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A comment on Looking back at how Signal works. Parent comment

Re:Looking back at how Signal works by Mediterraneo10 on Friday June 05, 2020 @10:17PM (#23436236)
The Signal team has always been open about the reason why they reject third-party clients: they claim that XMPP adoption was hindered by the inability of a user’s software to know if the software on the other end supports the same feature set. XMPP had grown into a large set of features that some clients supported and others did not.

If Signal introduces a new feature, it knows that all users’ devices will support that feature, because its own software is the only game in town.

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Re:Looking back at how Signal works by ComputerGuru on Friday June 05, 2020 @10:29PM (#23436299)
Backwards compatibility against a previous set of features isn't easy but it's certainly not impossible and graceful degradation is a thing.
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Re:Looking back at how Signal works by Paul-ish on Friday June 05, 2020 @10:59PM (#23436430)
It isn't clear if graceful degradation is possible in a security app.
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Re:Looking back at how Signal works by X6S1x6Okd1st on Saturday June 06, 2020 @12:43AM (#23436889)
There have been tons of problems with that concept and TLS
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Re:Looking back at how Signal works by ComputerGuru on Friday June 05, 2020 @11:59PM (#23436713)
Cases where a client is completely broken are never the problem: users will be forced to switch to a different client. It sucks, but it's no worse than the current state of affairs. A security-mandated change in protocol/behavior would fairly fall under that category.
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Re:Looking back at how Signal works by walrus01 on Friday June 05, 2020 @10:54PM (#23436407)
You can always define backwards compatibility that only goes to a certain lowest common denominator feature set, and no lower. For instance I have a number of httpd that support TLS1.2+ and specifically disallow SSLv3, TLS1.0 and TLS1.1. The population of browser user agents that don't understand TLS1.2 is infinitesimal at this point.
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Re:Looking back at how Signal works by upofadown on Saturday June 06, 2020 @07:14AM (#23438369)
Ironically OMEMO for XMPP ended up being based on the Signal protocol.
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