On its 10th anniversary, Signal’s president wants to remind you that the world’s most secure communications platform is a nonprofit. It’s free. It doesn’t track you or serve you ads. It pays its engineers very well. And it’s a go-to app for hundreds of millions of people.
  • solrize@lemmy.worldEnglish
    01·
    7 months ago

    What is signal anyway? I’ve never paid attention to phone apps much. Why isn’t it on F-droid if it’s FOSS? Is it like irc but with encryption? I guess I should look into it.

    • RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      7 months ago

      Why isn’t it on F-droid if it’s FOSS?

      That got me interested and apparently, they fear forks running out of date.

      Concerning F-Droid, we already providing an auto-updating APK directly from our site, and we really don’t want forked versions of the app maintained by other parties connecting to our servers. Not only could the users using the forked version have a subpar experience, but the people they’re talking to (using official clients) could also have a subpar experience (for example, an official client could try to send a new kind of message that the fork, having fallen out of date, doesn’t support). I know you say you’d advocate for a build expiry, but you know how things go. Of course you have our full support if you’d like to fork Signal, name it something else, and use your own servers.

      While that statement got plenty of thumbs down, I hate to admit that F-Droid is indeed out of date quite often. I currently can’t find a source for this but I once read this has something to do with their signing process.

      • solrize@lemmy.worldEnglish
        01·
        7 months ago

        Hmm, ok, thanks. But I’m kind of tired of version churn: who needs to keep changing a chat program? IRC has been around since the 1980s or so and still works fine.