Convert all active whatsapp contacts to signal? 80%? 50%?
Same for Facebook messenger!
It needs to be uncomfortable enough - if they want to communicate with us and are minimally tech savvy ("click link to install app") they have to switch to signal.
That's it.
I'm starting to send out messages over my morning coffee.
Let's do this together:
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007060592-In...
1. There are tons of replies in this thread. People have very strong feelings about signal.
2. Some people feel VERY STRONGLY that the pin numbers are stupid, and it has a terrible UX.
3. Some people feel VERY STRONGLY that the phone numbers are the simplest, most straightforward thing to use, and they would hate Signal if they didn't support it.
4. Some people feel VERY STRONGLY that they don't want their phone number used as an identifier, and it's a failure of Signal that they use them.
And it seems like many of these replies assume that their own position is the only possible one to take (or at least the only intelligent one!).
Imagine working on Signal and trying to create a product that pleases all these people, as well as even less technically minded folks, while having none of the usual analytics at your disposal to measure actual user interaction!
My hat's off to Signal. I admire their work but I don't envy their position.
At this point, none of us even use phones, my family pretty much use Zoom and at work everything is Google Meet, my phone function is basically a dead function at this point.
My email represents me, and I fully own it with minimal upkeep costs.
You can make the argument that I don't truly “owns” the domain name off of which my e-mail address hangs, either, but it's a much better situation than phone number ownership. There, at least, the constraints of ownership (rental) are clearly defined, as is my ability to move it between registrars.
Yes I think they suck, but do they suck more or less than en email? Not clear.
I'm a core contributor at Status, and the team I'm on is currently developing a desktop client[1] to complement the mobile client. We have alpha builds for Linux and macOS, and soon Windows.
Status uses the Waku[2] protocol.
One thing: I don't think it's unusual for a user to have little/no interest in the wallet or dapp browser. In that case they simply use it as a chat app that's focused on privacy and security while ignoring the other features.
The uptake? Like ~30% of the people I'd like to contact bother with it. The rest, it's even worse - we get stuck with SMS. And a lot of conversations I just miss, period, because they're groups of people in one of those other ecosystems (and missing those is a price I'm personally OK with paying, but not everybody will be).
The situation is just really bad. Signal is a good baby step forward, but it's not really the answer for most people, because they're sticky to wherever their network graph of contacts already is, and they're not going to switch just because the one weird nerd in their life isn't available there.
are you OK with THAT? You support children harassment by cops?
Throw some biased media page calling big companies bad. Not a hard thing to do today or write an opinion piece on popular news journal site and reference it. Medium works too.
We also need to cancel people for supporting these platforms.
The result is uncomfortable, since Signal never knows the other side removed it, so messages land in thin air. Several times did I have awkward moments when someone was angry "I thought you'd let me know if it was cancelled" - "I did - I sent you a text about that two days ago! On Signal!"
And after it started insisting on creating a PIN each time I start Signal, I finally deleted it from my phone.
You can forget about security if you can't get a seamless user experience.
Plus, it's just a terrible UX for a SMS client. I really wanted to like it, but it's just too obnoxious to use. I've certainly not recommended it, I've had better luck switching relatives to Linux mint (seriously, I am not exaggerating). Creating a group MMS is annoying, and there's a nag screen if you try to call someone from a message within the app. I understand that most of these problems are due to the secure nature of the app, but trying to use it as your full-time SMS client is just too much of a pain. I'll likely still keep it installed, as the 1 thing it does do is make it really easy to transfer files/send messages between devices (send messages to yourself, then download them using the client's for other OS's).
Personally, I don't feel the UX is "terrible", I can use it to do most of the things that I could do in WhatsApp. My friends and I also tested out the video call feature and found the quality to be the same, if not better.
That has never happened to me.
They can start by removing the atrocious phone number verification first.
Being forced to give them one of my 'most unique identifiers' (my phone number) was an absolute 'no'.
There are some good-looking and user-friendly clients