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> To become something attainable in practice we would have to start supporting the companies that are focused on the more important things first until they are mature enough to be able to dedicate time and resources to optimize for convenience.

What happened to open source?

> The problem is that when we prize convenience above other things and we end up with stupid things like customers arguing about the color of their speech bubbles.

That’s a fair point, in that if consumers prioritized open infrastructure over convenience, a commercial enterprise would too. However this is back to the earlier point - there is no point railing about that. It’s just a fact that most people want to just buy the nicest thing they can with their money.



> What happened to open source?

Open source is not magic fairy dust that can solve everything. You still need funding for developers, you still need to acquire customers to provide a feedback cycle, you still need device makers making it easy to install your app, etc.


Then is seems like you do understand why Signal isn’t as open as you’d like.


No. Signal has the funding, the technical talent and the customers. They are as "open source" as it can be. The issue with them is that they want to control the platform.


Have you considered that they might have a reason for that? You act as if control has no value to their mission.

Controlling the platform allows them to continue to evolve it while maintaining the convenient and spam-free user experience that users enjoy.


> You act as if control has no value to their mission.

What is their mission, exactly? Why does it require one single entity as the single pipeline for all global communications?

How many times will we have to go through the same cycle of building centralized Leviathans and see them turning against us, to understand that this is the Road to Hell?




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