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I think we meant different things when we said "drop in replacement" and therefore were referencing different ideas of what makes something a "drop in replacement," which is why it sounds like there are feelings of goal posts shifting.

If the messages are still sent via Facebook servers, that is not a WhatsApp replacement, it's an alternative WhatsApp Client, it's still at it's core "performing" WhatsApp. It is not a WhatsApp replacement, but a WhatsApp client replacement. I moved to signal specifically to sever my relationship with Facebook because I don't trust Facebook. Not communicating with Facebook is the feature that made signal appealing and made me want to replace WhatsApp (not the client, but the service as a whole) with something else.

I think conflating the idea of replacing "WhatsApp the service" and replacing "the WhatsApp Client" is the crux of our talking past each other and why my focus is on how it's UI compatible and ignoring the idea of protocol compatibility.

> You're on HN, it's nerdville, expect more interest in the protocol than clients.

We are on HN, and it's nerdville, it's true. It is the place where the very same comment (rsync files around) I am using to criticize the hubris of nerds (myself included) was made. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863). Plug and Play (referenced in the HN link) is a winning idea. The crux of my statements here is how amazingly plug and play signal is, specifically for WhatsApp users.

> This is as daft as…

> just one peer-reviewed article in a reputed journal.

You are upping the ante! Shouldn't a good leader lead by example? Where is your verifiable evidence of Huawei backdoors? I am working and publish in computer security, I am able to verify backdoors personally. Can you point me to such code?

Anyway, in addition to user "froh"'s points in a sibling post, here are more examples of Huawei technical leadership:

(1) An important NLP benchmark where Huawei is essentially as good as Microsoft and Google.

https://gluebenchmark.com/leaderboard/

(2) Here is insight about who contributes to the Linux kernel:

https://news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-contribution/

(3) Here is a best-paper award at a top conference.

- Paper https://people.mpi-sws.org/~viktor/papers/asplos2021-vsync.pdf

- Award https://twitter.com/ASPLOSConf/status/1384162699920044047

> When did Chinese law become global law?

When did US law become global law? The point is: any telecom gear provider that wants to sell telecom gear in the EU or US is required to add law enforcement backdoors.

> Huawei was caught with its pants down stealing code from Cisco.

Like most companies in developing countries, they started out making knock-off gear. Over 3 decades they went from copying other people's ideas to world leadership in 5G. Congratulations!

This is as daft as Googling "email" and expecting a de facto client. You're on HN, it's nerdville, expect more interest in the protocol than clients.

People search for "email clients. Try searching for "Matrix clients". Element is the best thus far, IMO.

"Widespread adoption" includes the EU's military, healthcare and government, so I wouldn't be so certain you'll end up being right. It's hit 60m publicly addressable accounts, which doesn't include any private servers or any kind of healthcare, gov or military: https://news.itsfoss.com/matrix-sixty-million-users/

EU is forcing interoperability standards. I have a gut feeling that you will look silly in five years time, but I'll buy you a very nice craft beer if I'm wrong. Hit me up on the bet in 5 years time: me@hammyhavoc.com

You were discussing "drop-in replacements", I gave you a drop-in replacement that still maintains interoperability with WhatsApp et al, which Signal does not. Classic shifting of the goalposts.

Depends on if you look at it based on a narrative that the former-staff wanted people to hear, or if you base it on the truth [1][2]. Specifically, this person states that I was in a position to "abuse my power" at freenode, such would mean that the statements he and others made in the past saying I had nothing to do with freenode until I "came in with lawyers" untrue, no? It's probably not worth spending cycles to research, but I'll leave these links if you're interested.

That said, a person simply can't defeat the cryptographically secured names of Handshake, so even if I was the boogie man, unless I have found the One Piece of Quantum CPU and harnessed its chakra[3], I'd be hard-pressed in fulfilling the boogie man role. ;)

[1] https://old.freenode.net/static/files/on-freenode.pdf

[2] https://news.itsfoss.com/freenode-controversy/

[3] intentionally put chakra and not haki here to make that more playful.

I have, and I have declined them all. Prompting an LLM and pointing it to somebody else's repo is not helpful, it's distracting and disrespectful, and also delusional to think that it helps the maintainers.

For a couple of bucks I can drown my own repos in low quality slop, so I don't need some well wishers to do it for me.

As a matter of fact I have yet to see an OSS maintainer that accepts AI generated slop MRs.

https://news.itsfoss.com/curl-ai-slop/

https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/10/ai_slop_bug_reports/

https://biggo.com/news/202508220113_Ghostty_Requires_AI_Disclosure_in_Pull_Requests

If you can't code, don't code and try to contribute to OSS projects. Claude or whatever trash one uses to make this outburst of garbage is not a substitute for skills. Don't waste mainteners' time and attention.

Thank you!

It doesn't actually allow you to publish and read anonymously without Tor or a VPN, but I will definitely recommend using both of those on the README. I do want to be careful about what is and isn't claimed, as I believe the world has become a bit dissatisfied with overclaims from decentralization projects lately.

I don't think I've come to the same conclusion about freenode (https://news.itsfoss.com/freenode-controversy/), and IRC is only decentralized if there isn't just one network anyway. I also don't think this is the right forum for this anyhow! You're definitely free to setup the same channel (#scarywater) on another network, and I'd be happy to be present there as well!