Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

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I love Signal, and I think you're spot on about what they did. But I've been having a difficult time with the direction Signal is currently going. It seems like they are just trying to create feature parity with WA and Telegram. Which, honestly they are pretty near that already and the differences aren't worthwhile. Worse, they'll always be playing catch-up, because those companies have 100-1000x the number of developers. Instead, I think Signal needs to do what it does best: protecting users. I don't think this needs decentralization, although I saw a user post a feature request that was about semi-decentralization/meshing and that seemed pretty useful.[0] If Signal can bring anonymity and censorship mitigation to the public that really gives us the full Monty. That's really what I want to see from Signal. It fits their mission and keeps their edge.

The best thing Signal has done is made everyone else adopt E2EE. Signal shouldn't be playing catch-up, they should be pushing others to follow suit. Companies like Meta say that they need data to protect users but Signal ,,demonstrates'' that this is not necessary. So continue in this direction. I know many want to just keep Signal as it is (Signal purists) but Moxie is right. The ecosystem is moving. Staying still will just get you killed.

[0] https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-airdrop/37402

>>It seems like they are just trying to create feature parity with WA and Telegram. Which, honestly they are pretty near that already and the differences aren't worthwhile.

Yeah, I don't know about that. I started using Signal about 6 years ago, I think. I remember back in the day there was a stable native Telegram desktop client that just worked (keeps working without single issue for years) and web WA client that just worked if the phone is online (mildly annoying, but very rarely a problem). Over time Signal developed an Electron-based client that annoyed me every time I use it. It requires relinking to the phone, it can't decrypt messages read from mobile, it can't send messages, it can send them, but the other party can't read them. I try it again every few months hoping that they fix these problems. Instead I get stickers and reactions =/

Yeah, I get it, multi-client encryption is hard, but WA seems to solve it using the same protocol. What I experience with Signal desktop client reminds me of Jabber OTP client compatibility issues 10 years ago. I almost stopped using Signal despite shiny E2EE. 90% of my texting is from desktop. I need it to work reliably. I don't care about stickers and reactions.

> Over time Signal developed an Electron-based client that annoyed me every time I use it. It requires relinking to the phone, it can't decrypt messages read from mobile, it can't send messages, it can send them, but the other party can't read them.

While I agree the app is a resource hog for what it is, I haven't ever had to relink my phone after the first time unless I reinstalled the app or got a new phone (duh). As for unreadable messages, I use Signal daily and have never had that issue once. I have had that issue multiple times using Whatsapp however.

>>It seems like they are just trying to create feature parity with WA and Telegram.

> Yeah, I don't know about that. […] What I experience with Signal desktop client reminds me of Jabber OTP client compatibility issues 10 years ago.

Like for the sibling commentator, the desktop client has been working for me largely flawlessly. Sure, doing backups on the desktop (and restoring them) would be nice, and no longer needing a phone number or needing to link it to a phone would be even nicer.

Meanwhile, though, WhatsApp doesn't even have a desktop client to begin with and their web UI is still mediocre and unsafe.

And let's not even speak about E2E encryption (or the general state of security) in Telegram.

So yes, I would argue most of Signal's features are more than on par with WhatsApp and Telegram.

Whatsapp does have a desktop client, at least for Mac (also electron like Signal's) and you can use it on the web without even installing one. Much better than Signal which only has an electron client so you need to run a whole browser just for it.

If it's browser based just let me run it in a tab.

> multi-client encryption is hard

It's taken a few years, and there may be a few bugs left that I don't know about (out of sight, out of mind), but Matrix uses the same double-ratchet encryption, and has solved multi-client encryption with cross-signing. Some clients may be imperfect, but this is the price we pay for being able to develop other clients - something Signal steadfastly refuses.

But in order to do 'bring privacy to masses', don't you think they need familiar features? Otherwise it's just 'oh that weird crypto privacy nerd chat app' that the masses don't want to use.

What "familiar features" is Signal missing? Honest question. It has reactions, groups, stickers (wish they linked signalstickers.org so you can get more from inside the app), replies, etc. I don't see anything that WA or iMessage has that Signal doesn't. I know WA has statuses, but every time I look at it none of my friends have posted one. Telegram has channels, but do we really need that?

I honestly don't know what these features are. The only thing I hear from normal people is stickers and "but none of my friends are there." This is a genuine question because I can't figure out what others have that Signal doesn't.

Telegram has a bot API that is great. I use it for a lot of Projects. Used to be a niche feature I guess, but nowadays I see a LOT of people using some bot for some specific feature.

For starters, others don't lose all your messages if your phone breaks and allow you to actually send messages from desktop and tablet platforms without constantly breaking and losing data.

The "backup" system Signal has is a joke for everyone outside the paranoid community. Every messaging platform has a single chance of losing users data before they switch away. Signal does it constantly.

You should be setting a two-week auto-delete for all your messages anyway. Archive and backup features in other apps are a massive privacy hole. These chats are supposed to be ephemeral, if you want long lasting comms that you can search through later, use email.

The idea of any of my contacts logging every message I ever sent to them, and backing them up in clear text on whatever dumb cloud provider they're using this week, is a pretty scary one.

Please stop telling me and my family what to do with our private messages. If you want to destroy them immediately, that's fine. But stop demanding that Signal destroys pictures and messages my grandmother cares about without her own input.

This arrogance is the worst cancer on "privacy" software. Essence of privacy is _control_ over data, not destruction.

Not sure I agree with this. The problem is I don’t know what I’ll need later until I need it… old messages from months or years ago that I never expected to need have saved me multiple times for a variety of reasons by now.

It’s also awkward to try to herd a conversation partner from chat to email at some arbitrary point when you think the conversation is veering in a direction where preservation is important.

Try sending emails with E2E encryption. Good luck.

Live location.

I use Signal as my main messaging app now, but even for the contacts on there I have to fall back to Whatsapp to share our live locations in order to find each other. Doesn't happen very often but it is a useful feature that it is missing.

I extremely don’t want this in Signal.

Is it really that hard to tell someone where you are with words?

I like the social impact of real-time disclosure of my location. I’d rather share my location for an hour with someone that I’m meeting than send them periodic messages guessing about how far away I am.

I think Apple has done a really good job with this — you can share your location for an hour, the rest of the day, or forever. I use the “share for an hour” option all the time.

If you don't want to constantly be texting while riding a bike, it's hard to do.

Yes, people need it. Had to use Telegram for it recently, because Matrix didnt have it at that time, and I don't have WhatsApp.

Do people really need minutely updates on your bike ride? What value does it add to anyone's life to know what exact block you're on for the next 15 seconds?

Just tell them your final destination verbally, and you're done.

Maybe they were riding in a group and one of them stopped to take photos and lost the rest of them. Now they want to see where everyone else is and catch up to them.

Sometimes its about the journey, not the destination.

Yes. Try describing in words where you are in huge crowds of people or in open fields or beaches.

You can easily send a location pin. Yes I realize this isn't constantly updating, but seems enough to meet 90% (number pulled out of my ass) of the use cases.

"I am about 200 feet southeast of the large monument in the center of the park, wearing a red shirt"

"From the XYZ Street beach entrance, we're about 100 yards north, with a blue umbrella."

Using realtime GPS tracking for this sort of thing is fetishizing technology to overoptimize a problem that was trivially solved for millenia using verbal offsets from known landmarks, while at the same time introducing and normalizing grave privacy concerns in society.

>large monument

Good luck at long beaches where there are endless swaths of identical copy-paste tress, tents, deck chairs and umbrellas, without any unique elements to use as bearings. I would hate to have to send people on wild goose chases in the hot sun.

>wearing a red shirt

You've obviously never experienced how difficult it is to be found by your friends if you're short in a crowd of tall people at a concert or any sort of wide festival/gathering. Telling people what color your shirt is doesn't do anything to help if they can't see you until they're within 1m of you. And that's without it being dark at night. It's like finding Waldo IRL but more difficult.

> fetishizing technology to overoptimize a problem that was trivially solved for millenia

Ok Fred Flintstone, you do you, just let me enjoy the modern comforts of current technical achievements please and you feel free to follow the stars and buffalo tracks with your friends.

I mean people used to do this all the time. I sure did.it isn't that hard and is often more accurate than GPS, but I do get your point. For what its worth signal does have location sharing.it just doesn't update.

Don't iPhone and Android make it super trivial to get a live location link from the maps app that you can drop in the chat? I know Android does. Seems weird to put it directly into an encrypted messaging app when it's native to the OS.

I'm on Android and didn't know I could do that. Now I realise that you can, its just buried a little bit. Signal also lets you share photos directly from the app; I don't have to go to another app on the phone and share from there, so it does seem like a different UX route compared to what I'd expect.

Thanks for that.

Matrix clients have it: https://element.io/blog/element-launches-e2ee-location-shari...

Encrypted backups. That’s the one thing I miss and why I’m not - yet - recommending to switch to my friends and family.

Molly, a (compatible) fork, has this feature.

The ability to forward more than one photo at a time. When someone reacts to a message I get a notification but there's no way of determining what message has been reacted to. The backup system to restore messages when changing phones is fragile and something I have to help less technical friends / family members with.

Who are these older/less technical users that can't store text or images outside of an encrypted conversation, but somehow are still agile enough to search back through lengthy conversation histories?

Many people? The search box is right there, but filesystems confuse the crap out of people before mixing in the app/local file distinction.

I dont think I did a very good job of explaining what I mean. Im talking about the process to transfer Signal from one phone to another. In my experience it involves placing the phones near one another and transferring over bluetooth (I think) and this process has failed for me a number of times - a scary experience!

I did this but wired and everything worked fine. it just took awhile.

> The ability to forward more than one photo at a time

This is already possible (on Android at least), and has been for a long while.

Long press on one, press "select" which allows you to select other photos, select the photos you like, and then press forward.

One issue with that is that if multiple photos are grouped together, you have to select the whole group, but you can definitely forward multiple photos in one go.

Sorry, I meant forward from an existing message. So if I want to share a bunch of photos from one group to another, I dont believe theres any way to select multiple photos (on iOS at least).

Weird, I can do this on Android.

I don't use it, (I wish everyone used it or something similar, but nobody I know does, or certainly didn't when I last tried it and it was nothing like that, just SMS-like) so I can't speak to that, but my impression up-thread was that that was exactly the sort of thing people were wishing it wouldn't (have) focus(sed) on.

Isn't telegram also from a crypto nerd

Hmm, it’s not that hard to get people to use it. It’s got free stickers!

I guess it's great but gosh I hate stickers, to me they are over-engineered emojis.

The only feature parity I want is synced chat logs and not being tied to a phone number. And Signal doesn't support it.

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