Hacker News Reader

Comment by upofadown | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why people insist on running this particular siloed encrypted instant messenger everywhere in every way. There are tons of these things out there. Since none of them interoperate anyway all you need to do is pick one that everyone in your group can run.

Kind of an upside to very unfortunate situation...

View on HN

> need to do is pick one

That is exactly the de-facto selling point of Signal. It does this and enough of other things better than the rest of the truly secure messengers. (Still not as good as Whatsapp is at these network effects, obviously.)

This is exactly why people insist on it. And exactly why if there was other messenger in it's place you would be asking the same thing.

Matrix is interoperable.

Moving to signal is going to end up being the same problem that moving to WhatsApp was: single point of failure.

Along with the same kind of lock-in to Android or IOS smartphones and the forced use of phone-numbers as user identifier.

So yeah, great that it's not Facebook, but not very useful otherwise.

I haven't really seriously looked into Matrix before. I've briefly skimmed what I could find about it, but didn't see any simple way to get something running where I could easily onboard friends/family. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems like the single biggest issue with Matrix.

I see you've managed to make an account on HN.

It is exactly the same. Download one of the clients, for example, Element. Then register. You don't even need an email address. Just make up a name, and a password.

There's even a web client that is functionally identical to the desktop and mobile clients.

It could not be simpler.

Ta da.

> simple way to get something running where I could easily onboard friends/family

He's not talking about himself, he's talking about (non-IT) friends and family. Most of them probably would be barely able to find the register dialog on HN, that's at least what I would say about my non tech-savy friends. A good chunk of them doesn't even have a PC.

For those people, Signal is optimal. Its onboarding and usage is a lot easier than Matrix.

Baloney. If they're that inept, GP is going to have to do it for them anyways. He should save himself some trouble and start with something he won't have to replace in 5 years when precisely the same thing that happened at WhatsApp happens to signal.

Signal is also not a good messenger...

You can't delete signal contacts and other potentially incriminating meta... Like wtf?!

Afaik none of that data is stored server-side anyway.

It is.

I find it particularly annoying that it inherits almost all of the worst features of WhatsApp which people are supposedly fleeing, such as being completely centralized and tied to your phone number.

People fleeing WhatsApp is basically fleeing from it because it is owned by Facebook. So it's usually for political reasons (especially in the USA) and/or for privacy concerns. A minority of tech-savvy users are leaving it for the reasons you say.

Not exactly sure what you are talking about. People are fleeing from Whatsapp because it's owned by Facebook (which has one of the worst privacy reputations), because it's closed source and because facebook can replace your E2EE private key if they want so the E2EE is pretty useless. Facebook could also use the metadata if they want, which is pretty valuable.

Signal on the other hand is a nonprofit run by trusted people like Moxie Marlinspike, it's accessible to casual (non-IT) users as well (unlike XMPP) and it's fully open-source. It also minimizes metadata, like with the Sealed Sender functionality.

> trusted people like Moxie Marlinspike

Just out of curiosity and not challenging: what makes Moxie trustworthy?

His code. Go check it out and decide for yourself.

https://github.com/moxie0

So if someone can write good code they cannot be malicious? Not sure we are using the same definition of trustworthy.

I suppose this is a matter of opinion, but for many the worst feature of WhatsApp is the fact Facebook has access to most of your stuff and its E2E encryption barely worked.

Signal being centralized and tied to a phone number are design choices to make things easier for users. That's a far cry from the presumed reasons WhatsApp did things. The only reason that Signal has gained what traction it has is because of those features.

Personally, I think that WhatsApp has an excellent user experience (including their encryption which is fine) and the only reason I am leaving is because of privacy concerns.

Signal also has an excellent user experience (much better than I was expecting) and most of the privacy concerns are alleviated. Decentralised would be better, but I have not found Matrix to be a particularly smooth experience.

The problem is the lack of alternatives for non-technical people.

My grandmother can easily use WhatsApp or Signal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com