Switched to Linux full time at the start of 2025 and haven’t looked back. I fully intend to go the rest of my life without using windows again.

Me typing “big titty anime girl” into a NSA SCIF

Pfft come on. I watched ISIS beheading videos when I was a kid and I turned out just f-… Hm.

AFAIK, nope. There are several personal projects which modify Signal to work on private infrastructure rather than use signal’s centralized service, but nothing intended for public consumption or at least not that I’ve heard of. Maybe search it.

Signal is good enough and has been pushing for more mainstream appeal and polish (e.g. gif search) Its Achilles heel and main drawbacks stem from it’s centralization: needing a phone number and routing thru Signal’s infra. But that can also benefits them in some ways. Most devs who would be tempted to change that would rather spend their time elsewhere: tox, matrix, i2p, tor, xmpp and irc shenanigans, etc. Signal is just hydrated, in its lane, unbothered; chugging along as its LLC dictates. No alarms, no fires, no compelling reason to do a hard fork.

Edit: it completely slipped my mind that Molly existed. So yeah there’s that. But they still use signal’s infra.

AGPL iirc. it can be forked and run independently or modified into a decentralized federation model. So doesn’t really matter if they cave.

I’ve always had weird issues with SMB like ghost files, issues with case sensitivity (zfs pool), it dropping out and me having to reboot to re-establish the connection… Since switching to Linux and using NFS, it’s been almost indistinguishable from a native drive for my casual use (including using a ssd pool as a steam library…)

The problem is that any strikes put an account at risk. There have been instances of accounts being knocked off overnight by frivolous strikes from one claimant, or multiple claimants just happening to coincide. The title was intentionally alarming, or sensational, but not really clickbait.