I'd pay substantially more for Signal if I could bot accounts.
I'd like a signal daemon on all my servers for alerting which could message me via Signal. This is worth a monthly fee to me.
I know people running small businesses who would really like to have a business Signal account: an ability to send Signal messages as a business identity without tying it to some specific phone number. This would be worth a subscription even if they had to get their customers to install Signal.
Signal need to figure out what product they sell that's going to fund the privacy objective: because there's plenty and they're worth having.
I know I could do these things, but the problem is (1) it's a cat and mouse game of trying to keep up with functionality they don't want to support and (2) means I'm not paying them for a service, which is the point of doing it.
IMO Signal need to figure out what they sell to people with the money to say "yes, this service helps me make money" so they fulfill the big mission statement. That's true viability.
Within that bucket there's some real obvious ones: server monitoring and alerting (I have Signal, let my severs have Signal so they can talk to me, maybe at an agreed reduced throughput rate so someone doesn't just try to run TCP/IP over it), and letting businesses have a secure multimedia messaging channel to their clients for notifications.
I find signald better. It also supports acting like a desktop client... so you can just add it to your account easily. signal-cli might do that also, but I stopped using it in favor of signald when I found that one.
But yeah, I hear you. It would be nice if it had a official bot interface where maybe all the bot's receipients have to be whitelisted so that it's easy to use for stuff like server monitoring but not easy to use for spamming.
I'd like a signal daemon on all my servers for alerting which could message me via Signal. This is worth a monthly fee to me.
I know people running small businesses who would really like to have a business Signal account: an ability to send Signal messages as a business identity without tying it to some specific phone number. This would be worth a subscription even if they had to get their customers to install Signal.
Signal need to figure out what product they sell that's going to fund the privacy objective: because there's plenty and they're worth having.