this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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There's no reason to trust Signal more than WhatsApp long term: the flaw isn't whether it's opensource or not, or whether it operates as a nonprofit today or not. The core issue is centralization: as soon as you accept that a single organization owns the whole network, you lose all leverage and freedom, and you should only expect that it will eventually turn against your interests with no recourse. Favour federated protocols (e.g. XMPP) which are by design largely immune to this, if you search for a stable and safe place for the long run.
I will let Moxie answer that: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
His opinion is that federated systems are too stable, to the point of paralysis by [lack of] consensus. If you want to be able to advance the state of technology he feels that centralized systems are the way to go.
Moxie is the megalomaniac behind Signal, of course you would expect him to back it up, but cherry picking facts doesn't make a good nor convincing argument. Here's a rebuttal by an XMPP developer. The current state of XMPP practically proves Moxies' post to be FUD: XMPP has multiple compatible, secure and maintained clients and server implementations, and by its decentralized nature, is more preserving of its users' metadata, and more resilient than today's Signal.
I know that diversification has its advantages. I'm a firm believer in it, and I think it's one of the main reasons to which Linux for example owes its resilience and flexibility. But decentralization also means it takes a long time, sometimes a very long time, for the that particular product's benefits to become known and widespread. Linux is a general purpose product which was able to find multiple niches in which to thrive. But other products have a much more narrow scope, and sometimes if they miss their window of opportunity they're relegated to the subnotes of history forever.
I believe that's what happened to XMPP, IRC and so on. At some point there was an opportunity to move with the times and add popular features and become user-friendly but they didn't, and commercial products that could offer those thrived instead. We as geeks would often like to think it's all because of the marketing power of wealthy companies, but we scoff at the notion of "user friendly". Let's look at Telegram and how well it's doing in spite of having neither the marketing power of Meta or Apple, nor the technical advantages of XMPP or Signal.
This is a danger that applies to Mastodon and Lemmy/Kbin too, and which Mozilla is currently trying to address. If the Lemmy community doesn't put some effort soon into addressing its outstanding issues that prevent easy adoption by new users, it will eventually fade into obscurity and become just as obscure as XMPP.
I realized that my previous post didn't embed the rebuttal link I was meaning to send, so please give it a look, sorry for that.
This is true: one can't possibly come up with a new chat product within few months would they want it to be an internet standard (which XMPP is) and having diverse parties implementing its components (which XMPP has). My question to that is, do we really need new chat products every other month? I personally consider that instant messaging was a solved problem 25 years ago when AIM/MSN & al. were ubiquitous and used by everyone and their aunt. Arguably, current generation's messengers pack less features, not more, than those they precede, and that's a trend we also observe within XMPP: old specs defining how to game together, share tunes, share whiteboards, … are slowly fading into obsolescence.
Nowadays XMPP has all the relevant features one would expect, in spec and implementation. There was a time when XMPP had problems with mobile use, not because it wasn't adequate (it was successfully used over extremely low bandwidth before), but because Google and Apple had decided that they would silently kill clients and a new protocol had to be figured-out for that event. That's perhaps a "once in a decade" evolution, which happened at a time the XMPP ecosystem wasn't as vibrant as it is today.
IMO what happened has nothing to do with "features" nor "moving with the times", what happened was a lot of venture capital money to answer every tech giant building their own walled-garden messaging platform. Again, all current "modern" messengers can do pretty much the same thing, look the same, and came-up roughly at the same time (and yes, this applies to Telegram, too).
This is not a danger, this is inevitable. Don't expect Lemmy/Mastodon (and the Fediverse in general) to become mainstream this generation: the internet doesn't work on merit, people don't spontaneously lean towards what's "best", even for themselves. Only tech enthusiasts do, and as it happens, they have a negligible political and societal impact compared to the (tech) majors. IMO no amount of persuasion by the geeks will change that. What I believe matters is, on one side, to define and standardize future-proof protocols and have them audited for security (XMPP is uniquely positioned here), and on the other, to lobby politicians so they make use of the existing legal framework (forbidding anti-competitive practices and monopolies, mainly) to level the playing field and compel the majors to become interoperable using said protocols. Mozilla may play a role in that, but what's going on with the EU and the Digital Markets Act is worthy to keep a close eye on.
Edit: typos and rephrasing
That's why I'm rooting for RCS.
For cross-protocols messaging? Sure! But it has its flaws (for instance, only message bodies are encrypted, which makes XMPP's OMEMO a superior solution in 1:1 and small groupchats). Also, it tackles only a small part of the problem, the larger picture (and problem) is about how the different protocols should inter-operate (exchange handshakes, keys, …), and this is nowhere near ready yet: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mimi/about/