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Comment by fractal618 | Hacker News Reader

Now I just have to get my friends and family to use Signal.

I've had surprisingly good luck with strong-arming people into switching. The important part is having their trust, if they don't believe you they won't listen. The next part is to make simple, verifiable, and non-technical arguments for switching. Believe it or not, almost everybody is willing to take small steps if they're free.

Instead of rambling on and on about "end to end encryption" or "double-ratchet cryptographic algorithms" or other junk only nerds care about, approach it like this:

* There are no ads, and none of the messages you send can be used for advertising

* It's not owned by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or any of the other mega-corporations, and you don't need an account on one of their sites to use it

* It will still work great if you travel, change providers, etc

* It's much safer to use on public Wi-Fi than other services or SMS

Honestly, don't even touch on law enforcement access as in the OP. That can strike a nerve for some people. The best appeals are the simple ones.

Also, a big one that works for me (especially iPhone users, which are the hardest to convert): "You can send full quality images and videos to Android users." The fact that Apple shots themselves in the foot is an advantage to Signal.

That’s not Apples flaw, it’s a flaw with SMS. It can only handle file sizes up to a certain limit, and during periods of congestion they lower that limit.

It’s also an issue the other way around. MMS is the limitation.

The best advice I have to give to get people to switch is showing that you have cross platform capabilities. Essentially everyone can have the features of iMessage/WA: full resolution images and videos, responding to messages with emojis (WA doesn't have), stickers (unfortunately you have to grab from signalstickers.com instead of in-app), voice and video calling, etc. If Apple didn't have such a closed ecosystem then I think it would be harder to get people to switch. In this respect, Signal is more feature rich than anything else (except Telegram, but Telegram doesn't have the same security and isn't trustless).

I think the common mistake is trying to convince people with the security. Use that as a bonus, not the main feature. You're talking geek to people that don't speak geek (convince geeks with these arguments, not mom and dad). I also suggest strong arming people and using momentum (if 4 people in a group of 5 have Signal, switch the group to Signal. Or respond to WA messages on Signal).

I switched to signal and got few people to switch too, then they started their shit coin(MOB). IMO Signal Messenger is just a way for that company to reach their shit coin goals. Uninstalled and never recommending that again.

I remember many people being pissed off when these features were announced some months ago.

As far as I can tell, nothing really happened afterwards. I use Signal on a daily basis and haven't noticed any coin-related functionalities. Either they were canceled, haven't been released yet or they're just buried somewhere deep and not advertised.

Do you have a different experience?

MOB is in beta and I think getting moved (if not already) to main soon. But it is non-intrusive and you won't notice it unless you look for it. People are just complaining about a feature that you have to look for. I'm not a fan of MOB and how the situation was handled, but I also think the reactions people are having are a bit over the top.

It's in beta, you can enable it in settings.

It's still a pain to buy MOB in the US so it's not that usable in the states. It would have been interesting to me if they just used Zcash instead of rolling their own, but I'm not sure what's supposed to be special about MOB vs. Zcash.

I also don't think it's that big of a deal.

I'd love Zcash (forced private transactions). But honestly I'd also like if we could use different currencies. My dream was that you could send cash and they would just use MOB as the intermediate transaction (so your bank would just see a transaction to/from Signal and not who you were sending/receiving to/from). But that also has technical challenges and legal issues so I understand why not. I think a multi-currency wallet is the next best option imo.

Yeah, my long term hope for this stuff is that Urbit succeeds and then a lot of the UX here gets fixed by that and all of these apps become redundant and unnecessary. I'm definitely in the minority there but I think there's a future path where that's possible and works well.

Are you sure you're not thinking of Telegram? They had a thing called Telegram Open Platform or something (TOP rings a bell for some reason)

Signal has some coin

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360057625692-In...

I think it's https://mobilecoin.com/

I have been trying to get people to install signal for 2 years. No one has budged.

The day facebook went down for some hours I got phone calls.

I have had some success. It helps that many of the people I regularly contact were willing to migrate, even after some time. Most already used WhatsApp, so the friction to installing a new app was less than someone not accustomed to using a dedicated app for messaging.

But most of my American friends that don't have international contacts still just use SMS because they are not really accustomed to an app such as WhatsApp and so on.

It's incredibly disheartening how difficult it is to get most people to care about digital privacy.

Even if you do it is pretty much impossible to get them to check their safety numbers and keep them checked.

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