Hacker News Reader

Comment by soiler | Hacker News Reader

The common criticisms of Signal to me often come down to letting perfect be the enemy of good. Yes, I want a perfectly secure and private messaging app, but Signal is an incredibly important stepping stone in that direction. It's moving the Overton window.

View on HN

Except that it doesn't seem to be better than existing Whatsapp in any way? They even use the same protocol and it barely made a dent in WhatsApps market share.

Outside the small % that rejects Meta... Who is it for and how exactly is it reaching it's objectives?

Its for those who reject Meta. No one else. People who want to disconnect from the surveillance-advertisement network of Meta. Remember that Meta likely uses your Whatsapp contacts web for its advertisements elsewhere. Signal does not.

> Remember that Meta likely uses your Whatsapp contacts web for its advertisements elsewhere. Signal does not.

Signal does not uses your contacts web elsewhere, that you know of.

Signal has less incentive and ability to do so than Facebook/Meta, so all else being equal, the former still deserves more trust.

That doesn't match what tptacek said though - it seems like Signal wants to be bigger while refusing to actually be better as a product.

Even if Whatsapp was as good as Signal, Signal would have been the stepping stone. Signal developed the protocol first and assisted Whatsapp in adopting it.

Projecting from personal anecdote here, but... my social circles have almost no intersection with my life in tech. They are not "tech people". Yet I have only a single contact that still messages me via WhatsApp. Everyone else and all of the groups I'm in moved to Signal.

Mine too, but I think we’re uncommon. Far more people use WhatsApp than Signal.

On the plus side; existing familiarity with WhatsApp makes moving to Signal easy to understand for people as they are very similar apps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com