ah yes, another fork of BirdSiteLive. Every one seems to make their own fork of that thing. And none of them (that I've found) set a user agent when delivering messages to other AP servers.
You can see where bird.makeup sets the headers here[0] (with a distinct lack of user agent) and an issue I filed against the upstream[1] asking them to please set a user agent.
Moxie and Signal didn't do anything other than asking LibreSignal politely to stop using their servers. They didn't "shut down" anything, and they have shown no interest in shutting down signal-cli/signald.
MobileCoin, the cryptocurrency that Signal incorporates and essentially sanctions, uses signald for their bot[0].
the Signal Matrix bridge has hundreds if not thousands of open source users, plus Element One and Beeper users, all using signald and not having any repercussions for years. The only 3rd party Signal client that's caught any flak from Signal that I'm aware of is LibreSignal.
It's not a licensing restriction, it's a terms of use for their network service. It's also not enforced. Their clients are open source, signal-cli uses a fork of the Android app's client library.
I cannot speak for moxie or Signal. I can speak for my own experiences, as the maintainer of a fork of signal-cli, and I have never seen any evidence that Signal's servers block signal-cli or my fork. I don't know about signal-cli but my fork clearly identifies itself in the user agent (and another field called the "signal agent") to the server. If they wanted to block me they could.
> If you think running servers is difficult and expensive (you're right), ask yourself why you feel entitled for us to run them for your product.
I don't get Moxie's stance. Aren't they running Signal as a public service? This sentence reads as if LibreSignal would be stealing profits from Signal by using later's servers. But there is no intention to raise profits / add monetization, is there?
MOB (MobileCoin) looks like an attempt at monetization, a bit shady if you ask me.
Other than monetization, I get Moxie stance, even though I disagree. If you control both the server and the client and don't allow alternative clients and federation, it is easier to make changes, keep focus, and you don't have to deal with complains from users with crappy clients.
Signal is also security and privacy-focused, and Moxie presumably want to keep that image. What if some forks throw away that aspect, for example by storing plain text message in "the cloud". Personally, I actually don't care that much about the privacy/security aspect of Signal, as weird as it may sound, for me, Signal is just a nice, no nonsense messenger with security as a bonus and I would welcome a fork that makes a convenience trade off. But these less secure clients may undermine trust for those who really see it as a primary reason.
After reviewing the thread, I think that it may just be that we have had a genuine misunderstanding over the meaning of the word enforcement due to context. moxie has made it clear that third party clients are not allowed to use OWS servers, and enforced it by having such clients removed from the internet. I feel that counts as 'enforcement' although upon re-reading the thread I can see why this happened. I am not aware of enforcement on the server-side although this is certainly enough to dissuade me from pursuing third-party Signal clients.
edit: reworded after rereading the thread a couple more times
It looks to me like those clients were removed due to trademark infringement (having "Signal" in their name), I don't think they were taken down because their code connects to OWS' servers (would GitHub or Google ever honour a takedown request like that?).
Sending messages to authors of third party clients that you are not ok with their use of your servers (literally the exact comment the link I and other posters shared):
> I'm not OK with LibreSignal using our servers, and I'm not OK with LibreSignal using the name "Signal." You're free to use our source code for whatever you would like under the terms of the license, but you're not entitled to use our name or the service that we run.
> If you think running servers is difficult and expensive (you're right), ask yourself why you feel entitled for us to run them for your product.
Yes, they mention both trademarks _and_ servers, and yes, if there was not a trademark issue, github and google would not remove the repo just for connecting to Signal's servers against Moxie's wishes.
However, the act of informing third party client developers that they are not allowed use the official servers is itself an act of enforcement - maybe one with not much teeth behind it unless he follows up with a legal complaint, but still nonetheless enforcement.
I see what you mean, I guess the mix-up here is that we have different working definitions of "enforcement".
For example, I would argue that Moxie's desire for unofficial clients to not use the word "Signal" in their project name is a statement of policy, whereas the takedown requests to remove the projects from GitHub and the Play Store are examples of enforcement of that policy.
That said I think I can be convinced that directly informing a violator of your policy of said policy is a type of enforcement in itself.
signal-cli uses a clearly identifiable user agent [0] that could easily be blocked if Signal wanted to. signal-cli could escalate by trying to evade that kind of a block, but as it stands signal-cli has been operating without trouble for several years.
I meant they may ask some clients not to use their servers, but they don't have any enforcement mechanism in place beyond asking them to stop on github.
They can apply measures to the users. They are not doing it right now, but they could suddenly start. By the discussion on some reddit threads [1], this moxie guy looks sketchy to say the least.
But I support the devs who work on alternative clients. The official Electron app is just bad, especially on Wayland. Hope signal-cli will keep working.
Sorry what am I looking for in this 200 comment reddit thread? I don't see any comments from moxie himself, just a lot of other people claiming to know what moxie wants. Are there reports of specific issues with 3rd party clients or comments from a Signal employee or something?
I'm looking for people's experience interacting with the Signal server, not moxie. We're talking about if the server enforces any kind of client restrictions.
I haven't looked super deep, but to the best of my knowledge that's not something that happens really. I looked through that reddit thread (thanks for that BTW, whisperfish seems interesting) and skimmed over that enormous GitHub thread, but I couldn't find much in the way of people actually experiencing issues interacting with the Signal server. Again, would appreciate it if you could link me to such a thing. As I mentioned elsewhere, I maintain an unofficial signal client and I try to be aware of these sort of things.
Because open source is only used as a publicity tool by Signal. That's why their server code was abruptly closed sourced without announcement for a year (purportedly to add a scam cryptocurrency that Moxie has a conflict of interest in).
It's hard to trust a project with a divisive, evasive and concealing leader.
The whatsapp bridge is based on the whatsapp-web api, which is non-functional if your phone is off. The phone part is what needs reverse engineering and replacing.
You can see where bird.makeup sets the headers here[0] (with a distinct lack of user agent) and an issue I filed against the upstream[1] asking them to please set a user agent.
[0] https://git.sr.ht/~cloutier/bird.makeup/tree/master/item/src...
[1] https://github.com/NicolasConstant/BirdsiteLive/issues/188