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Comment by gyosko | Hacker News Reader

The problem is not finding a nice alternative.

The problem is that everybody's contacts are on Whatsapp. How do you make THEM switch?

You uninstall WhatsApp and tell your closest family and friends that they can only reach you on Signal. Because you are so important to them, they will install Signal as a backup/secondary app. Other people will do the same, and it will snowball into everyone having Signal installed and at some point people will realise that the network effect is gone.

This is happening. First they get surprised that communication is possible beyond WA, even exactly the same. My mother's reaction was hilarious after sending me photos from Signal, free of charge. She was thinking only WA is free, every other app will charge her. I had to explain that calling, voice or video is also possible, without any payment.

How is free sustainable for Signal? I understand why WA is free based on data collection, but Signal just seems too benevolent toward its users. I read up on Signal Foundation (Acton and Marlinspike) as a non-profit which is being buoyed along by $100M from Acton. Mozilla is a non profit too, but it gets money from Google for placing Google search in Firefox. Where is the long term cash flow for Signal?

I wouldn’t be surprised if the WhatsApp founders, between the two of them, can easily sponsor Signal’s lean team for decades. (Since they’ve shown the inclination with substantive initial investments already, I’d imagine that they’ll happily keep funding if Signal continues to be used)

I was looking for this information as well. They have a donation page - https://www.signal.org/donate/ - unlike the Mozilla Foundation/Firefox, so if enough people decide to use it, and to make regular(ish) donations, it could work. See Wikipedia.

How much does it cost to run such a system and pay a dozen employees? $10m a year? Besides donation Signal does get money from the US gov because while we complain about encryption here we also realize that giving people in other countries an encrypted free form of communication helps them be freer. Our military also encourages the use because it is better that soldiers talk to their wives, partners, friends with that app than an unencrypted means and have the potential for blackmail. Same goes for politicians and many famous people (Joe Rogan recently mentioned he uses it). There is a strange dichotomy of pro and anti-encryption with the gov. But Signal does have a lot of funders and it isn't just your average person.

> You uninstall WhatsApp and tell your closest family and friends that they can only reach you on Signal. Because you are so important to them, they will install Signal as a backup/secondary app.

I'll be the one friend that'll insist on SMS/email. I’ll even offer to use some other supposedly encrypted method like Keybase or Matrix. If that doesn't work as a fallback, then I guess we can agree to disagree, and someone else can play the middleperson for us. :)

I refuse to use Signal because it doesn't offer chat sync, or message preservation if I either lose or have to wipe my phone.

How do you sync and preserve your SMS? Whenever I migrate phones, it is always the most painful part.

I back my messages up to iCloud.

For Android devices, I've been using the SMS Backup & Restore app [1] since Android ~2.1 or so.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.riteshsahu...

> I refuse to use Signal because it doesn't offer chat sync

Install Pidgin with signald ;)

One of the benefits of Signal is that it can also do SMS on Android, so it works great with people like you who insist on using that. Your SMS messages will appear right alongside the native Signal ones in the app.

You can backup your signal message DB; maybe not as nice as iCloud, but I guess you get what you pay for?

This is working for me. I am already using Matrix and now my parents are ready to switch to Matrix (with Element). Thank you Facebook.

Been there, done that.

I can state that it's a bit unrealistic to expect this kind of outcome.

Make it easier to switch, is the answer.

That was my thought process evaluating alternatives this morning. Signal is apparently lauded by the privacy crowd, but I took one look at it and said "no way is Mum going to use this".

I went with Telegram because the usability was good, WhatsApp-like functionality, and I saw a few people I know already on it - non-techies in particular, which is vital if we're going to disrupt WhatsApp.

lots of my friends have both whatsapp and telegram

and now some of them are almost exclusively on telegram and some on whatsapp

and whats worse is,now there are some half-and-half conversations in both

and on top of that whatsapp rolled out business accounts and every mom and pop store has whatsapp and thats the only way you can communicate with them in real time

i dont think im gonna be switching out

What gripes did you run into with Signal? Most of my friends (tech or non-tech) use Signal, so I'm really curious.

Where do you live? It's interesting to hear about an area where most people are running signal.

Here in the UK WhatsApp and messenger are the only ones that most people I know are using.

I'm pretty sure it's not my area, I just tell everyone I converse with to use signal and most of them do.

So one of the key differences was that when I loaded Telegram, I had a list of contacts ready to go, people who already had Telegram. I sent a message to a few people via iMessage using the "Invite Friends" menu item.

When I tried Signal, I saw an empty list and had to add numbers / find people myself. Not much in the way of onboarding IMO. My complaints are likely met with "duh, that's how it works, idiot", I believe that's just how Signal is designed as it's a privacy-centric app.

I'm just looking for a non-Facebook WhatsApp alternative, rather than a complete focus on privacy and E2E messaging, so I don't think Signal is "bad" but it's not what I'm looking for. I just want Facebook out of my life and its grubby hands off my data.

I installed both Telegram and Signal yesterday and both showed me a list of my contacts on their platforms. The list was actually substantially longer on Signal, in fact.

There were some permissions settings that I didn't pay close attention to, but maybe you didn't allow the app to control your calls or see your contacts on setup?

> When I tried Signal, I saw an empty list and had to add numbers / find people myself

That's not how it works; Signal directly gives you the list of contacts that are available, just like Whatsapp or Telegram.

The most likely is that you had an empty list because no-one in your contacts have it.

When I switched family on Xmas day 2019 it took hours for contact data to sync so that it was possible to message each other. WhatsApp setup took seconds to propagate. Luckily I was eventually able to persuade it was worth waiting for signal.

I saw someone with this issue on HN the other day. Though I've never had that myself, you can apparently pull down to refresh the contact list within Signal after tapping the "write new message" (white pen on blue background) icon.

The folks here are quite persuasive. Once we start switching rest will follow.

Let the exodus begin!

I was thinking the same. "Wow, just switch and people will switch too", LOL.

(see edit below)

You won't get them to switch and I use both. I try to get people to switch to Signal for comms with me and the hope is that if more people install it then they'll use it to communicate with each other. The majority of my contacts have not installed it. I am not yet worried enough about the current state of whatsapp that I'm willing to forgo using it entirely.

Signal, at least, is a very easy install and will just locate your contacts by their phone numbers (like WhatsApp) so the technical barrier is very low.

Edit: Oh, I came in to this thread without seeing anything about this new privacy policy. My comment was about the state before that. I'm only looking at the change now.

I'm over here confused about how so many people are using Whatsapp. Is this is the United States or other countries? No one I know uses Whatsapp over here.

I did however do what others are suggesting. I installed Signal, and told my close family and friends to install it to communicate with me - and to not use standard SMS anymore.

While I did get a bit of grief over it initially, we are all happily using Signal now, and more people I know are moving to it all the time.

It's also a great middle ground for iPhone and Android users to communicate.

You're absolutely right. Which is why any alternative we DO deem worth evangelizing should absolutely not have the same vendor lock-in problem as WhatsApp has. Which Signal and most of the alternatives listed do: they are single-service clients.

If we do manage to migrate some/any of our friends away from the embedded plethora of contacts they have on WhatsApp, I really hope it's towards something like Matrix, or similar, that doesn't have that same problem.

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