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Comment by fredley | Hacker News Reader

Facebook and Insta I can (and do!) live without. Whatsapp though, is the main method of communication, and particularly group communication for all of my friends. It's almost impossible to leave.

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One approach that helped me convert some of my non-tech friends to Signal Messenger is by calmly focusing on the long term aspect -- "Think about it, you'd be using these tools for the next 40+ years. A small inconvenience for a few months will give more power to you in the long term." And then I stop. I let them take time to decide; don't insist.

On iOS it’s not a small inconvenience to use Signal. For several years now, Signal has prohibited backing up chats. So if you switch phones or get a new phone or lose your phone, all your previous chats are permanently lost. Even re-joining the chat groups you were a part of requires more work, and after that there are issues in not seeing the group name, the members and related things. Signal is just ok as an ephemeral messenger, but it’s not a solution or a replacement of any kind for the other messaging platforms that work as one would expect them to and provide key features that lay people appreciate. Going by the pace of development, my view is that it’ll be a good enough alternative in a decade.

There are also other basic issues with Signal (message deliverability, buggy and spurious “device number changed” notifications, etc.).

Note that I do use Signal and advocate it, but I do that with only certain people so that I don’t burn my personal “relationship capital” unnecessarily with a poor solution.

I don't use any of them, but I've been trying to keep in touch with an old friend of mine who's serving with the Canadian Armed Forces in Ukraine and we often miss each other's emails.

He's had to adopt a local SIM card over there for security purposes (Russia's listening) and uses WhatsApp regularly. He asked me to pick it up, and instead I referred him to Signal.

This was [part of] his recent response:

I downloaded signal but they want to confirm my number but my sim card doesnt work over here and my european card is data only.

So that is one blocker for sure but otherwise I always push people to Signal as a reasonable alternative.

Apparently if SMS verification fails, it can fall back to a phone call where a robot reads you the verification code. This means you could set up Signal with a landline, Google Voice, Skype, or Twilio.

https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/signal-tutorial-second-p...

Just make sure you don’t lose access to that number. Or you’ll find yourself locked out of Signal completely if someone else verifies an account using that number.

I've converted most of my friends to Signal. Easy switch.

[edit] The native desktop app is even better than WhatsApp's (doesn't stream data from your phone).

I'd say you were a lucky one. Persuading my contacts to move and explaining my rationale has been a long, arduous and still not quite complete process. People seem to struggle with envisaging how a lack of privacy will harm them personally.

I've also got most to switch to Signal. On Android, it's much easier as it can handle both SMS and Signal messages, so there's much less friction for usage.

Group chats are also fairly decent on Signal, I just wish there was a way for an "admin" to exist to moderate users in the group.

> I've also got most to switch to Signal. On Android, it's much easier as it can handle both SMS and Signal messages, so there's much less friction for usage.

Except my friend's gf could never really see when messages were using data or SMS. And my friend put a stop to the experiment because the linux client was leaking RAM like a dam and we both had sync problems between the phone and the desktop client (we are both huge telegram users for the smooth experience when connecting to your account and for syncing. We both despise the privacy risks though).

I empathize. It's the same situation in reverse for many people. The social networks I'm on is where my friends and/or fam are at. It becomes very hard to leave once you've imprinted your social network onto a social network platform. A very common situation.

I wonder if its possible to mirror messaging apps in some way... like to use messenger/whatsapp/{insert better app here} as 'clients' and sync messages in a non annoying way (of course, im sure this would be actively undermined)

Try AirSend (https://www.airsend.io). We use it for group communication both for personal and professional use.

It is private. Create a channel and invite your friends. Thats it.

Disclaimer: I work for them.

I had a very quick look. How is this different from Slack and how does it avoid the incessant notifications/interruptions/noise problem in Slack and similar platforms?

AirSend is custom built to address communication use case cases across organization boundaries. For instance, you don’t need to switch across workspaces to communicate with different parties. Unlike Slack It also provides the file context and task context in the same conversation space.

With respect to interruptions/noise it doesn’t have any advantages over Slack.

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