I fear signal has to be mentioned a thousand times from all directions before they “trust” it.
Yes. A thousand times yes. The risk profiles humans naturally adapted to are not well aligned with the artificial risk profiles we see today. I can’t fault someone for not transcending their own natural instincts, because heaven knows I can’t.
Signal is licensed under AGPL.
Then nuance is dead and nothing is good enough.
Okay, so the Apache license is a “closed source” license?
Sure. That’s one possible vector. Is it “Open Source” software? Yes, they accept contributions for the community. It’s is “Libre” software? No, they depend on closed source software.
I’m trying to illustrate that the definition of “open source” can be weaponized for no good reason. Dismissing Signal because it doesn’t fit a narrow definition of “open source” makes everybody less secure. I have a hard enough time convincing my non-tech-savvy friends to switch to Signal. There’s a snowball’s chance in Hell I’ll convince them to use something even more obscure.
Following that logic:
Many popular Linux distros contain closed source blobs. Ergo Linux is closed source.
Not open source
There are lots of good reasons to be upset with how Signal produces builds. And maybe Signal has no good reason why they keep opaque dependencies. But by every common definition of the term, Signal is open source. Being on FDroid is not the definition of open source.
Please don’t gatekeep. There are better ways to criticize Signal. This is not one of them.
argues like an annoying 14 year old atheist that just discovered Internet arguments and the think whole Internet is Christian
Brilliant. I’m saving this imagery for later.
Hard disagree. This is a problem every web service has had to deal with since the beginning of the web: what happens when a host (either the machine or the person) stops working? How do you keep the service up?
Centralized services solve that problem with internally funded, transparent redundancy. Federation solves the problem with externally funded, highly-visible redundancy. They’re still the same solution, just a different way of going about it.
You could argue that user identity is lost due to the discontinuity between instances, but that’s probably something the Lemmy devs could fix without too much hassle.
Hey, at least they promote Lemmy!