Molly advertises itself as a “hardened version of Signal,” & its FOSS variant is the same without proprietary dependencies. TwinHelix’s FOSS Signal fork goes further, adding OSM support instead of GMaps. Are these forks trustworthy, & are they worth using for added security compared to mainline?
Yes they are allowed. The devs have nothing against third party clients as long as they’re not abusing the network or pretending to be the official Signal app.
The issue you’re referring to happened, I believe, around 2016 and it was specific to one developer who was using a similar app name and the lead Signal dev basically told them specifically to not use their network.
Almost every other Signal client since then even report to Signal’s servers as a third party client - and the signal devs can see this in their logs - and nobody has been kicked/asked to stop anything since.
I also seem to recall the issue may have been 3rd party clients unintentionally abusing the network at the time, causing issues for other users, so I can see the frustration from a dev perspective to potentially be woken up at midnight for an issue/outage affecting your users, that is caused or at least made worse by clients that are pegging their servers.
If anyone has more background or corrections, please let me know so I can update/edit my statement.
