<story><title>Technology preview: Sealed sender for Signal</title><url>https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>Two observations:&lt;p&gt;1. You should look into what other messengers do with sender&amp;#x2F;receiver pairs information. One very popular competing messenger logs pairs permanently, serverside, in order to make UI features work.&lt;p&gt;2. One of the least popular attributes of Signal (on Hacker News, at least) is its lack of federation and ability to interoperate with third-party clients. This feature is a pretty crystalline example of the kind of protocol change you can make when you control all the mainstream clients, and that would be an absolute nightmare for a protocol where you didn&amp;#x27;t.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simias</author><text>&amp;gt;2. One of the least popular attributes of Signal (on Hacker News, at least) is its lack of federation and ability to interoperate with third-party clients. This feature is a pretty crystalline example of the kind of protocol change you can make when you control all the mainstream clients, and that would be an absolute nightmare for a protocol where you didn&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;Personally I would be fine if they were in control of the only implementation but provided libraries that could be used to create bindings and gateways for other clients and protocols. My main problem with Signal is that their desktop app manages to be slower and clunkier than the average electron app which is quite a feat on its own.&lt;p&gt;If they provided a basic shared library or maybe even a stand alone  &amp;quot;headless&amp;quot; binary client you could interface through some socket protocol for instance it would let me write a gateway to use irssi or whatever not-completely-trash and actually configurable client instead of that glorified webview that manages to be worse than an actual webpage (still haven&amp;#x27;t figured out how to change the spellchecker settings in the edit box since right clicking doesn&amp;#x27;t have the option to change the dictionary like in a real web browser). Also I&amp;#x27;ve just started it and it already uses 158M of resident memory but that&amp;#x27;s business as usual for this garbage fire that&amp;#x27;s electron.&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell that wouldn&amp;#x27;t make it harder for them to develop and improve the protocol since they would still completely control that bit of the code.</text></comment>
<story><title>Technology preview: Sealed sender for Signal</title><url>https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>Two observations:&lt;p&gt;1. You should look into what other messengers do with sender&amp;#x2F;receiver pairs information. One very popular competing messenger logs pairs permanently, serverside, in order to make UI features work.&lt;p&gt;2. One of the least popular attributes of Signal (on Hacker News, at least) is its lack of federation and ability to interoperate with third-party clients. This feature is a pretty crystalline example of the kind of protocol change you can make when you control all the mainstream clients, and that would be an absolute nightmare for a protocol where you didn&amp;#x27;t.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>upofadown</author><text>Yes you can do stuff more easily if you control all parts of the network. That doesn&amp;#x27;t mean we have to give up on standards based messaging just because it is harder. In the long run silo based systems are more work because you have to reinvent everything every time you create the next entirely incompatible system. If that system doesn&amp;#x27;t catch on then you have to reinvent everything again and again until you get lucky.&lt;p&gt;This feature is an example of what happens when you don&amp;#x27;t solve the meta data properly in the first place. It doesn&amp;#x27;t really work that well but unless Signal starts routing through something like Tor (a system they don&amp;#x27;t and can&amp;#x27;t control) they are stuck with half measures.</text></comment>