Problems with Signal Messenger App
ravidwivedi.in
ravidwivedi.in
Without the network effects, nobody uses them in the first place, and then you're either
1. stuck chatting with your friends and family on Facebook Messenger or iMessage
2. or you try to convince them to use a decentralized service, which almost certainly doesn't have the usability or polish of an app built by a company.
If you don't like Signal, just don't use it. But it's the absolute best "least bad" option out there by a long shot. My mom is legally blind and uses Signal to talk to me and my dad in a group chat. And if it gets bad, we'll change services. Simple as that.
not true, see [matrix]. You hardly say nobody uses it
Still, the reason why it (and Signal) is not used that much in the first place, is the network effect working much better for WhatsApp and iMessage.
> 2. or you try to convince them to use a decentralized service, which almost certainly doesn't have the usability or polish of an app built by a company.
App built by company and decentralized aren't mutually exclusive.
> And if it gets bad, we'll change services. Simple as that.
tell that the people still stuck with WhatsApp
2. They are, though. Decentralized software necessarily moves slower because everyone needs to upgrade to add new features. Nobody is going to tell their mom to use an app where attachments only works a quarter of time (see: IRC).
3. Nobody is stuck with Whatsapp. My family stopped using it about a year ago. Most of my friends stopped using it a bit after.
Simply a false claim. Prime example: the internet
> Decentralized software necessarily moves slower because everyone needs to upgrade to add new features.
so...?
> Nobody is going to tell their mom to use an app where attachments only works a quarter of time (see: IRC).
and IRC is the same as "decentralized services"?
> 3. Nobody is stuck with Whatsapp. My family stopped using it about a year ago. Most of my friends stopped using it a bit after.
> Just one data point
Email has been around forever. And yet sending an attachment larger than about 50MB is essentially impossible. There will never be an update to email that fixes this.
It worked very well and it was extremely easy to onboard people without anyone getting siloed. A lot of us early adopters remember being dragged into this reliance on centralisation and data, and remember buggy mess it was when that first started.
I'm still quite annoyed and bitter about how signal evolved into signal and lost value for what it was, for the sake of trying to become another WhatsApp.
Opportunistic encryption is also considered bad UX-- too easy to mess up.
(edit: typo)
XMPP is in fact one reasonable approach to standardization. Unfortunately, the Matrix project has caused an effective standard split. Bridging between the two systems still breaks encryption. Identities are not portable between the two systems either.
The Ecosystem is Moving (2019) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdM-XTRyC9c
Even jitsi cannot federate with bigbluebutton.
Though I like email, mailing lists and matrix(element) etc but world is pragmatic: workplace use of slack to whatsapp to signal or google docs.
It has become a habit to post in hn
1. DIY mailserver 2. Photos hosting 3. K8S
but people need to know Infamous Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
The ecosystem is moving, but Signal is falling behind as said ecosystem moves. Way more resources are flowing into making Matrix good than are funding Signal and XMPP, to their detriment.
Which is good as long as they're not the only ones able to confirm that they're just shuffling encrypted blobs around that become data only to the person who can decrypt it.
>> The communications of the whole world get dependent on a single service provider, which is Signal Foundation.
So, even though you can setup the Signal server (https://github.com/aqnouch/Signal-Setup-Guide) on your own infrastructure, in the end it still connects to... Signal own main server (whatever)?
If you have a custom app compile, it's no longer really "Signal".
The app means the official Signal binary?
// If you have a custom app compile, it's no longer really "Signal".
Why? I thought one could compile an app from the GPL Signal codebase and use it to connect to own server.
They don't want others to connect to them so as to have a high level of security, which includes rapid deployment of state-of-the-art security features across their whole fleet. But any individual or group is free to deploy Signal's code on their own servers and apps.