Oh WhatsApp, you changed. Meta got the best out of you.
"No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they'll see tomorrow.β
"Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought.β
~ WhatsApp Blog, June 18th 2012
https://blog.whatsapp.com/why-we-don-t-sell-ads
@anselmschueler their acquisition options had a vesting period and one of the founders quit a few months before he would have been able to vest. He left behind $850M worth of Facebook shares and then founded Signal with Moxie Marlinspike. The other founder also quit Facebook but vested his options.
@fj Good quote at the beginning too:
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.
β Tyler Durden, Fight Club
Not exactly the typical institutional communication π
@fj that's why I don't believe any non-decentralised platform and any non-libre software. It's just enshittification waiting to happen, regardless of the founder's intentions.
If you really don't have a price, make it so you can't be made the offer from the start. When you are looking at a piece of paper with a bunch of zeros on it, it's too late. Too hard to resist.
@fj you can't trust anything with VC backing, they will always abandone their principles for money.
It's not even a case of greedy assholes taking advantage of you, it's just the whole structure of corporations wherein they have a mandate to always seek the best payout for their investors. They can't possibly *not* sell out because they have all these contracts and investors they have to satisfy.
Actually kinda funny how being a successful corporation means being in endless debt forever.
Yes. At leas in that it has no ads, and is secure.
It also, as we've seen in the press, has no guardrails, and when it comes to security people are the weakest link.
Remember kids: if you want security, don't put it online. You can play games with encryption and disappearing messages all you want, but if the other side takes a screenshot or a picture with their phone - that's forever.
You do realize that @fj literally wrote Signal (together with other people)?
And what do you mean by "infamous"? Are you referring to the leaked US govt group chat? That was solely caused by someone being stupid enough to add a journalist to their secret group chat. This could literally happen with any messenger.
The other stuff happened due to the Trump cabinet not using the official Signal build, but rather an insecure third-party version of the app called "TM SGNL", which is sold by an Israeli company called TeleMessage.
@micahflee wrote a great article about this: https://micahflee.com/tm-sgnl-the-obscure-unofficial-signal-app-mike-waltz-uses-to-text-with-trump-officials/
I also recommend just reading through the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_government_group_chat_leaks
π‘Update May 3, 2025: I have posted a follow-up, Here's the source code for the unofficial Signal app used by Trump officials. Update May 4, 2025: Another followup, and a big one: The Signal Clone the Trump Admin Uses Was Hacked Update May 6, 2025: I've written a new detailed
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