• 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?

  • Dot.@feddit.orgOPEnglish
    75·
    22 hours 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
      8·
      21 hours 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·
      21 hours 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
        4·
        21 hours 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.