Absolutely, and I’m not trying to say they don’t own their infra or have the ability to cut off the Molly users. Luckily, if that were to happen, you could use the automated backups to restore back into Signal, since they’re functionally the same.
Regardless, both apps have reproducible builds. It’s the infra that isn’t reproducible.
They’ve been allowing Molly to continue to function for multiple years. Notably, from Molly’s readme:
Molly connects to Signal’s servers, so you can chat with your Signal contacts seamlessly.
I looked over the terms of service linked there and don’t see anything specifically calling out third party clients. Is that elsewhere in another terms page somewhere or is it just not being specifically mentioned?
Point 2 is mostly not true, in that Molly exists and you can do reproducible builds with either implementation.
I’m not sure how much they dig, but Alexa recently changed to do everything via cloud, including all recordings and voice processing. It’s definitely at least always listening and phoning home.
Yeah, Ubuntu is really corpo these days, tons of bloat too. I avoid it like the plague.