Wha?

Is it bad to quote yourself twice in the same thread?

"... success of literally ever other attempt to bring e2e to the masses."

Attempt to bring e2e to the masses. How many actually using it is that metric.

Before open whisper & signal: how about number of people I knew with whom I could communicate securely with using pgp. 1. Total number of people in the world who could do it. A few thousand tops? You reckon it got to 10k, 100k. I can't imagine it got anywhere near a million...

Today: Number of people doing it everyday without thinking about it. Over a billion.

Sometimes metrics are so overwhelming that you have to tip your hat to it. This says nothing about any other dimensions of analysis other than "Number of people actually using e2e." It's a hell of a metric we can give credit to Moxie & co. for. That /one/ dimension is just wow. People tried before, for decades. It just didn't work out on that one metric. Something would have to be pretty bad to make that metric not dominate the discussion of overall success. But yeah, this is just the success of getting people using e2e and it's a massive achievement.

Most of those people aren't using Signal but the Signal Protocol. When people say they want different identities, infrastructure or clients what they are essentially saying is they want to use the Signal Protocol but they aren't Facebook. They can't spent millions on development and maintenance so instead they want to integrate with the existing ecosystem.

Signal being successful because it is implemented by different parties and therefor used by many people seems more a counterargument to the state of Signal because it would suggest that Signal would be better if more people could use it for more things.

> Is it bad to quote yourself twice in the same thread?

pretty bad, actually.

The reported number of users does nit equate with number of securely e2e protected users

What's not open? Signal is open source.

Parts of it are open source. It's not like they'll let you come audit the AWS accounts.

No- for sure. But if that's the last argument someone can put forth about trusting Signal, that's pretty damn good. Most privacy/security investigations end by the second paragraph of a EULA where the service tells you that they farm and track every bit of information possible and sell it to third parties before the electrons/photons finish passing through their network cable.

And I'm fairly sure that's not what the poster above me actually meant, anyway. When you say "it's not open", do you really think they're saying that in the context of not knowing that the source code we can see is the code that's actually running on the server? If that's what they actually meant, then why would they say that at all, since literally no third-party service is "open" by that definition?

They clearly are under a misconception that Signal is closed source or that the protocol is secret or something. They're probably thinking of Telegram, which IIRC, is not open.