I don't think you can have messaging without some level of trust, but I agree that the Signal Foundation isn't very trustworthy.

As for the communication protocol... there are some 3rd party clients that connect to the Signal servers (Axelotl, signald etc.) which have not been banned from connecting for quite some time now. Not sure why, but at least that shows that the protocol in general works as intended. Together with reproducible builds for the official client this at least makes it likely that the unmodified official client works as advertised (although there could still be some caveats in the shared libraries).

But who knows what the server does and supply chain attacks that substitute the official client for a modified one are still easily possible when Signal controls all distribution channels (they will tell you this is to prevent supply chain attacks, but only those of most 3rd parties, not those originating from within Signal & Google/Apple).

Truly secure systems: i like that one.

Finally, since the client is a binary distributed by Whisper, it’s not possible to verify that the client and server use the published protocol independently

you can use Signal-Foss and use their builds or build it yourself.

Finally, since the client is a binary distributed by Whisper, it’s not possible to verify that the client and server use the published protocol independently.

What are you talking about? The official client is open source and has reproducible builds.

Haha thanks. Its impossible for it not to be controversial, for some reason I've found signal fans to be more fanatical in their loyalty to it than most advocates of other privacy apps.

Except that they don’t have the message senders thanks to sealed sender

Sealed sender is a nice idea, but due to Signal's centralized server architecture it is sadly snake-oil. If Signal wants they can easily circumvent sealed sender with a simple timing correlation as they have 100% knowledge about when a client sends or receives a message.

Since when does Zuckerberg endorses Signal?

He uses signal, I don't think he's publicly endorsed it.

The best way to do private/secure messenging is to do it similarly to the least private and secure messaging protocol in use?

I'm just describing how it works, this seems overly combative. Encryption is a different topic than federation. Emails and phone calls are federated, yet insecure.

This entire section completely ignores that Signal isn’t designed to talk to random people. It’s designed to talk to your friends/family/coworkers, who most likely already have your phone number. It makes it super easy to migrate. There’s no way my grandma would be able to add me on briar…

That "ease of migration" comes at a cost: namely that signal's centralized server now knows your identity. And yes while briar isn't quite user friendly yet, its just as easy to share a user_id string as it is a phone number. With matrix or XMPP I can share my ID with a link.

sealed sender

I don't know enough about this to comment, but signal still has to know who to send the message to. That means that the server must decrypt the recipient at some point.

Payment in Signal has been a major request since the migration from WhatsApp. In multiple countries WhatsApp has a payment feature that is hugely popular.

I'd argue that most people don't want a cryptocurrency bundled in their chat apps. This is a really strange thing to defend.

For the last one, its telling that you deleted half my sentence. The full sentence is this:

Signal's use luckily never caught on by the general public of China ( or the Hong Kong Administrative region ), whose government prefers autonomy, rather than letting US tech control its communication platforms, as most of the rest of the world naively allows.

Many countries have now realized their mistake in letting US tech companies control their social media platforms, and are trying to adopt the PRC model of home-grown chat apps. A great example is India, where Facebook and Youtube ( 2 US tech companies ), are the most popular social media apps. This was a glaring mistake allowing these US surveillance giants to so completely own the social media landscape of India.

they don’t have the message senders thanks to sealed sender

Reading over this again. The primary identifier in signal, is phone numbers. You think signal doesn't store those, or use them to route messages?

Federation increases censorship resistance. I do not think it necessarily decreases privacy, although having metadata strewn across multiple servers may be a risk. Still, I think the comparison with email is a bit of a strawn man argument, since it is not only the federated nature of email which makes it easy to surveil but also the fact it is unencrypted by default.

Moreover, email these days is concentrating in the hands of a small number of providers (gmail, etc).

XMPP seems a lot more distributed at this point in time.

No probs!