Signal is testing “stories” feature | Hacker News Reader

Signal is testing “stories” feature

androidpolice.com

31 pointsdijit25 comments

Man, does everything need likes, hearts, stories and other unnecessary baggage? I am happy with just one spartan, minimalist safe messaging app that does not have any of these and I'm happy to pay for it as well.

people like stupid bullshit

Yeah. For instance I don't care about encryption at all, it's a shit feature with no benefits. So couldn't they just remove that useless feature and focus on adding telegram's stickers in?

> I'm happy to pay for it as well.

Assuming you're not lying, you are in the mass minority and I hope you do donate; the truth is Moxy has said in the past that it's completely funded as of right now and for the immediate foreseeable future due to the foundation donations.

But Meredith Whittaker (ex google) just took Moxy's role and has given an interview on how things will be funded moving forward, which ultimately relies on the small donation model spread from it's userbase, so I have and will continue to donate and I hope you do as she expresses very well in that interview [0]: privacy by default is getting rarer if not completely gone besides Signal due to most tech corps business models and that has dire implications.

>> people like stupid bullshit

Agreed, but if that helps bring in more possible donations than it's worth it; personally< i have never had any social media (assuming HN isn't) aside from a reddit account but these things are seen and UX enhancements from traditional platforms so hopefully we some significant migration

0: https://twitter.com/HallieOnNBC/status/1577420537973952512?c...

Famously; whatsapp had a payment model at one point.

They charged $1 per year and iirc they were profitable at that price point.

So they're removing the SMS feature but adding Stories? Sounds like we know where this is gonna end up.

I wonder how many use Signal as their default sms app on Android. I have been doing so since the start and thought it was seamleas and amazing. Including the feature for message delivery confirmation. The announcement in the app hit me completely unprepared. We can't have nice things anymore.

Stories sounds nice as a feature. It doesn't take away anything. But dropping sms support makes me bitter. I haven't found a replacement yet so happy to hear recommendations.

I used to use Signal as my default SMS app (and would prefer to have kept it that way), but I would occasionally miss texts. They typically were group MMS ones, so I split them back out.

I too was using SMS in Signal, but only because it was slightly better that the default in GrapheneOS.

That said, I thought it still sucked. Sharing a photo from another app only showed a list of Signal chats and my contacts - with existing SMS chats being absent. There was also no way to bulk delete messages - which was particularly annoying when clearing out the countless Doordash messages I get.

Kind of glad they're altogether scrapping SMS support. Hopefully a better, dedicated app will appear to take it's place as an open source SMS app.

It also allows me to reevaluate whether I even want to consider using Signal since I only talk to two people on it anyway.

Hah, good point about reevaluating. I too have only two people that I talk to via Signal itself. It's going to look quite empty in the app. But then that's the way it is for iOS as well. Oh well.

Same on LineageOS. The default sms app is pretty terrible.

Consider switching to Silence SMS app - https://silence.im/ . It allows you to send normal plain SMS / MMS to anyone. But if the other party also has Silence app installed, it has a neat feature where it uses Signal's encryption protocol to encrypt and send your SMS / MMS to the other party.

It has not been updated since 2019, so I think we can declare it dead :/

If it works fine, then why does it matter if the stable codebase hasn't been updated?

Hmmm, I haven't heard about this one before. Just installed it and it looks quite nice actually. Pretty snappy and configurable. I like it :)

It seems to be f-droid only though and not available on the Play Store anymore. Not that I'm too concerned about that.

Thanks for mentioning it!

Maybe Signal should split into two apps. One keeps SMS for their large Android userbase. The other goes on to become a privacy-respecting TikTok/Snapchat clone. The world needs both of these.

Had Signal been a decentralized service, maybe it would be possible to have both in tandem. The centralized nature of Signal is partly to blame for the fact that it's controlled by a development team who can and will piss off what may be the majority of their users. They have a lot to say about the beautiful simplicity of their protocol, so I'm skeptical of their arguments that it cannot continue coexisting with something like SMS.

After this betrayal, it is foolish to continue putting faith in the Signal team. Continuing to be a user is an endorsement of their pulling the rug from under us. Searching for suitable alternatives, and there are many candidates, is high on my priority list.

PMs never get promoted for saying "Yeah the product is solid we don't need any more features."

Ordinarily I would agree with you, but if https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/signal-foundation is to be believed, it's hard to see the "promotion track" in a 10 person foundation

The idea being to create a social network to attract those who have been avoiding FB, so that their personal data can be datamined too? Folks, please don't forget that when a product that requires an infrastructure that costs money is offered free, your personal data is what's monetising it - whether it be Signal or Proton (though in Proton's case, they do have a business model with non-free services that may be commercially viable).

as far as I know Signal is owned by a non-profit foundation

My understanding is that Signal is monetized through the premined cryptocurrency they integrated which isn't owned by the non-profit but by the people directing it.

The CIA does support, and even runs, many non-profit foundations.

I believe TOR is in large part funded by the US government

As a counterpoint to the (nevertheless valid) comments out here, I’d personally like a product that offers “stories” and other social-media-like features that’s privacy respecting and not based on advertising and stealing personal information.

Should it be in Signal itself? Maybe not. But I’d love a Snapchat equivalent (or similar social media product) from the makers of Signal that doesn’t stalk its users.

The only thing I want are "usernames" and not the binding to a mobile number.

Well, I hope you get them because allegedly that's the very reason they just shot Android SMS in the head: to "free up" resources to work on usernames

I'm sure this stories and the cryptocurrency were implemented by bug free machine generated code and thus didn't detract from said username workload

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