• Signal forks can have unexpected behaviours like retaining deleted messages and also they don’t get updated at the same rate that Signal get updated.

  • Every couple of years I hear a story about hackers disturbing signal with backdoors, which would be impossible or very hard to be done If they blocked third party clients. (Ex: 1)

  • The amount of people who use third party Signal clients are very few anyway.

I saw what WhatsApp did to forbid modification of it’s app which works in stopping a lot of distributions, why doesn’t Signal do the same?

  • AllNewTypeFace@leminal.spaceEnglish
    32·
    16 days ago

    IIRC, they do forbid third-party clients from their network. You can build it from source, but you won’t be able to connect to production Signal servers.

    Third-party clients would not necessarily be a bad thing. Signal has limited resources, and as such has to cut corners. I for one would love a native desktop client that’s not Electron bloatware.

    • Dot.@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      96·
      16 days ago

      There are already 2 third party forks I know of, Molly and Signal-JW.

      They both use and access the main production Signal servers.

      As I said, a compromise here would be to have a client security certification program, where no other clients outside it would be able to use Signal.

      • Static_Rocket@lemmy.worldEnglish
        10·
        16 days ago

        I could appreciate a client certification that is optional, like a list of approved clients on their website or something along those lines.

        It should not be enforced by killing the client. I like security, but I enjoy software freedom more.

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
        44·
        16 days ago

        As I said, a compromise here would be to have a client security certification program, where no other clients outside it would be able to use Signal.

        You mean running a trojan “as a mean of security”, similar to anticheats? Are you sure this is a good idea?

        Or if by “program” you mean having some allowed clients as opposite to only the official one allowed, it’s a social thing, not a technical one. So it still won’t prevent anyone from connecting with another client.

        • Dot.@feddit.orgOPEnglish
          41·
          16 days ago

          I mean having a list of allowed clients.

          As I said in my post, WhatsApp already enforce forbidding third party client and it seems to work well.

          I don’t see why wouldn’t Signal improve the security of their users by implementing this, while upsetting the very few users who use third party clients.