Anyone else wondering?
Well, I happen to disagree. I’m a privacy-conscious person, but I’m not an activist. Most of my contacts in real life (i.e the people I need a messaging app to talk to) are non-technical, and not really privacy-conscious. They’re not going to install a different app just to talk to me. The big draw of TextSecure (before it became Signal) was that they could just set that as their default SMS app, and it’d magically start to send encrypted messages if the other end was also using TextSecure, and they had to change exactly 0 of their habits.
I guess it depends on how you view it:
- Move as many people as possible over to encrypted comms with the least friction possible, or
- Provide a niche secure messaging platform for niche activists with niche needs.
I thought the goal was 1, but turns out it was 2. All my contacts are now back to Facebook Messenger…
It sounds like you’re slightly mis-remembering this oft-cited Hacker News comment from Moxie from 2015. I’m going to quote the main bit here because honestly a lot of people in this thread could stand to think about it:
If we were going to rank our priorities, they would be in this order:
Make mass surveillance impossible.
Stop targeted attacks against crypto nerds.
It’s not that we don’t find #2 laudable, but optimizing for #1 takes precedence when we’re making decisions.
I wasn’t actually quoting this, but yeah, I think that’s the point. Supporting SMS was helping adoption by promoting a seamless transition for users. Dropping it feels like prioritizing #2 to me. (All this comment thread about opsec, compartimentalization, activism, etc is really about #2, IMO)
