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Comment by 6gvONxR4sf7o | Hacker News Reader

I love and hate signal. The tech seems good, but the UX has some real frustrations. Group chats are the most glaringly frustrating part in my mind.

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That’s because group chat in an encrypted messenger with good ux is an unsolved cryptographic research problem. Everyone else just punts on it.

I get why that’s unsatisfying from the user perspective, but it’s absolutely necessary from the perspective of maintaining user trust over time. Signal has a plan to fix it but we’ll have to see if they can actually implement their new groups solution.

What? No it’s not an unsolved crypto research problem. Signal supports group chats just fine, it’s just that’s it’s hidden away behind a couple extra clicks and you have to name them that inordinately annoys me compared to imessage where you just type the recipients out all in one place. It makes it feel like you’re Setting Up A Group instead of just bullshitting with friends.

You misunderstand this problem. Doing group chat where you do a massive rekeying of all participants every time someone joins doesn’t scale, but it is secure. Signal doesn’t practically support large groups like Telegram does (although telegram is unencrypted as a result).

I can assure you that large secure groups with strong cryptographic guarantees and evolving membership lists is unsolved.

Nah, you misunderstand the complaint. The UX is annoying if you just want to message your friends Alice and Bob. On other platforms it's trivial. On those, you type alice into the new message bar, click her contact, type bob into the address bar, click his contact, then write your message and hit send. On signal, you have to create a new group first.

I'm not talking about wanting to make the kinds of groups with dynamic membership like you're talking about.

I'm probably missing the point, I use groups in Signal but I never faced any issue. I'm probably not a power user. Can you provide more details please? I'm curious about it. Thanks :)

Not sure what exactly OP is referring to, but this bug has plagued Signal for quite some time in that it doesn't handle Signal to non-Signal group messages gracefully:

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/8571

The bug is my only real complaint with Signal's group messaging system.

EDIT: I should note that the bug was opened in January of 2019 (although existed for much longer than that) and as of December 2019 it was still in ongoing problem for some users.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22358608

I elaborated in responding to another user.

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