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Comment by novia | Hacker News Reader

Personal computers are big. They don't fit in your pocket. They don't lock when you hit a small button on the side. They are often shared. Your argument about locking down the whole computer is brought up every time someone wants this feature. The reality is, we want signal to be an application that anyone can use. Not everyone is a single male with enough income to have their own private computer.

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So what about your mail client, team chat app, browser (with all your accounts logged in to your sites), terminal, and all your files and network mounts?

I would rather make this a feature of your desktop environment / window manager. Then you have this functionality for all apps, and the apps themselves don't have to make that functionality.

Edit: actually maybe what you're looking for is to have multiple accounts on one computer. Then every user has their own desktop environment with their own apps and data and apps are not shared among users.

Signal originally marketed itself as an application to replace sms texting. People put more personal information into their sms chats than they do into a discord chat or email typically. Every other chat application I use on the desktop has the option to log out.

I'm not going to argue the justification for this functionality with you all any more, and it is a little strange and suspicious that there are so many of you all opposed to a simple option being added to an app. It's a little insulting that you and other commenters think that multiple accounts on a computer and locking a computer with a keyboard shortcut are novel concepts that need to be explained.

If anyone is reading this who would like to help me instead of arguing against the implementation, my email is in my profile.

If you want the functionality inside Signal, then only the Signsl devs will be able to help you. If you want a solution outside from that, look into desktop environments that have a feature to lock a specific app. Or use multiple accounts. That is what it's designed for I would say.

Computers have keyboard shortcuts for locking. Some even have dedicated/configurable single buttons for locking, so they are just as easy to lock as phones are IMO.

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