this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
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The Signal messenger and protocol.
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Sorry. I wish I hadn’t a few years ago. I will be looking to move to a non-Android, non-iOS phone soon so family will need another way to contact me. I can’t take a project serious that demands I use one of the corpo duopoly phones or even have a phone at all, but Signal, LINE, & a couple of other chat apps have this weird requirement.
XMPP and Threema don't require a phone number. And if you want you can run XMPP on your own server.
The difficulty will be convincing family to move again—not the technology options
I know, most people I know stick to whatssucks and faciesbook messenger.
Why don’t you contribute to Signal and be the change you want to see? You can make a pull request in GitHub.
The creator explictly made this choice.
Also screw telling folks they must use Microsoft products to contribute to a project.
The developer literally puts information in the README.md on how to contribute code, so you’re correct they made the choice to allow collaboration.
Either collaborate to make it do what you want or quit whining about it not doing that thing. Signal is free after all, the least you could do is contribute if you want more features.
GitHub is a great version control system, regardless of its owner.
I mean the creator requires the Android/iOS primary device or no service… by design. They do not want another option.
Also not every project is open to contributions that fundamentally change things—which is why forks are so common in free software. Changing this core isn’t worth the effort since there are alternatives that already do everything Signal does, but just have a worse marketing team. I am very much allowed to be as angry at family stuck on Signal as I would if they used WhatsApp for similar reasons—both technical & social.