It's very telling that the Signal team worked on this crypto stuff rather than being able to sign up without a phone number and idk some sort of Loomio style decision making features for groups.

Also I worry the problems they outlined in
https://signal.org/blog/update-on-beta-testing-payments/ are unfixable.

2, 3 and 4 are out of the project's control and they can't code their way out of those issues.

There is no doubt that the future of banking is going to be very mobile focussed.

You can see this with all the fintech being experimented with surrounding the Open Banking API.

However, no one has cracked the crypto currency that's actually usable for buying actual stuff problem. I don't know why the Signal think they will be the ones to solve it. The problems are obvious.

The project has made a bunch of (in my opinion) wrong turns in the past and I fear this will be another.

I'm sure they're doing a bunch of UX testing on everything they do but look, that isn't a golden ticket and it can lead you in the wrong direction also.

Incidentally, I can see that their nag UX strategy for creating a key for the remote SGX stuff doesn't work. Less technical folks just ignore the nagging "Verify your pin" box. It's just part of a UX pattern of "annoying pop ups that you ignore" that people are already familiar with.

I guess my point is that much as the Signal project is the poster child for open source UX, they can't magically solve the really difficult problems that everyone else is already grappling with.

They have a big of a start up public facing persona of "yeh, we'll definitely solve this hard problem". It comes across as arrogant to the wider libre community. A bit more self critique wouldn't go amiss.

And what I'd say to the libre/hacker communities is to bear in mind that Signal isn't designed for you.

I believe as a project, it was originally conceived as an intervention into the messaging space to promote what is now known as the Signal protocol.

It's actually been very successful at this as big messaging players such as WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, Google shit and Signal derivative such as Wire has adopted the protocol to various extents.

However, we know the implementation of E2E crypto into proprietary platforms is very problematic if there's no way to tell it's been implemented correctly.

It's also been useful for the libre software community. Olm on Matrix and OMEMO for XMPP are based on the Signal protocol and are probably the best hope for decentralised E2E encrypted communications. Though they have some advanatages over Signal, both of these platforms still don't perform as well in terms of metadata privacy as Signal.