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New Year, New CEO (signal.org)
939 points by 0xedb on Jan 10, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 322 comments



This post, and how it explains that there's 30 people working there now, made me realize that if I care about signal continuing (and I do, since I really like it, especially that it has a dedicated desktop client), that I should see how it makes money and whether that's sustainable. Turns out it's donations, and now I'm a donor through monthly charges through the mobile app. I actually opted for that specifically because their web site noted that they can't give you a badge in the app if you donate online, and I thought showing the badge would be a good way for other people to see and inquire about, and hopefully realize they can donate too if they care to.


While this is true, remember that the Signal Foundation was started with a sizeable investment from their new interim CEO Brian Acton.

> In February of 2018, Acton invested $50 million of his own money to start the Signal Foundation alongside Moxie Marlinspike > > https://signalfoundation.org/en/

He's worth at least a billion dollars, so one imagines that Signal will continue as long as he's involved.


You can't take him for granted like that. Yeah he donated a lot and yeah he has more and yeah he left $1B on the table after leaving Facebook, but he just can't do it all alone.

If you're rich you get all kinds of people in your life soliciting your money, you gotta watch it like a hawk, it's easy to lose a billion dollars.


Good point. And he might also want to donate to other charities. There are many worthy causes besides Signal.

And it’s probably sound for Signal to not rely on one single wealthy donor.


> There are many worthy causes besides Signal

To be fair, that applies to non-billionaires as well.


Indeed!


> it's easy to lose a billion dollars

With doors that go like this or this and not like this


> If you're rich you get all kinds of people in your life soliciting your money, you gotta watch it like a hawk, it's easy to lose a billion dollars.

People forget this far too often. No matter how much money a person or an organization has, it can disappear in the blink of an eye if you view it as an unlimited money pot that you can keep going back to.


> it's easy to lose a billion dollars

:O


20 $50 million donations to various groups and $1 billion dollars is gone. You could probably do that in 5 years and still not come out as effective.


The average american makes ~2m in a lifetime, 1b$ is 500x that. "Losing" 1b$ is ludicrous unless you are actively looking to lose it (or don't care about it, like musk & al).

How do you lose what 500 people make in their lifetime?


Yeah, but the average American also isn’t making $50 million donations to keep a pet project going.


Let's say your net worth is ~100k. That's equivalent to a 2.5k donation. Investing 2.5k in a pet project is pretty common, and you don't find yourself in the streets for doing so.

I think people that say it's easy to lose 2b$ don't have a clear understanding of the amount of money that is. It's a crazy amount for one person.


I think you’ve lost the context. If signal does not figure out revenue, they will require more $50MM donations. Using your analogy, that would be like you spending $5,000 or $10,000 when you originally only planned to spend $2,500. Perhaps you wouldn’t flinch, but many would pull the plug after the first or second time, especially if disappointed about some aspect of the project. Your project is at risk by relying on your continued good graces, even though you may technically be able to afford more investment. Likewise, signal is at risk if it requires periodic investment of millions from Acton, even though he can afford it and currently supports the project. Since he donated a few percent of his net worth, it’s a better situation than if he had donated, say, half, but signal still needs to take the risk seriously.


Look at what happens to lottery winners.


There’s a world of difference between a million and a billion.

Just physically moving that amount of cash is difficult and takes time. Even those lottery winners don’t blow the whole lot in less than a year.


> Just physically moving that amount of cash is difficult and takes time.

...that's why it isn't moved physically?


Forget it in your pants, and it went in the washing machine.

You know, same problem as everyone else, really.


That's why they're making all of the cash money plastic, so these billionaires can stop accidently laundering their money. Genius!


Sure but even a meagre 8% return on $950M is $76M. Buying and holding SP500 index funds in 2021 would have returned more than triple that, at 26% or so.

You can give away 50 mil a year and still get tens of millions dollars richer if you're sitting on $1B.

It's only "easy" to lose $1B if you have absolutely no idea what you're doing.


Since when is an 8% return "meagre"?! I get it, the last year had a crazy stock price increase, but it was an outlier.


The average SP500 return for the last 50 years is north of 10%, so I consider 8 to be meagre.


4%. 4% is the number. Don’t count on anything over this.


The next 10 years? 0%. We’ll be lucky if the market is flat in the next decade.


10 year treasury bonds are essentially risk free, as they are guaranteed by the US Treasury. Current 10-year yields are a bit less than 2%, so that's essentially your minimum return there.


Assuming that interest rates remain above inflation, which is already no longer true. What's the point of earning 2% a year when the USD is losing 6% a year in value (and that's likely far undercounted).


The point is it's possibly the most secure investment available, so that's why it's a good proxy for the risk free rate.

Whether or not you want to invest at that rate is entirely a separate conversation.


Is that 4% inflation-adjusted?


Usually yes. In times of inflating asset prices, the value of the investment tends to inflate with it.


Usually yes. But … not every year exactly, so it works best when viewed over a longer term.


A meager 8%. You have betrayed your total ignorance when it comes to anything having to do with money. You have no idea what you’re talking about. The only investment that will give you 8% is an extremely risky one and that’s not an appropriate vehicle for a billion dollars. And you say this in the world wide environment of negative interest rates…

The reason not many rich people lose their money is because becoming rich is hard and you have to be smart to do it. You don’t have to be good or moral but you have to be smart. Even then there’s a ton of washout among new millionaires. But you don’t get to a billion by accident. Look at all the people who make tons of money through some other means than intelligence — lottery winners and football players — they all lose their money even if it’s millions. Sorry bud, the system isn’t rigged. Life is just hard.


>The only investment that will give you 8% is an extremely risky one and that’s not an appropriate vehicle for a billion dollars.

Buying SPY returns on average 10% or so, year over year.

Do you consider the S&P500 to be "extremely risky"?

>Sorry bud, the system isn’t rigged.

I feel like you replied to the wrong person? Between you and I, the only one who brought up the question of whether "the system" is rigged or not is you.


Or, you know, a one $1 billion dollars donation and it's gone as well :D


> it's easy to lose a billion dollars.

Can you cite some examples? If it were easy, presumably a lot of people have done it.


Vijay Mallya, Patricia Kluge, and Eike Batista are all entrepreneurs who lost a billion or more and are now worth nothing. Masayoshi Son lost $60 billion and only made back about $20 billion. Technically Bezos, Buffett, and Bill Gates have all lost billions many times, just due to market fluctuations, but that probably doesn't count. Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, spends $1B like nothing: $500 million yacht, $300 million dollar house (one of many), $450 million on a painting. I'm certain that many members of that family have spent $1B or more.

You know what they say: a million here, a million there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.


Many super-paid athletes famously end up broke very quickly after their careers end. Some NBA names here [0] but it's not specific to basketball - it typically correlates with coming from poverty and/or lack of financial education.

[0] https://www.thesportster.com/basketball/15-nba-players-who-w...


I wonder why they don't maintain any IP rights on their performances like actors or singers.


Bill Hwang, revered as a God Of YOLO on WallStreetBets, once lost $20B in two days: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-09/where-is-...


Mike Tyson, Evander Holy field, I'd imagine there'd be a lot of boxers.


> Can you cite some examples?

Alongside the other examples in this thread, Donald Trump lost at least $1b during the first two years of his term.

> If it were easy, presumably a lot of people have done it.

The easiest way to lose a billion is to start with more than a billion, and there aren't really a lot of people in that position.


Note that this was an unusual arrangement, to say the least. My understanding, from memory of having briefly looked into this, is that Acton loaned $50m to the Foundation, rather than donating it, in what appears to be a 50-year, interest-free loan with no regular repayments. As an initial donation of that size from an individual would have probably put the Signal Foundation into private foundation status rather than public charity status, this has at least the appearance of trying to circumvent the public support requirements of public charities.

It is somewhat difficult for one individual to consistently single-handedly support a charity in the US without causing the tax status of the organization to change detrimentally.


There are provisions for individual large donations to be excluded from the public-support calculation if the charity can make the case that they are "unusual". No idea if that would apply here though.


If they invest the 50M, and keep the team lean, it can be long-term sustainable.


But that---a $50m donation from an individual, then sustaining the organization off investing that donation---is exactly what, whether it makes sense or not, a public charity in the US is usually not allowed to do. That would make it a private foundation in the eyes of the IRS.

With that said, if I'm interpreting their 2019 filing correctly, it appears that they are making enough in donations that they may have a legitimate claim to being able to eventually repay the loan, and they are now including imputed interest on the (interest-free) loan as revenue.


From Wikipedia...

> The foundation was started with an initial $50 million loan from Acton, who had left WhatsApp's parent company, Facebook, in September 2017.[8] The Freedom of the Press Foundation had previously served as the Signal project's fiscal sponsor and continued to accept donations on behalf of the project while the foundation's non-profit status was pending.[4] By the end of 2018, the loan had increased to $105,000,400, which is due to be repaid on February 28, 2068. The loan is unsecured and at 0% interest.

Appears it wasn't an outright donation. I've always wondered about the details behind this. Don't think I've seen something like this before.


It wasn't an outright donation as a protection mechanism. If they go full Oculus he wants his money back. If they remain true to the founding principals, it'll likely just be forgiven upon death or put into some funky trust.


An unsecured, 0% interest loan with a 50 year term may as well be a donation.


It gives him more control over the org than a donation would have.

For all intents an purposes, he owns Signal. He's the org's benefactor, lender, founder, board member, and now CEO.


Giving money probably has some tax implications. Providing a loan does not.


This is technically true, but the donation would be tax advantageous over a loan, so I can't imagine that's the reason.


True. I saw your other post about control and that makes more sense.


I think 501c3s should be barred from taking huge donations like that in situations where it's not 100% clear that such a donor couldn't end up personally benefitting from influencing the charity. For example, I stopped giving money to Wikimedia Foundation when Google showed up with their millions. If there is even just a 0.0001% chance that donations from my hard-earned cash will ultimately just end up lining the pockets of billionaires, then I don't want any part of it.

In Germany there is now a party running on a program trying to forbid political parties from taking donations from any individual above €5000 per year, and barring politicians from staying in office longer than two terms of 5 years each. -- This is roughly the standard I expect from any charity that wants to have any shot at getting money from me.


He co-founded the foundation. The die has been cast.

The guy's worth 2.5B. I sincerely doubt he'd go to all that trouble to just make even more money. There are easier ways, with less scrutiny.


I don't think it's hard at all to imagine scenarios where his other assets could benefit from a player like Signal competing with Facebook, even if Signal is non-profit.

This is similar to how Google Docs competes with Microsoft Office. It hurts Microsoft's cash-generation and thus benefits Google as they compete with Bing.

If Google had been even smarter (or poorer, so as not to be able to afford footing the bill for Google docs entirely on their own), they could have established Google Docs as a 501c3 foundation, benefitting from tax exemptions and donations from individuals and just dominated that foundation through large donations and putting the right people in charge.

This may or may not be an accurate analogy for Acton's true motives with Signal, but I just can't know the truth of it and am therefore not taking that risk with my cash.


People said the same about Keybase because of who was behind it. Just because it's got moneyed people running it doesn't mean they won't sell once their priorities change.


If you have one person giving a lot of money to an organisation, that person might be tempted to use their influence to change the direction of said organisation.

If you have millions of people giving a small amount of money, chances are the organisation will try to preserve the users' best interest.

Now I get it that the person who gave a lot of money also happen to be the interim CEO, but you gotta start somewhere.


I hope signal and signal foundations stays along for a long time, would be good to model it around Wikimedia Foundation. https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/


Hearing about Wikipedia's deceptive fundraising messaging [0] made me question all donations to large non-profits -- but I guess a 30-people org is a different matter. Plus, Signal doesn't seem to be aggressive about it.

[0] https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...


When the WMF announced the creation of an endowment with the Tides Foundation in January 2016, on Wikipedia’s 15th birthday, its goal was to accumulate $100 million over 10 years, as “a permanent source of funding to ensure Wikipedia thrives for generations to come.”

Just five years later, the endowment passed $90 million, and the $100 million mark, now described as an “initial goal,” will be reached this year.

https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/tides-foundation/

Which partly explains Wikipedia's political stance.


> The Tides Foundation is a major center-left grantmaking organization and a major pass-through funder to numerous left-leaning nonprofits.

The fact that they declare themselves center-left is not a violation of 501(c)(3)?


What you're quoting is InfluenceWatch's description of the Tides Foundation, not their description of themselves. Their own description (from their About page) is "Tides is a philanthropic partner and nonprofit accelerator dedicated to building a world of shared prosperity and social justice."


IANAL but declaring a political leaning is not the same as supporting a candidate for public office. Many, many political 527s have an associated 501(c)3 or (c)4 to handle donations for their charitable work, like the obviously left-leaning MoveOn.org.


I forget the precise rules on political activity, but when the IRS investigated what was (blatent, IIRC) violations of it by right-wing organizations several years ago, the right and GOP pointed their propaganda cannons at the IRS and its head, a non-partisan public servant, making it clear that such rules were not to be enforced (and the rule of law is inferior to the GOP).


Would you please share some links to more info about this?



It should be easy to find plenty, but here is one from the end of the saga:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/politics/irs-targeting...


No? What provision do you think are they violating?


Why would it be?


This is extremely interesting, and explains my experiences with the obvious shift in moderation to an Americanised left-leaning perspective. It has been quite jarring to see something I had so much trust in undermined by America's identity war.


> Which partly explains Wikipedia's political stance.

I'm curious to hear what you think Wikipedia's political stance is?


Take the large number of science articles that have become politicized. Next, please name a couple of them that don't support the left side of the argument.


If there are a large number of these articles post a few examples. Posting articles where "the left side" and the scientific consensus happen to align is cheating of course. There are a lot of those.


I am not OP but I would cite the covid-19 article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19

There is research to support all kinds of propositions regarding the vaccine's efficacy and safety. Of topical consideration is its efficacy in reduction of transmission. The article has been scrubbed (and all updates are being removed) which cite the current research that the vaccine is less effective at reducing transmission against more recent strains of covid-19; and especially compared with typical live-attenuated and inactivated vaccines.

Citation: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2108891

Further, all citations have been scrubbed (and all updates are being removed) which explain that mask efficacy in reducing transmission for children is questionable at best, and also demonstrably harmful.

Citation: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Further, all citations have been scrubbed (and all updates are being removed) which explain that vaccine efficacy wanes rather quickly compared with typical live-attenuated and inactivated vaccines.

Citation: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110345

Further, all mention of "natural immunity" has been scrubbed (and future updates are being removed) discussing the reality that those who have already recovered from covid-19 possess natural immunity to the virus which is at least as effective as vaccines.

Citation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8627252/

These are all relevant and credible citations to an article discussing many aspects of the virus, yet they are being actively removed.

I feel the need to postface my comments with the disclaimer that I love vaccines and have three covid-19 vaccines already, and am prepared to receive more. My comments are purely to provide a relevant and factual example to support OP's premise that there is some form of bias present in moderation of Wikipedia now. This bias is extremely difficult to quantify and qualify because there are millions of layers of bureaucracy built into Wikipedia's moderation system. It is almost ungovernable now, and those who have attained sufficient power and coordination can and do use that power to affect bias.


If by "the left" and "the right", you're thinking of US political definitions, please name a couple of politicized scientific disputes where the right-wing side of a scientific argument has merit.

I can think of one family of scientific subjects where the "progressive" side is almost as unscientific as the "conservative" side, and a particular case[0] where the "progressive" agenda was loudly denying the scientific state of the art.

But I cannot think of any cases where the "conservative" side had actively better scientific grounding. But that, of course, is probably due to my bias, my thought bubble, etc. So please, if you can rise to the standard you're setting, I'd like to learn about it. (If nothing else, almost all of my friends and family are left of me, and it's nice to be able to reality-check them, when social mores permit.)

[0] I'd provide my example, but I'm sufficiently afraid of progressive culture to not want to discuss the particular case under my own name. But I checked WP on the subject, and while it's not incredibly detailed either way, I don't think it supports the progressive side of the case w.r.t. the science. (In my assessment, the alleged progressives were wrong about the science in this particular case, although they may have been right about everything else, I dunno.)


There is the left narrative, and then there is everyone else.

The classic example is CAGW. If I know a person's position on that, I find I can predict their position on most any other contentious issue.

The average people on the street have plenty of received opinions that they are happy to share, but know little about the actual science relevant to them.

But, we were discussing Wikipedia science articles. The issue with Wikipedia is what is permitted to be said on some science pages, and what is quickly reverted.

Everyone is political. Good scientists (and good encyclopedists) ought to try hard to suppress that.


>The classic example is CAGW. If I know a person's position on that, I find I can predict their position on most any other contentious issue.

In case anyone was curious, it seems to stand for "catastrophic anthropogenic global warming" [0] (or Citizens Against Government Waste, which seems an equally stark signifier of the invoker's political position -- who better to exemplify "waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government" than, uh, Bernie Sanders?!).

"CAGW", for "catastrophic anthropogenic global warming", is a snarl word (or snarl acronym) that global warming denialists use for the established science of climate change. A Google Scholar search indicates that the term is never used in the scientific literature on climate[104][105] except in reference to denialist tactics.[106]

[0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Global_warming#CAGW


Ok, I can guess your positions on the issues now ;)

It’s not a “snarl” word. It’s an acronym which is used because the whole fully qualified set of words is too long.

All four words are necessary to state what’s being discussed. Anything less is trying to deflect the debate.

Working backwards, Warming: it’s a rare scientist that thinks the world isn’t warming. We are still coming out of the last ice age. Fifteen thousand years ago, there was ice a mile thick where I’m sitting. We are also coming out of the Little Ice Age. A couple of centuries ago, you could walk from Manhattan to Staten Island on the ice in the winter.

Global: local climate change happens all the time. No one disputes that. The discussion is about global climate change.

Anthropogenic: significantly caused by humans, specifically by emitting excessive CO2. This is theoretical, because by itself, CO2 can’t account for the projected warming. There must be a feedback to the real greenhouse gas, water vapor.

Catastrophic: The amount of warming is going to alter the global climate to the point that the Earth’s ecology and human civilization will be seriously affected.

The last two points are in scientific dispute. The computer models, which have many knobs, predict a bad outcome.

Historic satellite measurements of the global tropospheric temperature show that nothing unusual is happening. The increase is 0.14 C per decade.

https://www.drroyspencer.com/2022/01/uah-global-temperature-...

It appears to me that the CAGW hypothesis is disproved.

Global climate change is a topic for some very interesting science. The solar system's position in the galaxy, for example. Or, the effect of the sun on the intensity of galactic cosmic rays.

The climate models can't address even recent pre-industrial global changes.


A "snarl word" is a neologism for the age-old practice of the creation of derogatory labels by people who are trying to dismiss things without the listener realizing they don't have good cause.

>The last two points are in scientific dispute

I don't think that's true. I think that a casual google will show that climatology is actually in overwhelming agreement that human activities are driving climate change, and here's one I did earlier [0]. To the reader: this is a testable hypothesis!

>It appears to me that the CAGW hypothesis is disproved

Argument by personal incredulity isn't always a fallacy. Sometimes, smart people are intuitive and well-informed enough to jump directly to conclusions without needing to cover the intervening intellectual distance. Maybe this is happening here, and I'm just not an exceptional person, but if I were you I'd consider wondering why the likes of Dr Roy Spencer and I couldn't turn our ability to outthink entire scientific disciplines to a more profitable end.

The issue is that stupidly oversimplified models from 40+ years ago have been borne out, sourced from both capitalist and Soviet science [1][3]. By all means, there are many, many inputs into the grand planetary system, but the inconvenient truth, if you will, is that atmospheric CO2 increases seem to track with temperature increases, in both modeling and the historical record. I think, by "many knobs", that you're trying to suggest there are many variables that can be tweaked -- nope! It's actually very straightforward. Are there complex, "more realistic" climate models that produce unorthodox results when their knobs are twiddled? Probably! But for every one of those you fixate on, remember that there is one big, simple one that continues to track with the thing we're trying to measure: observable reality. Bald-faced denial of observable reality is a pretty good signifier that some aspect of science has been politicized, whether in a Wikipedia article or in a congressional hearing.

You've made a lot of claims, but haven't really backed any of them up, or even explained them; "CAGW" is pretty clearly a snarl word.

[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966

[1] https://eos.org/features/a-50-year-old-global-warming-foreca...

[2] https://xkcd.com/1732/ <- "This is just a temperature chart!" That's right, but its sources, which track the CO2 rise, aren't

[3] https://www.climatefiles.com/exxonmobil/1982-memo-to-exxon-m...


A relevant example of this is COVID. It became politicized, with [some of] the left taking the "we must vaccinate all infants and become hermits indefinitely or everyone will die" position and [some of] the right taking the "vaccines are harmful and useless and the virus is just a cold" position.

Neither of these positions is The Truth, as usual, but the result is that some of the things the right has been saying have been accurate but previously disparaged. For example, the difference between dying of COVID and dying with COVID, or accurately pointing out that the large majority of fatalities have been people with comorbidities.


> A relevant example of this is COVID

This is literally an irrelevant example because it's not related to Wikipedia. New, evolving science (especially as it intersects with many governments' policies) is always going to be wrong to some degree.


> This is literally an irrelevant example because it's not related to Wikipedia.

rel·e·vant /ˈreləvənt/

closely connected or appropriate to what is being done or considered.

appropriate to the current time, period, or circumstances; of contemporary interest.

> New, evolving science (especially as it intersects with many governments' policies) is always going to be wrong to some degree.

Now this is an irrelevant criticism. Nobody asked for an example that isn't in dispute.

New, evolving science is the thing you would expect there to be the most political disputes over because the uncertainty causes people to believe whatever most benefits their coalition.


Doesn't Wikipedia have articles about Covid?


Yes but it doesn't say anything about vaccinating infants or any of the other strawman nonsense that the person I replied to was saying.


This deserves more attention.


> Turns out it's donations

Are they still doing the crypto scheme? I stopped donating when that started, but would be more than happy to pick it back up if they reversed course.


For me I stopped using Signal when they started permanently storing sensitive user data in the cloud, they were extremely unclear about doing it confusing many of their users, they ignored the objections and security concerns of their users who realized what they were doing and they never updated their privacy policy to reflect that information (and still haven't). For an app that insists that you be able to trust it, they just did not come off as remotely trustworthy.


Do you have anymore info on that?

Good sources to read?


Here are a bunch of threads I found:

https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-secu...

https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/gmwheu/introducing_...

https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/hkl914/welcome_to_t...

https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/giqxug/whats_happen...

https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/hkle3d/forced_pin_b...

https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/ghsj5b/pin_cloud_st...

https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/hm2fwx/why_i_think...

Signal then announced that because of all the hate they'll make the feature optional, but opting out would just set a pin for you and upload your data anyway. This also caused a bunch of confusion.

https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/hnok10/moxie_on_twi...

https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/hrlmoe/pins_now_opt...

https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/hoh7e9/moxie_marlin...

/u/PriorProject has a comment far down which sums up my view pretty well in this one:

https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/htmzrr/psa_disablin...

It's worth pointing out that they're collecting the type of data they still brag about not being able to turn over because they "don't keep user data".

https://signal.org/bigbrother/eastern-virginia-grand-jury/

In fact, this was posted just one month before all this went down: https://signal.org/blog/looking-back-as-the-world-moves-forw...

Between that and not updating their privacy policy it's a pretty massive red flag, but so many people don't even know about the data collection. Look at the answers this guy gets:

https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/q5tlg1/what_info_do...

same with the top comment here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/qpb8eh/mlat_order_...

It's insane, and I hope every user who has to learn what signal is really collecting from some random internet comment thinks long and hard about what that says about how transparent and trustworthy signal is.



This feels more interesting than most cryptocurrency uses. One thing a cryptocurrency can be is an open protocol for payments - it makes sense to try and make one into such a protocol. The privacy preserving aspects of MobileCoin are interesting and feel like they fit with Signal too.


I am ridiculously negative on all things "crypto", but person-to-person payments (in fiat) are currently pretty annoying and limited (at least in the US, even with things like Venmo and Zelle), and integrating private payments with a privacy-preserving messenger would seem to be a good thing. I don't know if MobileCoin is the best solution here, but I also don't see Signal starting partnerships with big traditional banks or payment processors, either (and wouldn't really want to see Signal in bed with those sorts of folks). So something like this might be the right move, even though I'm unlikely to use it myself.


> and wouldn't really want to see Signal in bed with those sorts of folks

Why?

This has been ongoingly why we have bad encryption technology. No one wants to taint their ideological purity by trying to solve problems for organizations that can pay for them which would actually solve problems for private citizens, and simultaneously ensures that good technology doesn't secure important social interactions for private citizens.

Why should I not be able to verify I'm talking to my bank through Signal? Why can't I have messages from my local government secured to me via Signal?

It's a 2-sided problem, and one side is this bizarre rejection of any attempt at enterprise marketing for a platform with enterprise utility.


Because we all saw where it leads with Google/FB. They might start by just doing the simple things you proposed. But once a government or bank is a customer, they would be the largest/most powerful customers by far. Meaning Signal would begin to bend to doing what those customers want, maybe collecting analytics or personal information, or selling your contact data to advertisers. Maybe one of those banks donates money to Signal and wants favors in return.

The biggest customers of a company inevitably shape the incentives and behavior's within that company. easy to dismiss as a "slippery slope fallacy" but it's historically true. No one who's using Signal to get away from the shitty enterprises that built/own FB Messenger wants a repeat of the same thing. Even if you don't agree, many Signal users probably do, and it would be silly for Signal to piss off their customers.


IIRC the privacy aspect relies entirely on Intel SGX (Which isn't really unprecedented for Signal) which is not ideal. Since it's centralized anyway, I would rather have seen a blind-signature based payment system. It would be more private and probably more efficient.


It doesn't rely on SGX for privacy: https://developers.mobilecoin.com/faq


From what I remember reading, without SGX it is reliant on an older model of Monero that is missing a critical newer mitigation that prevents people from decloaking upwards of 80% of transactions due to a timing bias in how older transactions are selected for including in the ring signature.


Do you have reason to believe MobileCoin scales any better than any other open blockchain protocol? I doubt it.

Also, payments with free floating crypto like MobileCoin and bitcoin really isn't practical in most of the western world, due to the requirements of capital gains tax reporting, not to mention the instability of the price.

MobileCoin is seriously behind the ball on this, even though it's a problem being actively solved on bitcoin's lightning network, https://seekingalpha.com/article/4459757-biggest-bitcoin-dev...


That’s right and I stopped using Signal for that reason. Tax authorities have every right to look into any account that facilitates transactions in taxable assets (even just to confirm that no transactions have taken place)

I have nothing in principle against crypto currencies and I am very much in favour of strong privacy for personal communication, but mixing the two is obviously contradictory. It completely defeats the purpose of Signal.


also, MobileCoin is a permissioned blockchain with four nodes. It's the embodiment of "it's just a slow database."


Do you have a source for this?


https://web.archive.org/web/20210408011945/https://www.mobil...

That was as of last April, the page has now been removed.


> Are they still doing the crypto scheme? I stopped donating when that started, but would be more than happy to pick it back up if they reversed course.

Yes it seems they are still doing the MobileCoin thing. I'm against cryptocurrencies, blockchain, NFTs, etc also, but nothing is forcing me to use it. I'd be curious to read some case studies or blog posts about how it is being used. For example, are people using it to pay for milk in rural India, send money to family in Myanmar, split dinner bills in New York?

Regarding donations, I would be happy to donate, but it would be great to see some financial reports. Other initiatives like Software in the Public Interest (SPI) and the OpenStreetMap Foundation publish yearly reports, which makes it easy to see how the projects spend their money, how much cash they have in the bank, etc. Pardon me, but I don't want to donate to Signal if they still have $50 million in the bank, or if their CEO is taking home a huge salary, or if they spend the money on fuse-ball tables. ;)


Also lichess.org publishes yearly reports


I'm not sure. I'm a bit torn on that. If they can sustain themselves though some method, that's good, but I would rather that method be aligned fairly closely with their initial goals of security and privacy, which crypto pays good lip service to but it's always the best at achieving, given public ledgers.

I guess I'm just worried about perverting what makes it a good messaging client, and would rather they get money from people that support that cause so they aren't as tempted to chase some other path because the alternative is to shutter.

That said, that can happen even if they can sustain themselves through donations if the management/board decide to do so. Just have to hope it stays the course.


I did the same thing. I had setup a monthly donation to Signal several months before the crypto announcement. When I heard about the crypto thing I cancelled my monthly donation.


Oh wow, I read the post and thought congrats Moxie, job indeed done. We are still not there, so a lot of empathy for the feelings behind that :)

... Except if it is donations and esp. Brian Acton's, or even say Firefox with most of their money being one Google or Bing search bar deal... the sustainable business isn't there yet. A replacement CEO can be good just for that. Marlin as a CEO found amazing product/user fit, and as a tech leader, hired enough and built enough for a great dev culture. But there is no sustainable product/customer fit yet, esp if they view the user as not the established product: the market isn't paying. A CEO focused on solving that would be quite healthy for achieving sustainability! Hopefully Brian and his successor will have more room now to figure that out, it's not easy, esp given their privacy mission!

(And still congrats and a lot of respect to Moxie for building something people want & helps security, and growing a team to deliver it, and everyone else for pushing into the next phase!)


I just stopped my signal donation today, which I've been doing monthly last year due to this:

https://amycastor.com/2021/04/07/signal-adopts-mobilecoin-a-...

Was it an overreaction? I don't think so. I feel dumb stuff like this, massive conflicts of interest, happens too often these days, and I'm voting with my wallet.


The Signal Foundation is in Benevity, which powers lots and lots of corporate gift matching. I give a yearly matched donation each december as I try to reach the max matching for my company.


Thanks for pointing this out, I had no idea it existed. Uggg I just made some donations last week which look like they could have benefitted from this.


For my company at least there's a very easy interface for declaring donations for matching post hoc; sometimes it asks for a receipt. Totally fine to use it in January, too; it's a head start on this year's donation goal...


Amazon Smile also has signal foundation as a non profit.


Thanks for pointing that out, wasn't aware of it, just subscribed too.


I went through the same process. Acton gave them a huge foundational base, but you want it to be a viable model in its own right.


I too took to donating through the app so that I could get the icon. My donations continue through their website, but it's also important to spread the word to folks like you that Signal needs funding to continue its mission!


I just went to donate but at least on Calyx, I do not have Google Pay installed. I just checked their blog post and they will add other payment methods in the future so I hope I can become a sustainer too.


Thanks for the suggestion. I just set up an in-app recurring donation to get my profile badge too


They are planning to integrate their own sketchy crypto-coin, I think they will get money from that. Although not sure how is that going, haven’t heard about MobileCoin for months now


I'd like to see an annual report before donating a single buck


With the integration of MobileCoin, Signal has a potential web3-style path to sustainability.

https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-cryptocurrency...


No, this is very bad news and could end up with end-to-end encryption being outlawed in the name of preventing money laundering https://www.theverge.com/22872133/signal-cryptocurrency-paym...


No, this is very good news, because it reveals the essential equivalency between privacy-for-speech & privacy-for-commerce.


Personal privacy for commerce is great, but for money laundering I'd compare that to paying for political influence in the way that it mixes up speech and money in a bad way.


And yet, both kinds of privacy depend on the same freedom-of-technology. If you give up your privacy-of-commerce based on fears of 'money laundering', your privacy-for-speech is probably already dead.


100% agree with you here! Privacy is privacy, it doesn't matter what the activity is. Most money today is just digital information, no different than that text message being sent. It seems impossible to allow complete privacy when sending one type of digital information but not another.

I could send someone the recovery keys for a bitcoin wallet and launder money via any messaging service. If we need to regulate that then privacy goes out the window, you'd have to know what the content of my message was to know if it was allowed.


I agree with all of that.

But I consider that bundling to be a bad thing.

And I wish large-scale money laundering was easier to deal with in a privacy-preserving way.


I consider entropy a troublesome thing. I wish it could be reversed. But, the universe is how it is. Privacy is general-purpose, and the things you can do with it resistant to unbundling.


Yes.

And because privacy-for-commerce is morally wrong for almost all definitions of morality, then I guess privacy-for-speech is also morally wrong.


I totally support your right to live in a surveillance police state of your own choosing – far from people who prefer privacy & freedom.


I just hope that moxie's replacement is someone with as strong a reputation for fighting for the principles at stake and the ability to defend them. How many people could have written the Cellebrite blog post? Probably not many. The hidden pressures on Signal staff must be enormous, as likely the the world's single most valuable surveillance target.


Adding MobileCoin to Signal really changed my perceptions about just how principled the Signal foundation really is. I have a lot of respect for much of Moxie’s work, but the MobileCoin thing is still a head-scratcher.


Why so? Moxie helped design MobileCoin. Besides, his recent post on web3 lays it bare what he thinks of it.

MobileCoin, in time, I hope grows up to be a credible alternative to Facebook's USDP (Diem), like how Signal is to WhatsApp. I don't think its inclusion a head-scratcher at all. If anything, I hope it serves its purpose well, and isn't unfairly regulated to oblivion.


I got the impression that his web3 post [0] only talks about token incentives, DAOs and other decentralisation for decentralisation's sake. There's no mention of MobileCoin, which I gather he just sees as tool to facilitate anonymous payments (it's a token on top of Stellar).

[0] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html


Though MobileCoin may have borrowed a consensus mechanism from Stellar, I've seen no indication that it's a token on the Stellar chain.


You're right, sorry I have misread this then. According to Wikipedia, MobileCoin uses its own blockchain based on mechanics from Stellar and Monero [0]. That also makes a lot more sense technically, and explains the supposed 4 years of development [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobileCoin

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26726246


I balk at any mention of crypto as a rule (since the landscape is so saturated with hucksters) but I have to assume it is to provide a functionality similar to WhatsApp Pay, Venmo and whatever WeChat has.

Those in app type payments are a huge part of message app usage in some parts of the world where I am sure Signal would like to increase uptake.


Mobilecoin is a quasi-security and not a stablecoin. The price went 5X in the days before Signal announced that they have built MobileCoin integration (in secret).

In a way, crypto has given non-profits a way to take profits out to personal accounts.


If that was the goal, the lightning network is a far better solution, mire privacy focused too.


Which part do you find objectionable?

I hate most of the cryptocurrency-bs, but mobilecoin seems to have been designed carefully to avoid most of the objectional aspects of blockchain stuff.


Prior discussion can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26724237

The CEO has posts in the thread as well.


Here's the direct link to the comments from MobileCoin's CEO (not Moxie): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26726246

Funny how he avoids answering any questions about financial incentives and token sales.

Edit: Also note how the mentioned primary goal of MobileCoin is to "fund Signal", not to be a payments layer for it.


Moxie presumably got rich from MobileCoin, it was reported that he recently bought an expensive house in Los Angeles.


He sold an earlier company to Twitter, pretty sure he already is "rich" (most of us here are, comparatively).

I'd like to think about Moxie as the most honourable person in all of this. Leaving the CEO role could be a sign that he doesn't agree with everything that's going on.


And left Twitter after a really short period of time. Usually, your acquihire pay depends on staying for a certain length of time.


I doubt that he was already as rich as he became last year otherwise why only buy an expensive house only now?

I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing but it is an important fact that is being left out.



It makes me nervous too. However, I will continue to use Signal but without using MobileCoin. I hope Signal will do what’s right.

[In my region we already have a good system for mobile payments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_(payment)]


What if you want to send money to someone outside of your country? The only reason Swish works is because it's co-owned by the major banks in Sweden.


Yeah, in that case MobileCoin might come handy.


So I think the motivation was, let's fight censorship. What gets censored? Speech, and also...money. OK then let's enable money too.


I'm also very skeptical of all things crypto but you did mention principles and I think there is an angle of mobile coin that is clearly ideological and very much fits into Moxie's reputation.

That is to take the transfer of money away from old and large institutions.


The lure if getting rich by creating your own money is irresistible and thus corrosive. Even the most principled person will have difficulty ferreting out all the wats it undermines that integrity.

Meanwhile bitcoin serves that same purpose and much mire efficiently with lightning.

Moxie just bought a $5M house in LA.


For context - have you actually tried it? It’s pretty good.


Uncensorable private communications are useful, but become 100x more useful when they are coupled along with uncensorable private payments.


It's such a terrible idea for many reasons, but mainly because it's like waving a red flag at ignorant lawmakers: https://www.theverge.com/22872133/signal-cryptocurrency-paym...


> I just hope that moxie's replacement is someone with as strong a reputation for fighting for the principles at stake and the ability to defend them

Yes, and who has a better reputation for fighting for principles than Brian Acton, one of the guys who made Whatsapp and subsequently sold it to the most morally correct company in the world: Facebook.


Acton has had an interesting road since selling WhatsApp to Facebook. That includes leaving Facebook with $850 million USD in shares on the table for leaving early and telling people to delete their Facebook accounts. Looking at what he's done tells the story of someone who learned many lessons since he sold WhatsApp.


> That includes leaving Facebook with $850 million USD in shares on the table for leaving early and telling people to delete their Facebook accounts.

Honestly this action was one of the things that really made me like Acton. It was more than words. Granted, he already had a few billion dollars at that point -- and I'm under the opinion that $2bn isn't much different from $1bn (except bragging rights) (current work 2.8bn[0]) -- but it shows that money isn't his (only) motivating factor. It is also pretty hard to tell people to leave something you built.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/profile/brian-acton/?sh=13ea0bdb5cfc


WhatsApp’s other co-founder, Jan Koum, also reportedly [1] walked away from hundreds of millions by leaving Facebook due to disagreements.

Turns out he was still employed [2] despite saying it was time to “move on”, in order to get his remaining money...lol

1 - https://fortune.com/2018/05/01/jan-koum-whatsapp-facebook/

2 - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/15/whatsapps-jan-koum-left-face...


i wonder if Acton figured that WhatsApp might lose to competitors and privacy-focused people would migrate to a new app anyways, and he could do more good with almost $1 billion.

And also $1 billion is quite a lot of money.


There are two types of people in the world: those who sell their start ups for 16 billion, and those that dont have startups people are willing to pay 16 billion for.

I am very doubtful that very many people here would turn down that sort of money if given the opportunity. Its very easy to wax poetic about virtue when nobody is trying to tempt you.


> I am very doubtful that very many people here would turn down that sort of money if given the opportunity. Its very easy to wax poetic about virtue when nobody is trying to tempt you.

Indeed, not a lot of people would be able to turn that down. Moxie? That's one of them, that I like to believe they would though.


I mean, he walked away from $800 million in Facebook stock because his belief in privacy wouldn't allow him to continue working on WhatsApp, post-acquisition. I think that speaks louder than selling WhatsApp in the first place.


People make mistakes. Seems to me Acton is trying to do everything he can to correct it.


What he's been trying to do can also be interpreted as spending a few tens of millions here and there to generate PR with the goal of whitewashing his treachery when he sold out his WhatsApp userbase to Zuck and the most privacy invasive company on the planet...

I'm reminded of the old gag:

Would you sleep with me for a million dollars?

Yes, of course!

Would you sleep with me for one dollar?

What kind of woman do you think I am?

We've already established that, now we're just haggling over the price.

Acton already whored himself out to Zuck for $19billion. We've established what kind of person he is.


That gag really shouldn't be used seriously. Doing something for instant riches is not the same as doing it for day job money.


It makes sense morally speaking. Regardless of the price, someone who sins for money is a sinner.


There is still a huge difference between a one-time thing and an everyday action.


Treachery? What exactly did he owe you?

Sell out, sure, but who did he betray?


It would be awfully hard to turn down nineteen billion dollars for the sale. The social ills caused by Facebook were also a little less undeniable in 2014.

Since the sale he has criticized the hell out of Facebook, too.

Sure, he isn't a martyr. But there are way way way worse behaviors in the valley.


You mention "principles" but Signal is yet another walled garden.

It does not protect metadata.

It requires a phone number to work.

The servers are centralized and it does not do federation by design. Development is centralized and not community-driven.

Respectfully, please don't paint Signal as some champion of Internet freedom and privacy.


This is my biggest concern. Hopefully the replacement will truly care about user privacy and have the balls to fight for it, even if it means going up against large (governmental) organizations.


For anyone curious, this is the blog post: https://signal.org/blog/cellebrite-vulnerabilities/

It’s a fun read.


I'm guessing it's why they started collecting and keeping user data


I've been a user and evangelizer of Signal (aka TextSecure and even RedPhone when the audio piece was split off as a separate app) for a very long time now. I admire the work that Moxie and the entire team have put in over all these years. Thank you all so much for the great work, whether it be writing blog posts rebutting the "I have nothing to hide" people or implementing open and secure-by-default protocols and apps that put privacy within reach of even the least technically-savvy among us!

I hope the next adventure is as fruitful as this one was Moxie. Cheers!


The New Yorker profile of Moxie stuck with me. Worth reading in full: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/26/taking-back-ou...

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24824956


and from TFA above:

> In early 2018, Acton and Marlinspike announced the formation of the Signal Foundation, a nonprofit. Acton, the foundation’s chairman and sole member, seeded it with a no-interest, fifty-million-dollar loan.

additionally from Wikipedia:

> By the end of 2018, the loan had increased to $105,000,400, which is due to be repaid on February 28, 2068. The loan is unsecured and at 0% interest.


unsecure 0% interest 105M loan? where can i get this?


Just invent an awesome and innovative set of cryptographic protocols, make an incredibly usable set of secure communications tools with them, and agree to give them away for free to the world. Hopefully you will be blessed in return with the same kind of support that Moxie was!


It also helps if you can find someone with $16 billion of Facebooks blood money burning a hole in their conscience. And a hundred mil or so that'd fallen behind the couch cushions they can throw your way as a PR stunt or reputation management exercise...


I get your skepticism, but on the other hand I don't see the Jan Koums of the world throwing their money away, even if for PR. Acton is walking the talk, and it looks like his presence has meant some ex WhatsApp engs have joined him at Signal, too. What more could this man do?


> Facebooks blood money burning a hole in their conscience

Better late than never. Never seems more typical.


A million developers are contributing to FLOSS projects (including openssl) and get pennies at best.

The difference is that Signal is a walled garden and suddenly somebody pays for that.


Which is why it is extremely important to have a solid 'business'model behind your FLOSS project.

To align sustained development and ongoing maintainance with a FLOS licence model.

Because the alternative is to have volunteers spending their evenings and weekends on hobby projects that sometimes grow way over their hobbyish status. Which is both scary and sad.


I see the terms as a donation or grant. The money still is a loan (vs a grant), but the terms are well below "market" in order to support the non-profit's cause.


But why structure it that way? Does anyone know?


My guess was that it is a way of keeping the organization from failing the public support test (https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/exempt-organizatio...), which generally requires that at least 1/3 of the organization's support comes from the general public, not from, eg, one individual donor. Failing the public support test would make the foundation a private foundation instead of a public charity, which would change a number of regulations and have a small (usually 2%) on investment income.

What's particularly odd is that, if they were they a private foundation, as Acton is a board member (who also appears to have sole power to determine board members), I think the loan itself would be a prohibited act of self-dealing.


Might have also been an attempt to appear less of a target for that breed of self-serving administrators that seem to haunt certain other foundations in tech. And to keep reasonably humble people reasonably humble.


The mobile coin pumpup powered by the nonprofit Signal Foundation was weird.

They got the coin up to $60 from something like $3.

This starts to be another hustle (and with the money folks can make exploiting a nonprofit in this way no surprise really).

Normally the nonprofit would own the asset it is improving in this situation or get a BIG cut of the upside for leveraging an asset like the Signal network (just as any crypto coin company would).

In this case it all seemed very very shady.

My guess is someone wants to cash out somewhere on using the nonprofit to pump things up perhaps? I'd pay attention to what they are doing in the crypto space recently to see if there are any correlated activities


Yeah, I hate to get all tinfoil, but something smells off.

MobileCoin patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200184467A1/en

One of the men listed on there was the subject of a wild gossip thread that had to be deleted here recently. One is the MobileCoin CEO. The other is dead.


> had to be deleted

I think you mean "was censored."


Care to explain more? Maybe an archive.org link?



Yikes, I've never seen a HN thread with active censorship.. [name redacted]. Pretty wild thread.


Goodness - that's a lot more wild then I thought it would be.

But there is something about nonprofit pumping a crypto which may benefit directors of the nonprofit that strikes me as weird with signal.


Damn. That’s the wildest thread I’ve encountered on HN.


Thank you Moxie for all your hard work, commitment and mission driven leadership to get Signal where it is today. I have many friends and family living across the world and I was able to replace WhatsApp with Signal and got out of FB ecosystem and really enjoying the peace of mind that comes with Signal’s privacy and non-tracking for my communication needs. A big thank you indeed.


moxie really made the project big.

But with the new CEO I hope a slight change in core principals including but not limited to

- Allowing Bots (I'm tired of running another self hosted messaging app just to send me movement data from my security cams at home)

- Allowing the use of third party clients (like CLI)


There is a cli version. Is that not stable enough?

I imagine at Signal this is not decided based on the whim of a CEO, but on how to implement it secure,privacy friendly and free enough. E.g. if you havd to upload your private keys to some bot service, that may work but is terrible. Or if the service can easily bd flooded with bots spamming us. Or if the security model requires some apple alike central checking comittee. And so on.


This all seems like good stuff, but as someone who used to work with Moxie, I think the obvious should be stated: the only reason for an interim CEO is to move out of the role immediately. He could just as easily have stayed in the role while he hunted for a successor.

I'm curious why he wants to vacate post haste, but I'm used to not having my curiosity satisfied when it comes to Moxie. :)


>I will continue to remain on the Signal board, committed to helping manifest Signal’s mission from that role, and I will be transitioning out as CEO over the next month in order to focus on the candidate search. Brian Acton, who is also on the Signal Foundation board, has volunteered to serve as interim CEO during the search period. I have every confidence in his commitment to the mission and ability to facilitate the team for this time.


I noticed that too. Why is it so important to leave this month, after 10 years? I hope everything is ok, with the Signal organization and with Moxie.


I wonder what a canary from Moxie would look like these days.


Could be he's getting pushed out?


Signal has already changed history in a way. The past few years, as trust in a certain type of ethically challenged tech company has come crashing down it was vitally important to have a tangible example of a working, usable alternative.

Important for users, but also important for policy makers and other people in high places that are typically tech-illiterate and may assume that trillion dollar valuation implies TINA (there is no alternative).

Moxie and that tiny group of developers @ signal have been granted a moment of extreme leverage and they made great use of it.

Godspeed


If you get good value out of Signal and you can afford 5, 10 or 20 bucks a month get that auto-donate signed up. I can't think of a more cost effective way to directly contribute to practical privacy.


If it's really a 501(c)(3), you can use Amazon Smile to give a small percentage of your purchases (1/2 of 1% if memory serves) to Signal.


Good tip. I am donating currently to National Parks Foundation using AmazonSmile but I could definitely consider this in future.


Will Apple still able to get the 30% cut if I do using in app payment? Any idea? Does it make more sense to sign up for monthly donation via web to get more money donated to Signal vs not getting a badge?



Is it different? I just did it via app without a second thought.

If you only get the badge via app I think it's better even if a chunk is taken by the app store, because then people ask "wtf is that heart thing?" and then I can tell certain contacts what it is get them to do it too.


If you are using In-App Purchase then yes, for almost whatever it is (I think they might have at least a couple special deals with major publishing companies... not Signal ;P) you are "donating" 30% of your money to Apple.


Not in this case. According to Signal, neither Google nor Apple get a cut:

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/4408365318426-S...


Then this must not be using In-App Purchase (and looking at that website and the ones it links to, that seems to be the case: it is using Apple Pay).


Thanks - I would like to get all my money to Signal in this case so I just signed up for monthly donation using their website link.


Thanks for everything, Moxie!

I'm sure you don't remember this story, but I remember years ago (2011?) having a drink with you and Stuart while we were working out of I/O Ventures. I was talking about buying a cheap sail boat and you very calmly told me that the ocean will kill me. That it was always trying to kill me.

Anyway, I think about that conversation nearly every time I'm in or on the water and it's definitely kept me alive.


His documentary Hold Fast about being at sea is interesting to watch:

https://vimeo.com/15351476

The 100Rabbits folks are tech people who live at sea:

https://100r.co/


I'll watch that this evening!

I used to race/rally $500 cars and had mentioned we had planned to do something similar with boats in the Caribbean and Moxie looked like I slapped his mother. Moxie and Stuart are arguably some of the kindest and smartest people I've crossed paths with in SF.


Great to see Brian Acton (founder of WhatsApp) taking over as interim CEO and the logical choice.


Hopefully remains as interim. I'm still suspicious based on previous experience with him selling Whatsapp to Facebook and all that. Actually, very surprising move, are they planning to sell Signal?


Obviously you can't be sure he's sincere, but he's on record as saying he regrets that sale.


* step 1: Make bucket of money selling your private comm app to FB.

* step 2: Publicly declare your regret for that decision.

* step 3: Take leadership of big competitor to previous app.

* step 4: Goto step 1 for double profit and to continue tearing down functioning attempts at large scale private communications platforms.


The only reason Whatsapp was bidded up to an insane 19 Billion sale value was because Acton did not want to sell. Note that it's not insane in terms of value (in hindsight this was clearly a good buy for FB), but insane when considering that value for your small 30 person company.

That's a crazy sale price, I'd like to see you turn it down.

It can be true that he didn't want to sell and regrets it and just couldn't reject that offer, the opportunity costs available to you at the level are nuts. This is a risk with centralized services, it's why we need systems that don't require benevolence: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...

Most people don't have principles valued at 19B.

I think Urbit is a potential way to get there, but a lot of the web3 ownership model points in this direction.


Also turning down money for yourself is one thing, but turning it down for your employees and everyone else involved is different.


Agreed - at that level you're talking nearly 100M for each employee? Maybe more?

Even if I'm off by a magnitude (and I think I'm not) - that's life changing money for everyone that helped him build Whatsapp.


Even on a purely ethical level, selling the company has to pretty bad to offset the amount of good you can do with that amount of wealth.



Matrix doesn't solve these issues, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29882848

That said, I think Matrix is cool and appreciate what they're trying to do. I just think without solving the upstream problems you won't be able to succeed beyond a niche audience.


For all its flaws in Facebook integration, WhatApp is the single most impactful system ever in getting people to use secure communication. 1B+ people started using end-to-end encrypted communications overnight when WhatsApp enabled e2ee. This move pushed the entire industry towards adoption of e2ee.

Yes, they sold to Facebook. Yes, Facebook is doing everything it can to get the contents of WhatsApp communications so they can monetize. But it is impossible to not see the change they made on the landscape of communication privacy.


From my perspective, it's also remarkable that WhatsApp managed to enable e2e while already being owned by facebook. It probably won't last, but to me that demonstrates a commitment to security and privacy on the part of the WhatsApp team.


> Yes, Facebook is doing everything it can to get the contents of WhatsApp communications so they can monetize.

Like what?


e2e is a mirage if its blessed by the three letter agencies.


There's a step between 1 and 2 that you missed - choose to quit from FB and leave $800,000,000 in stock on the table


That's an important part of getting step 3 to happen.

You need proof of regret, and $800 million seems to have been enough. Cheap money if you can make step 4 happen such that it nets more than 0.8 billion.


Really? You would give up $800M for a bizarre outside chance of.. getting a second chance at $800M?


Signal is a nonprofit. Going to be hard to net $800m on that.


Acton didn't "take leadership" of Signal, he funded its development.


They incorporated Signal as a nonprofit, so it is illegal for anybody to personally profit from the sale of Signal. Of course, that hasn't always stopped people from trying (eg, the recent debacle with the .org tld).


What happened there?



Given that Brian Acton apparently "left over a dispute with Facebook regarding monetization of WhatsApp, and voluntarily left $850 million in unvested options on the table by leaving a few months before vesting was completed"[0] and that he went on to found the Signal Foundation one year later with Moxie Marlinspike in 2018, I feel it's not a super clear signal that Acton or Marlinspike are trying to "sell" Signal.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Acton#WhatsApp


Just for context, that’s after vesting a few billions already.


Okay, but still. It seems like a stretch that the guy is secretly evil but voluntarily gave up almost $1 billion to deceptively prove he's not actually a bad guy. You can claim to be a good guy and wait a few months to cash out - leaving money on the table IS a real signal, even if he's already rich.


Depends on if he actually left money on the table or if he speculated that there would be more money coming to him if he publicly left FB when he did.

Social/public good will is a kind of money itself that can't easily be measured in dollars. That's a big part of the reason extremely wealthy people engage in philanthropy.

Good will is a currency that opens some doors that no amount of raw dollars can open.


You're the only one that has used the word "evil" here.


I can't imagine they intend to sell Signal but then when I say "they" it's always been a stand in for Marlinspike. We can only hope he's correct in terms of the team he's built continuing the mission that had formerly been guided by his judgment.


He did leave Facebook because of privacy issues right? That should be a good sign…


I wouldn’t be so sure. He also benefitted greatly from selling it to Facebook in the first place, and stayed on for a few years.


Everybody that joins Facebook thinks they can "fix" it, and many stick around trying to do so. Eventually they leave.


The WhatsApp sale also happened back in 2014. I don't think FB was especially well liked at that time, but they didn't have as bad a reputation as they do now. 7-8 years is a long time.


I remember WhatsApp touting the fact that they charge a $1/year subscription to be evidence that they will not sell out data about your use of the app and your contacts, presumably as a contrast to the chat apps offered by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others wanting to sling ads.

Obviously, the offer from FB was worth selling out for.


Hopefully that means he'll prioritize things that are making Signal a hard sell to WhatsApp and Telegram users.

Making Signal a messenger on equal footing would go a long way to increase adoption.


I'm wondering if the recent "adding crypto transfers to Signal" stuff had anything to do with this...


I was wondering the same, what if this is to avoid conflict with monetization of Mobilecoin.


Signal is the purely the best messenger we have so far, I remember OpenWhisper Systems RedPhone and TextSecure and how much it evolved since then. It pushed and helped other messengers to roll e2ee too.

PS. On Twitter Moxie mentioned that Usernames and e2ee Statuses are coming soon -- last missing pieces IMO, what a legend, huge respect and thanks for changing the industry Moxie!


As a five-year user of Signal, thanks for making Signal such a fantastic messenger, Moxie.


I'm still really disappointed he didn't go for a more long term solution, federation: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/01/02/on-privacy-versus-freedom


Moxie's post that your Matrix link was a response to: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

I think Moxie is right, federation will lead back to recentralized services (for the reasons Moxie outlines in his recent Web3 post). People don't want to run their own servers. In that world you'll have federated services that are mostly centralized with a much worse user experience than centralized competition. Signal's real competition isn't Matrix, it's FB messenger, Whatsapp, and iMessage.

The incentive failures are actually upstream from the application layer of the web. Running a linux server is too hard, spam and auth are issues with the current tech stack, dependencies are a mess of complexity and federated systems built on the current stack can't really solve these issues so end up recentralizing to sysadmins that do (at best). This is the reason I started working on Urbit, I think to fix this for real you have to fix problems farther up the stack.

Given the current landscape, Signal is the best available option imo for most people. Hopefully if Urbit succeeds we can have the federated system we want with UX that's actually competitive.


The "problem" of federated systems is that it dilutes power across businesses and does not allow any single entity to control the ecosystem. This is a good thing, except that it makes it harder to fight head-to-head with trillion dollar companies that use messaging platforms as loss leaders.

Thing is, Signal has the exact same issue: the top post of this thread is about how people are feeling compelled to donate to Signal so that it does not rely on one kind benefactor. If people want to donate to Signal, why not donate/hedge a bit by donating to Matrix or to the Conversations (the best XMPP client) developers?

> Signal is the best available option imo for most people.

Signal is still centralized. It is "open source" only in name, as the client code was constantly out-of-date and it is basically impossible to fork it or run your own server. It has a very poor record cross-client vulnerabilities and it forces everyone to be dependent on the security of their smartphones. How many times do we have to re-learn not to put all of our eggs in the same basket?


We agree on the issues, but don't agree on the solution.

I don't think Matrix will be able to compete. I think Signal is the best available option today for most people, but the risks you outline are real. I think Urbit is our best shot at a better future.


> I don't think Matrix will be able to compete

Matrix is already competing. It's just taking a different strategy (going after governmental institutions and enterprises) than the one you'd like. The fact that Element is going after a market with a very long deployment/usage cycle makes me believe that Matrix has a lot more staying power than Signal.

Signal is nice, but it all it takes is one catastrophic bug - or one Government pushing to break it, or some good amount of years with lots of developers on payroll without any real revenue - away from disappearing or selling out.

> I think Urbit is our best shot at a better future.

No. The problem to "fix" is not a technological one. It's socio-economical. When (if?) individuals and SMBs learn TANSTAAFL, we´ll be able to have a diverse/healthy (and cheap) industry of professional service providers.


> "Matrix is already competing."

Sure, s/compete/win - I don't think they'll win (hence why they'll be a niche).

> "The problem to "fix" is not a technological one. It's socio-economical."

It's both - if you fix the bad incentives, you can fix the behavior. If you don't then you won't.


Maybe we should first establish what's your idea of "winning"?

Because my idea of "winning" is one where there is no central entity controlling what should be basic infrastructure. My idea of winning is one where we have more options and that we can hedge one player against the other.

I don't (necessarily) want Matrix to grow to a point where it goes unchallenged. I want it to grow enough to the point where none of the other players has a clear upper hand.

I use Matrix already to talk with my immediate family, a good amount of my friends also managed to install it. Does this mean that I got to use Matrix exclusively? No, far from it. But I do have the option, and in the past when there were issues with WhatsApp and Signal, a lot of my friends were glad that all my nagging gave them an alternative.

"Bad UI", "complex onboarding", "technical issues"... those are all things that are easy to fix compared with the "issue" of having a oligarchy controlling all of the communication platforms of the Western Hemisphere and then China trying to encroach in.


I think that's a fair question.

I guess my idea of winning is like the web vs. gopher. I want the good, federated protocol to become the default. I want my friends to be using it not because I have to nag them to, but because it's just objectively a better experience. The federated nature of the thing being invisible and irrelevant to them.

I think today that's impossible - not because of issues related to Matrix, but because of deeper problems with our computing stack and the web. Federated systems can't match the UX of centralized ones and when they come close its often because they've recentralized anyway.

I think we agree more than we disagree probably. I just see Signal as good given the current tradeoffs.


The fundamental issue is that I don't see how we can define what is a "objectively better experience", not for any sufficiently large group of people with different values and priorities.

Any attempt at establishing these comes through some central planning which leads at best to some cookie-cutter "one-size-fits-all" Apple-esque design that while functional, it's just a local maxima that destroys any kind of creativity and makes everything uniform and bland.

> Federated systems can't match the UX of centralized ones and when they come close its often because they've recentralized anyway.

I think it is easier to see it as an issue with the amount of resources that the big companies have vs the "underdogs".

If Element had the same amount of resources as Facebook, it wouldn't be hard for them to say "we will build a client that is just like WhatsApp for those that think that WhatsApp is the benchmark. For those that want something like Discord, we will build another client. And those that want to use Matrix to replace Slack will get another client that does exactly the same".

It does not matter if it is federated or centralized, what matters is that Element does not have those resources, so they can not develop as fast as their competitors and then are seen as "lagging".


I prefer the Element UX especially since I can actually use it for WhatsApp/Telegram which I still use heavily, there are a lot of people/businesses/governments backing on Matrix, Signal is just another app that is controlled by the US government and I don't see much privacy there in the long term... Yes it will be recentralized but not completely, how come E-Mail did so good?


You may personally prefer it just as some niche audience still personally prefers to run their own email server, but your grandma will never prefer it or use it and neither will 90% of the public.

Email is an example of this class of failure. Almost everyone uses a centralized provider (mostly Google) and even if you do go through the effort to run your own server since nearly everyone you interact with is using gmail it's mostly pointless anyway.

Signal is not controlled by the USG (see recent doc about what metadata they have access to via Signal). I ran a Matrix server for a while, the UX around setting up encryption is bad (not for lack of trying, it's just a hard problem given the constraints). Most people just use the Matrix.org server and will never run their own (which is the recentralization risk I'm talking about) - at best you'll have a couple providers, and dealing with spam is still a problem. You'll also have a system that adapts slowly because it's harder to make changes to this kind of system, it'll always be worse.

To escape the incentives that lead back to recentralization and to create a federated system that isn't just another niche nerd hobby, you really have to think about the issues that lead back to centralization from first principles. I think Urbit's design and the tradeoffs they make do this.

https://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progr...

https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit


> You may personally prefer it just as some niche audience still personally prefers to run their own email server.

No. This is a false dichotomy. There is a very healthy market for email service providers. Basically every domain registrar runs one, a good amount of ISPs... there can be a cottage industry for service providers.

> Almost everyone uses a centralized provider

Because the large companies make it free to try to make their money by either exploiting the data or by using the email service as a loss leader. Signal can not do either, so they will have to rely on some other revenue stream, or they will end up like Mozilla.


> You may personally prefer it just as some niche audience still personally prefers to run their own email server, but your grandma will never prefer it or use it and neither will 90% of the public.

I think this is just not true, my grandmother would use whatever I tell her to use she doesn't care if Signal has "better UI" according to some people. The reason in my opinion why people don't use Element or other Matrix clients yet is because people aren't aware of them. Signal has a billionaire behind them and that means they advertise the shit out of Signal.

> Email is an example of this class of failure. Almost everyone uses a centralized provider (mostly Google) and even if you do go through the effort to run your own server since nearly everyone you interact with is using gmail it's mostly pointless anyway.

Why can't Moxie and Signal just run a Matrix server and offer this service to people? Your point seems to be - we lost the fight already so there's nothing to do. I think there's a lot to do and Google/Facebook/Apple have not yet won. Even if they have most people at least the people who really care have the opportunity to stay private AND free. Many people still use Hotmail, Yahoo, university accounts, business accounts, privacy concerned providers, government accounts and even famous country specific providers. Gmail is the most used one but it's by far not the only one and the way to fight that is not by giving up on a free world.

> Signal is not controlled by the USG (see recent doc about what metadata they have access to via Signal).

Signal is a company registered in the USA they will have to abide the US law when push comes to shove, so this is not a long term solution.

> I ran a Matrix server for a while, the UX around setting up encryption is bad (not for lack of trying, it's just a hard problem given the constraints).

It's getting better and it's partially like that because it's more private(no phone number) and secure(no US company) than Signal, it also contains an encrypted backup on the server which is a huge feature that Signal just does not have.

> Most people just use the Matrix.org server and will never run their own (which is the recentralization risk I'm talking about) - at best you'll have a couple providers

Most people use WhatsApp maybe Telegram, not Signal and definitely not Matrix the future will tell us if this catches on or not, so let's just stop speculating. There is already now some governments using Matrix and a lot of projects, so there are already many servers and many providers, you can also just pay for your own server at Element and you're already not using Matrix.org

> and dealing with spam is still a problem.

That's a general problem that you'll have with any platform, Telegram and Facebook are still fighting spam with little many failures. If anything this is something that I see a good future with Matrix since a lot of different companies/individuals will try to fight this together instead of a big company trying alone and failing.

> You'll also have a system that adapts slowly because it's harder to make changes to this kind of system, it'll always be worse.

Or better because many people are working on it compared to 30 people (!!)

> To escape the incentives that lead back to recentralization and to create a federated system that isn't just another niche nerd hobby, you really have to think about the issues that lead back to centralization from first principles. I think Urbit's design and the tradeoffs they make do this.

I heard of this project before, it sounded cool at the time but I didn't get enough info the details to remember much, I don't really understand how this is relevant though, care to elaborate?

I don't think Element or Matrix is aiming to be a niche nerd hobby, they have a lot of money invested in them (last I read it was 30 million) and the UI is super cool (much cooler than Signal)

At the end of the day Signal and Matrix are both niche and it's just such a pity that we don't go for the obviously better choice but instead put all our eggs in one American basket yet again.


> "I think this is just not true, my grandmother would use whatever I tell her to use she doesn't care if Signal has "better UI" according to some people."

Protocols are slower to change, this is why XMPP lost to competing messaging services. Maybe grandma is a bad example, but a highschool kid is going to use the messaging service that has the emojis and crap they like - not one with a crappy app and confusing encryption setup. I don't think it's lack of knowledge I think it's just harder to create an experience as good and you're at a perpetual disadvantage to roll out new features.

> "Why can't Moxie and Signal just run a Matrix server and offer this service to people?"

Moxie mostly outlines the reasons here: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ - the answer is mostly the same as above, it won't be competitive and it'll lose.

> "Most people use WhatsApp maybe Telegram, not Signal and definitely not Matrix the future will tell us if this catches on or not, so let's just stop speculating. There is already now some governments using Matrix and a lot of projects, so there are already many servers and many providers, you can also just pay for your own server at Element and you're already not using Matrix.org"

This is kind of my point? Except that I'd go further and say most use FB Messenger, iMessage, or Discord. I did pay for an Element server for a while to support the Matrix devs. While I want them to succeed I think the existing incentives are such that they will remain niche. Most will use centralized options because they provide a better experience and most users don't care about federation. The UX is everything.

> "[Spam] is a general problem that you'll have with any platform"

Unless you think about it from first principles and actually come up with a way to solve it: https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit - if you have NFTs as a permenant pseudonymous ID with a low but non-zero cost, moderation becomes trivial and spam is no longer economically possible. Today centralized services have an advantage fighting spam (email is the easiest example) and decentralized services struggle with this.

> "Or better because many people are working on it compared to 30 people"

I think this has been shown to be empirically false with this kind of service. Not because of the number of people, but because of the reasons federation on the existing stack is hard.

> "I heard of [urbit] before, it sounded cool at the time but I didn't get enough info the details to remember much, I don't really understand how this is relevant though, care to elaborate?"

The pitch is basically that the problems that cause federated systems to fail (at the application level) run pretty deep. To fix it you have to rethink some assumptions with modern operating systems and how you handle identity across the web. If you fix these issues, then it becomes possible (but not easy) to solve the UX problems that causes federated applications on the web to fail and provide a better experience than the existing web for applications. If you can fix the incentives then you can escape the trap we're in.

> "I don't think Element or Matrix is aiming to be a niche nerd hobby, they have a lot of money invested in them"

You're totally right - they want to take over the world, and I want them to win too, I just don't think they can because of the current local maximum we're trapped in. It's moloch (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/).


> I think Moxie is right, federation will lead back to recentralized services (for the reasons Moxie outlines in his recent Web3 post).

it does not, see Email


Email is centralized on a handful of providers (mostly gmail).


Email is decentralized. Most people (including me) decided to sell their data for a better service which is why we ended up with Gmail and a few other services that are very popular. If Google and the other services are forced by law to not be allowed to do that we could easily just create an account in the thousands of not millions of email providers that offer alternatives, if Signal goes down, we all have to go back to WhatsApp.


Even in the hypothetical case of this law leading to google not providing email (neither of which I think would happen) you'd just end up on some other server run by some other corporation with all of the risks that entails.

You could argue that's better than trusting one service (debatable imo), but you're still a thin client vulnerable to the whims and data protection capabilities of that provider. Even worse, if everyone is using just 3 or so main providers then since you're communicating with people centralized primarily on these other services you're also vulnerable to their security practices too.

All of this is because of a few core problems with the current stack. Linux servers are too hard to run. Modern dependency requirements are a mess, operating systems were designed without an eye toward the web or identity so spam is a problem. You can't fix this without thinking more deeply about these issues, I think Urbit might be a way out. Without fixing these issues the options available in the current system are niche communities or centralized services. The idea of people running their own decentralized nodes at scale given these constraints is dead on arrival. PGP is a failure - even when people's lives literally depend on it they cannot or will not do it.

Trust me, I wish this wasn't the case - but I care about winning more than I care about idealistic purity. You have to think pragmatically about what the best option is today and what crazy changes are required for this to succeed in the future. Today with the existing tech stack I think Signal is the best we can do at scale in competition with whatsapp, fb messenger, and iMessage. Tomorrow I hope urbit gives us a way out.


Threema exists too.


it's not.

There are thousands if not millions of companies participating in the federated network, not including some nerds who self host


Uh, on-device servers are a thing for Matrix. These aren't your grandpa's servers that live in a 19" rack, or even your mom's server that's an off-the-shelf consumer-grade NAS. Matrix is shooting for portable identities. Matrix is planning to do Bluetooth BLE mesh nets too for offline usage.


Yeah - I saw they were working on that, I think that's a smart approach.


User lock-in is not just a glitch. It's the whole reason why people invested in signal. It's yet another walled garden masked as an open source no-profit.


Will the new CEO remove the Mobilecoin scam asset from the secure messaging product?


Moxie - thank you so much for building Signal for the world.


Can someone shed some light on moxie's true identity? Did he change his name at some point and why is there no record of a name change nor does even the topic ever come up online?


My pet theory: Moxie is a CIA plant.


wonder what Moxie will get up to next, given his web3 skepticism and the state of the tech industry today.


Hopefully he finds some time to sail heh.


I do miss the days of various squats and plywood boat failures. More of that please, Moxie. But mostly, thanks for Signal.


The documentary of his earlier sailing:

https://vimeo.com/15351476


His web3 skepticism did not stop him from getting involved with "MobileCoin" some time ago, or was that conveniently forgotten?

https://www.wired.com/story/mobilecoin-cryptocurrency/


Since when is MobileCoin web3?


Another scamcoin or "open source" (not really) project, no doubt.


Please don't cross into personal attack.


I'm a big fan of Moxie. Thanks for all the work you've done to give people a free and secure way of communicating. A truly important cause.

Ultra-cynical take: I wonder if there's an element of avoiding conflict-of-interest accusations regarding Mobilecoin.


"a very accomplished and committed leadership team", yet a search for an external CEO, did I read that right?

Seems kinda risky to push the reins onto someone new to me. Unless I am missing something?


If anybody is displeased by this news, check out Matrix protocol. Grab yourself a client like Element for it. You can even bridge Signal to Matrix if others don't want to switch.


Thank you to Moxie and the entire team at Signal for building this incredible software and releasing it out in the world! I've been using it since the TextSecure and RedPhone days and moving more and more of friends and family to it ever since.

To the HN crowd, please become a sustainer (monthly donations) of Signal through the app. You get a badge that way, which is an opportunity for those you communicate with to learn about becoming a sustainer too.


To host a privacy-first IM platform is really challenging. If they took advantage of the users' privacy (behavior, interests, contacts, etc.), they would make good revenue. But they will not.

Then how to make this good thing sustainable is a question. Users would think donation is fair enough. But the fact is a world-class IM platform needs an exceptional engineering workforce. Those people are not just looking for users' donations at will.


Still require SIM to sign up


Signal is wonderful. Huge respect and gratitude to moxie for his dedication and integrity, a true inspiration.


Come up with a commercial Signal server, where the server is not at/by Signal.

Sell the server to secret squirrels, etc.


Or, just use Matrix protocol and cut out the corporate politics entirely.


I stopped believing in Signal some time ago because of their attempts to avoid taking a side in the moderation issue - their policy is just not clear enough [1, 2, 3]. Moxie advocating that you don't need to trust the servers just worsens it [4].

Another thing I don't like about Signal is how they conduct their development, doing everything in their own private repo and just throwing the code at GitHub to say they are open-source and trustable (remember when the server code wasn't updated for months because they were adding the mobilecoin feature ?). The only way you can really discuss some bigger thing is in the beta testing forum posts.

I hope the new CEO changes some things.

[1] https://community.signalusers.org/t/reporting-cp-groups/4005...

[2] https://community.signalusers.org/t/could-signal-become-the-...

[3] https://www.theverge.com/22249391/signal-app-abuse-messaging...

[4] https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1457005910136549379


> It’s a new year, and I’ve decided it’s a good time to replace myself as the CEO of Signal.

Best of luck to them, and to the rest of the team at Signal.

No matter how we cut it in these comments, competition to the incumbent(s) is a positive for humanity.


My hope is that maybe with new leadership Signal can finally get export/migration features. There seems to have been a deliberate resistance to adding them.


A big risk is that the new leader, having less authority and fewer credentials for their choices, will compmromise Signal's security to pressure from the public.

With only 30 people, I am glad things are delayed. That is necessary if Signal doesn't develop and release them before they can be done right.


Security isn't just confidentiality. It's availability too. Losing all your data if a single device is lost or stolen or breaks is bad availability.

Export isn't delayed. The Android app has export and import already. They said it's likely they'll remove it once the Android app has history transfer like the iOS app.


Thanks a lot moxie. Epitome of "this guy gets it". You don't have to have had scabies to gain my trust as a CEO of a tech company, but it helps.


Man, the WhatsApp founder hit it big.

I Really need to join a startup.


Where can I see the annual report/budget?


Maybe Signal will finally add native Apple M1 support now? It’s been over a year and they already have ARM code in their iOS version.


The beta version of the client received M1 support last month:

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/4461#issu...

It opens way, way faster than the Intel version.


Yeah, JITs on top of Rosetta2 is one of it's weakest areas.


Thanks for pointing that out, as I was quite unaware! Last time I checked this wasn’t available and I didn’t see any news about it. I should have checked before posting.


I just noticed v5.27.1 stable was released a few days ago... There's no need to use the beta version anymore.

Check the about page, it should say "M1". If it says "Intel", reinstall the app (replacing the old .app with the new should be enough).


I wish Moxie sees this, would love to have a conversation and maybe have him work together with our project: https://community.intercoin.org/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...


Now it becomes clear why he was attacking Telegram and web3 so tirelessly lately.


Please don't post unsubstantive comments or cross into personal attack.

Thoughtful critique is welcome, of course, but it would need to contain a lot more information than this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


He was attacking Telegram because he’s resigning as the CEO of Signal? What is the obvious connection there that you have seen?


IMHO, he was attacking Telegram because Signal lost in popularity to Telegram, and investors were not happy.

And he was attacking web3 because these same investors pushed cryptocurrency features into Signal, and he was wildly against it.


He was attacking Telegram because it was letting people believe that they conversations were e2e encrypted when they weren't.


Signal doesn't have investors.


[flagged]


This reads like conspiracy theory with no hard facts to back it up. It’s been demonstrably false as well.


Obviously, none of this is true.


>investors were not happy.

Who?




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