I appreciate the sentiment for what you're saying, but our direct user growth has surprised even us (again, not sure where you're getting your numbers), and Signal Protocol is now on over two billion devices.

If your major concerns are reliability and user growth, I think federated protocols are likely to exacerbate rather than improve those conditions -- as we've seen with XMPP historically. However, I would love it if you proved me wrong. Signal can be deployed in a federated environment today, let me know if you need any help setting it up.

In regards to federation for Signal, what are you looking for in terms of technical competence and skills? I'm already intimately familiar with running servers, VOIP, SMS delivery, etc so I've got a good grip on things, and I'd like to tie in our existing PBXes with Signal whereby ZRTP calls go straight to endpoints, perhaps we can force the issue with Grandstream and get them to add ZRTP support on device for their GXP2140 & GXP2170 phones.

If you can further narrow that to active users per $TIMEPERIOD (for example, MAU), that would be great.

For example some time ago when Signal was still called TextSecure, we converted all our group chats for a friend group of technically minded people to TextSecure. We all agreed that encryption is important and worth some minor discomforts. We switched back to Facebook (which we all dislike) within a month because TextSecure didn't have consistent message ordering in group chats, making some conversations impossible to understand for those unfortunate enough to receive messages in a bad order.

So while I'm able to get people to try it out or use it for "sensitive" stuff, these issues really hurt usage and I'll just end up reverting to SMS once a day at least.

Edit: I don't want to sound to be complaining too much. I love Signal and try to convert people. Just hard when basics mess up. And it's also frustrating because on the surface some of this stuff doesn't make sense.

Would make those that insist on ZRTP in my life a lot more convenient to have extended convos with.

My messages go into the ether without any indication that they are not being received.

This might not be a deal-breaker for some, maybe even a very nice feature for some, but for me it made me go back to other services.

Github issue: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-iOS/issues/967

I really wish they hadn't axed it, it was a lot easier to use it than do an adb backup of the app & data.

Looking at that GitHub issue, Moxie appears to have popped in for half a second out of annoyance, then the main repo maintainer michaelkirk went and locked & limited the issue to just contributors.

The thing with locking issues is that Signal issues get so much noise that the content will drown in it. I dislike not being able to add on-topic comments, too, but I understand how they got where they are.

On Android, the client can export plaintext messages to storage, or you can use something like Titanium Backup, which wraps up the app installer AND data directories in a tarball and can restore it across other many different versions of Android.

There's also Matrix (matrix.org). Took me about half an hour to set up a homeserver, has federation and TLS for now but full end to end encryption is already in beta (since I'm using my own homeserver I'm fine with just TLS) and Riot, the biggest client, is easy to set up and use. My wife is rather opposed to new things and isn't amazing with technology but she's happy enough with it.

Conversations on the other hand was a pain to set up self hosted (more Prosody/eJabberd's fault though) and had silent message send/receive failures.

For me the missing link is a good, native Linux client. Signal would have "got" me the last time I was shopping around for a communication app if it had that. Then again, I probably represent maybe 0.01% of the audience you are trying to reach...

I read this frequently, but I'm still not sure how this is supposed to work - would you care to explain?

Comparatively, as it stands now Google is getting a bunch of metadata on Signal users, such as when messages are sent and received and from which device, IP addresses, OS info, etc.

Here it seems that you're defining "metadata" as your IP address (and OS?). That's kind of a non-standard definition of "metadata" in this space -- most people approach the topic more concerned about who is communicating with who.

Email is federated, and I run my own mail server, but almost every single email I send or receive has GMail at the other end of it -- so running my own server does not provide me with any meaningful metadata protection, even though it is a federated protocol. The idea that everyone in the world is going to run their own mail server (or messaging server, or whatever) has not born out in practice, even in environments that natively support federation.

I think serious metadata protection is going to require new protocols and new techniques, so we're much more likely to see major progress in centralized rather than distributed environments (in the same way that Signal Protocol is now on over two billion devices, but we're unlikely to ever see even basic large scale email end to end encryption).

If all you want to do is hide your IP address, it sounds like you should just use Tor or a VPN.

> Comparatively, as it stands now Google is getting a bunch of metadata on Signal users, such as when messages are sent and received and from which device, IP addresses, OS info, etc.

This is not true. You're referring to GCM? The only thing GCM does is wake up a device to connect to the Signal server when the app is running in the background, nothing is actually transmitted over GCM.

I consider myself an educated Signal user and I had no idea about that. Preach it, shout it, this is great for everyone who thought "GCM == messages"!

If that was the case then Conversations would be bigger than Signal, but it just isn't

Improving server reliability is a separate thing.

XMPP itself is huge, GCM is essentially just a frontend for it. Conversations is smaller than Signal in part due to Signal being around since 2011, and Conversations being created in 2014, and also Signal gaining many high profile endorsements, from Snowden to Hillary. Still, Signal is microscopic compared to Whatsapp.

Maybe this isn't too bad. How does modern XMPP compare with Signal's protocol?

Since Signal refuses to learn from XMPP (especially the federated part), maybe the solution is to make XMPP learn from Signal. Then, Signal's failure to become federated would have been an important step to make XMPP finally useful for secure messaging.

Conversations is essentially Signal but for XMPP, the problem is it doesn't blend in normal SMS and additional value adds to sweeten the pot for normies and keep them using it.