.
Now, there's nothing to say the whole service wasn't backdoored at some point, but it appeared to be a real concern, at least to LE. A few security audits at the time also gave it a very positive report (ditto for citation). In the post-MS sale era, of course there's zero trust. Prior to that though, things seemed different.
I strongly disagree, Skype has always been a black box. The usability of Signal's crypto is a lot better than it has ever been for Jabber.
> I can understand the reasons for not supporting federation, but I disagree.
Yet you don't address any of the problems with federation.
> What Open Whisper Systems and Wire need to do is open source the server components of their solutions, and try to remove the reliance on servers as much as possible.
https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Server