At the risk of burning away virtual points, I have the following observations and opinions. I respect the encryption technologies that Signal has developed, but

At the risk of burning away virtual points, I have the following observations and opinions. I respect the encryption technologies that Signal has developed, but I'm always frustrated with Signal as an app, platform and where it seems to be headed. Throughout this talk, the one quote that came to my mind for every point he was defending was this: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." ― Upton Sinclair I also found it amusing when he said that it's easier to switch from WhatsApp to Telegram to Signal. The truth is that switching people from WhatsApp to Telegram, in my experience, will earn you brownie points because Telegram is a lot more feature rich than WhatsApp (let's keep the encryption part aside for the moment). If you manage to switch people from WhatsApp or Telegram to Signal, again in my experience, you'll lose credibility and trust because Signal, for all the money the foundation has, moves at snail's pace. Moxie's argument early in the talk about centralized systems being able to change fast just does not apply to Signal. It still lacks stability in delivering messages. Its UX for joining groups, re-joining groups after reinstalling your OS, etc., completely sucks. Don't even get me started on Signal treating its users as if everyone uses a burner phone and doesn't care about keeping their conversations when they switch devices or even have to wipe a device and get it running again (Signal on iOS still explicitly prohibits backups after so many years, and the Signal team's most recent addition to the app was stickers!). The example for switching from WhatsApp to Telegram to Signal being easy because it's tied to phone numbers is disingenuous. Following how WhatsApp and Telegram identify their users may not be the best thing to do. Signal assumes that people always have the same phone number and that phone numbers are the best way to identify people. But it fails to acknowledge that using email addresses to sign up (at least as an option for those who want to avoid phone numbers), like how Wire does, provides people a choice in how they want to appear on a platform. I know people who don't want to use a phone number based platform because they don't want all their phone contacts to know that they're on a particular platform (this was partially solved by Telegram in an update a few months ago, where you have control on who gets to know that you're using it, even if they have your number in their address book). His non-answer for the question around the 38 minute mark on Signal being tied to a phone number and that being a risk shows that Signal is stuck with what he/they believe is ideal, and refusing to acknowledge that this is a big problem for some sections of people...the very people Signal claims to be most useful for.