I see mention of the toxic dictator stuff and non-reproducible builds mentioned through this thread - do you have info on that you can point me to? I am asking because a guy at work wanted me to install Signal as voice call quality on Duo was appallingly bad. Thanks in advance.
You can read about the stance in question on a lot of github issues, one of which is this one: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37 (not actually the signal repo, but moxie talks about the need for iron control over the platform). You can extrapolate consequences pretty far from what is said there, consequences which are well understood by moxie (if nothing else, you can see that time was spent thinking about environmental factors). To me this attitude is baldly toxic because it makes the world worse (in that it reinforces the opinion that centralised is better, which is at the heart of so many problematic digital services).
Thanks. Reading that thread, I think he is saying that he wants to remain centralised and federating third-party servers and traffic isn't his plan.
I know in theory that sounds "bad" but it's their service I guess? In the real world, centralised services seem to be the norm, eg. the postal service. They don't let random third parties take the mail and also mandate that you use their postage stamps to use their network, and only accept mail at their post boxes and mail offices. They don't let people inject mail into the vans along their postal routes, and don't forward mail that is from another delivery company, eg. DPD, DHL, FedEx.
I am not sure how else it'd work?? Surely it'd be like expecting the postal system to deliver FedEx's parcels, whilst not paying the postal system anything at all. That's unfeasible and unsustainable.
There's e-mail for one. A great good everyone uses, which is definitely decentralised (much to the chagrin of a few large providers, which continuously act in bad faith to centralise it as much as they can). Signal could have been that, but for (mainly) mobile messaging. Because they went the jaded route as you do it's now just another way for one person to apply his dictatorial view to the masses. I agree with you that in a mountain of shit you won't really notice a little bit more shit, but that doesn't make it anything but shit. It could have been better, it is not. That's something that deserves a little lamenting.
I can only guess but it may relate to Moxie's at times somewhat brash behavior in Github issues and an ongoing debate over centralized vs decentralized protocols (with him advocating the former). He gave a talk addressing the (de-)centralization topic at the Chaos Communications Congress in 2019:
