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Comment by bitcharmer | Hacker News Reader

Well, this sucks. I just switched from WhatsApp and few days later this. Can anyone here recommend something more reliable?

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This is unusual, and probably in part due to the influx of many new users, such as yourself. Stick with it, they'll have it back up.

I just upped my monthly donation to the Signal Technology Foundation to help them offset some of their costs.

https://www.signal.org/donate/

All alternatives, like Signal, are getting a huge unexpected influx of new users from Parler's shutdown. One of the others was having similar problems a day or two ago. I think I remember seeing that Signal had the biggest boost, too.

I'd imagine that Signal's increase in popularity is overwhelmingly due to WhatsApp's recent changes to their privacy policy rather than Parler's shutdown. More of my contacts have joined Signal in the last week than they had in the last year. I'd be surprised if any of them were ex-Parler users.

Parler was pretty much the antithesis of end to end encrypted and secure, and Signal serves a very different purpose to Parler. From what I've seen on Parler, their average user would dismiss Signal as being produced by commies and therefore evil, due to its Open Source license.

Go back to WhatsApp. Signal is crashing because it appearantly went up 5x in userbase. I can't guarantee any other service would cope with such a rapid expansion of their userbase other than WhatsApp.

Or stick it out a little and sms people.

This is the first outage i recall

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