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MLS only deals with encryption and key management, which is great but that’s been a “solved” problem since TextSecure (now Signal) introduced the TextSecure Protocol (now the Signal Protocol) in 2013.

What I’m aware is missing with RCS / MLS compared to Signal (someone with more recent knowledge please correct me):

• Sealed sender so only the recipient knows who sent the message.
• Not storing metadata or logs.
• No built in crash reports.
• Private contact discovery.
• Published government requests providing evidence that they don’t have any data.
• Open source client.
• Looking at the Google Play store, Google’s Messenger shares precise location data with third parties, Signal doesn’t.
• Also on the Google Play store, Google’s Messenger app list a lot of data collected. Signal only lists phone number.

RCS still leaks metadata like a sieve. Encryption, considering the platforms that exist today (Signal and SimpleX), should not be the minimum requirement. Plain-text messaging should not even be possible in modern secure messaging platforms. The platform should be open source and be engineered to mitigate the collection of metadata - like Signal and SimpleX.

Just a reminder for anyone not in the know:

While Bluesky is better than Xitter right now, don’t forget that it’s still a centralized service that has censored - and will continue to censor - content they disagree with. Bluesky Relay servers costs so much to run that it’s only financially feasible for big corporations to run them. This forces centralization, although technically can be decentralized, and puts it’s end users onto the same path of enshittification that Xitter and other social networks have gone through.

Mastodon, while imperfect, is actually decentralized (including DM’s - all Bluesky DMs are centralized amd can be viewed by its admins) and cannot suffer this type of censorship.

but I thought apple were the good guys /s