Let's Talk About Molly

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Until yesterday I was using Signal on my MK, but two things started to annoy me:

  1. Update nag notices – the Signal team release a new version weekly and every bloody week there’s a notice to update. The frequency makes these difficult to ignore. If your version is more than a few months old, they discontinue it and you are forced to update. So, I started feeling like a sheep being aggressively herded.
  2. Donation notices – it seemed like every two weeks I began seeing notices to donate. I’m not averse to making donations, I do it for other apps, but being pestered almost to the point of being forced to donate is not a donation, it’s coercion. Nothing about Signal is subtle.

So, I decided to try Molly-FOSS. Does anyone know if Molly-FOSS suffers from these same annoyances?

One thing I noticed using Molly-DOSS is that the app would display this notification: “WebSocket Service: Ready to reconnect”. I can’t really say I understand why it feels the need to do this. But I gathered that Molly-FOSS has the option to use websockets for notification delivery or unified push. Another forum user mentioned using Molly and enabling unified push. Thie means telling your Signal client that you wish to use a unified push server for the distribution of messages. Then in Molly-FOSS you need to provide details of the server. You can either self-host or use existing providers e.g. https ://ntfy.sh to relay these messages for you.

The way I understand NTFY is that you subscribe to a topic. Think of this as your personal channel where messages are exchanged. You can give it a name e.g. https ://ntfy.sh/orangemaniac

Then I discovered that these messages use HTTP Put or Post and if you load the URL of your topic in a browser, your messages can be read openly by anyone. I was gobsmacked. The insecurity of this left me wondering why anyone would use this to exchange personal messages with loved ones.

I abandoned ntfy and have accepted websockets instead.

If you’re a long time user of Molly-FOSS and can shed any light on any of the above, I’d be grateful for your experiences.

Many thanks.

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Well, now you understand. It’s the only way to receive notifications in Android without a UF server.

The security problem is not related to Molly but to the UF server you choose.

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I do have received several ghost calls in the last month since installing Signal and WhatsApp, but knowing struggles of y’all I prepared myself. If I hear a notification, when I have time I check both apps and if none holds a message for me, I move on.
I don’t want to derail this conversation but battery drain is a way bigger issue for me. Is there a chance Molly is better in that regard than Signal? Or is it unlikely to be the culprit compared to WhatsApp in the first place?

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Molly does request donations, although I’m not sure if they are for molly or the signal foundation. Most people that use signal do not care about the fact that it is open source, or what makes it private. It is a drop in replacement for messenger, whatsapp, snapchat, etc. Those apps exist to harvest your data, and they do not request donations because you pay for it by using it. The average person does not think “how is this apps development being funded?”. So if signal does not request donations, its easy enough for the average user to not even consider the fact that signal needs funding. If signal only requests donations once and never again, its not unlikely the user will think “maybe later”, and then forget completely about it because they are never prompted again. Signal makes privacy accessible in a way no other app does, they deserve your money, and people deserve to have an option like Signal available to them. I wouldn’t complain that my email provider requires me to pay for space on their server, Signal is offering their service and development for free, but it isn’t free for them.

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You obviously missed this in the original post, so here it is again:

I’m not averse to making donations, I do it for other apps, but being pestered almost to the point of being forced to donate is not a donation, it’s coercion.

I’m happy to oblige with a donation. A nudge twice a year, or (gasp) quarter would be acceptable. But these donation requests appear every two weeks. A new version is released every week/two weeks and one is nagged to update.

The principle of donations is not the point. The point is the frequency.

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