your family and friends care enough to download and set this up?
If self-hosting in general wasn't such a PITA, I'd probably research the options and set something up. But honestly, I'm burnt out with trying to maintain even the most basic setups. I have a Raspberry Pi with NixOS under my desk that hosts Miniflux over Tailscale, and I can forget it exists 99.7% of the time - until I accidentally unplug it, and 6 hours later, wonder wtf happened again.
Now multiply the problem by the average funny cat video size and crappiness of my residential uplink. Won't happen.
This is a great feature for privacy though
This “limitation” is the ultimate advantage from the perspective of Signal’s core competency.
Then what if a new person joined the group convo? Do they have a right to see everything that everyone has said in that group convo, right back to the beginning? What if someone objects to sharing past conversations? What if sharing past conversations is a legitimate security concern to the group?
How does one filter out those past statements by someone who doesn’t want to share past statements? With security-state and foreign-state moles being a rather big issue in some groups, this is a legitimate rabbit’s hole that needs addressing. Some companies that standardize on Signal may not want any prior convos to become available to new entrants.
Personally, I see the lack of history to be a very real competitive advantage, and not any sort of a nerf.
Sure, your own history can be shared between installs on devices that you yourself own. But that is your chat history, meant for only you.
When you add a new computer, Signal refuses to sync the history.
Where I live (Canada) only a single person I know uses Signal. Everyone else is on Whatsapp and/or iMessage. As far as I am concerned, Signal is a wasteland.
I have received 400% more spam on Signal than I have received real messages.
Probably that they don't bother to have another chat app just for a few people.
A older family member has WhatsUp and Signal and gets sometimes confused. I have WhatsUp, signal, telegram, discord, meta messenger and would be .. hesitant to install an IRC client for like 3 people.
And lose because you can't give it to a kid that doesn't have a mobile phone number.
I have shared custody of my daughter and we communicate via xmpp on a tablet they carry over there when they spend a week at their mother's.
Want to find that recipe that you remember that some person shared with you a while back? Now you have to look through four different apps.
And the overhead grows quite fast as you add apps.
Even getting people to use a different messaging app (such as Facebook Messenger) already installed on their phones is difficult.
I have whatsapp and conversations and that's it. I only use teams on my professional computer, you will never see me install "work" on my personal smartphone and nobody needs a linkedin app, the website is enough.
I agree about LinkedIn and will probably get rid of it; I mostly installed it as I was going to a conference and wanted the easy option for swapping contact details using camera codes.