Their code is open source but you can't really do anything with that. You can't run your own server on the network, and they've previously stated they don't want third party implementations of clients.

Again, I don't trust promises anymore. Eventually they're going to need more money and that money will come with strings attached. If some org like Matrix would get bought people would just decouple themselves from their network. With Signal we can't do that because they are the only operator.

> Their code is open source but you can't really do anything with that. You can't run your own server on the network, and they've previously stated they don't want third party implementations of clients.

There are third-party forks and clients. Parts of the US government use one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49678919

Also, you can audit the code.

They've previously said they would ban third party clients: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

Interesting, I hadn't seen that; thank you. Though that is dated 10 years ago and they haven't done it yet, or not fully successfully. It might be challenging to identify third party clients, though maybe each app inevitably has a unique fingerprint.