If signal would officially allow third party clients, non-phone-number-bound users and maybe federation that'd be great.

It does not.

As very recently made evident, Signal spends a significant amount of money maintaining their phone-number-bound infrastructure, with an entirely plausible, reasonable, user-focused reason for doing so. As a Signal user, and donator, I’m 100% okay with the trade-off they’ve made, and would hate to see it reversed just to appeal to some nerdy pipe-dream for how services should work.

> As very recently made evident, Signal spends a significant amount of money maintaining their phone-number-bound infrastructure, with an entirely plausible, reasonable, user-focused reason for doing so.

If there is some recent revelation that makes phone numbers all of a sudden a secure, portable and censorship-resistant identifier please link me that.

Until then I'd prefer to not have my private communication determined by telephone companies that often have not cared for either security, censorship or privacy. Regardless of signals e2e encryption having my access to the network determined by a telephone company is not the right way to go.

I'll continue to restate the thing that made me immediately quit Signal forever - I made an account, and 10 minutes later, it had alerted someone I hadn't talked to in years that I had an account, simply because they had my phone number at some point in the past, and they messaged me.

For a nominally privacy focused app, for them to literally alert people to my new Signal account I'd gotten to securely message someone violated all trust I had in them. What's to stop someone from just adding a Contact for every single valid phone number on their phone and then getting an alert for any time anyone makes a Signal account? I may as well just use Facebook then.

Does iMessage allow third party clients? No? Then why the double standard?

I'm saying that if we hold something to a higher standard lets actually hold them to a higher standard.

Is signal better than iMessage? Probably. Should we ask for them to be better than they are? Yes.

It looks like we are comparing standards here, and that neither passes the bar.

Signal does allow third party clients, Beeper is one. I agree about other things, and would expand on the list.

They do not officially and discourage it. Moxie and the rest of the company has been extremely clear that all third party clients are not considered supported or allowed, regardless if they can and do interact with signal services.

Useful (though somewhat dispiriting) to know. I would feel a lot more forgiving toward Signal's UI shortcomings if I had a choice of alternative front-ends.