Surely the status on this will never change. In my experience a year or two ago:
- It is possible to install a modified Signal client that doesn’t require Android or iOS, but using those clients is in violation of the Terms of Use of the Signal servers, which outlaw code forking
- If you can figure out how to use of those clients – by disregarding the Terms of Use / EULA – then Signal will do an automatic update for future users to cause what you’re doing to stop working
- If you experiment with your Signal account to try to figure out how to “fix” your fork, you will get banned from Signal for 7 days for a first offense
You know what they say: “if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.”
If I was a betting man, I would bet a large sum of money than in the year or so since I stopped paying much attention to Signal, the status of my above bullet points has not changed for indeed a duck will remain forever a duck, and never become an eagle nor a falcon.
Edit:
If you would like to communicate securely, free of prying government eyes, my best advice would be to build a rocket ship and travel to a planet separate from this one that is air-gapped. I recall reading a GitHub comment from someone high up in the management chain of Signal app, wherein they stated that the era of open source has ended. It’s not viable to use open source and federated technology where people do their own thing anymore. Similarly, they would probably tell you that it’s not safe for you to run Signal on a device such as Librem 5 or Librem 14, because these devices have modifiable firmware and modifiable operating system stacks and as a result can be infected with permanent, immortal malware rootkits the first time you run bad software. For people living under that security model, who think that they are going to run bad software at least once on their device without realizing it, apps like Signal might be very good because they ascribe to the security model that the only good security is security from the user, meaning that even the user can’t fat-finger something that takes over admin privileges on the device – which the user should not have. And it is that line of thinking which gives rise to the idea that Android and iOS are the only secure operating systems on the planet. Microsoft, too, abides this security model – for example, their secure login system called “Microsoft Authenticator” is not available for Windows, since in the eyes of Microsoft it would not be possible to use Windows to log in to anything securely, because although Windows is not open source it is also not averse to allowing users to take admin privileges on the device, or to install a different OS.
So, if you believe in Signal and the Android security model, then I don’t really know what you’re doing on Purism forums, since at that point you may as well think of the “open source / free software” movement as the “hack me please” movement, where nerds who over-inflate their egos go to get hacked more quickly than everyone else by the modern-era unstoppable information war veterans who are hacking everyone everywhere all the time, unless the people are using Google Pixel to fight against being hacked.
Edit 2:
I, for one, know that I am hacked. I discovered that I was hacked when I learned that before I was born, the United States Government was already secretly working on researching ESP, the capability of humans to perceive information about the world at long range and without their other senses. According to CIA documents that are now public, research confirmed that about 1% of the human population has access to the ESP, and the government made it their goal to construct a computer system or device that would be likewise capable of ESP. I was raised to be a firm believer in the principles of logic, science, and reason, so when I think about government surveillance computers that are capable of ESP, it finally clicks that Ed Snowden and corporate surveillance we’re all afraid of is most likely the brilliantly-conceived distraction from whatever is actually happening in this world, and perhaps what is actually happening is unfathomable to me because of my upbringing, to the point that it is literally a joke because of how well and perfectly I was brainwashed like the rest of society, because I am no one special.
And that’s when I realized that if you want to communicate securely… And I mean, really, really securely… then you should go to another planet. I heard that one of the moons of Jupiter might be a fun place, but I guess survival of human biologics is more likely to work on Mars