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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

I find Signal just unbeatable on all fronts: security, UX, ease of use, general thoughtfulness put into the product. It has the best simple media editor (for video clipping, blurring faces, compressing) I have ever seen casually built into the sending flow.

Every time I use anything, from MS Teams to Whatsapp, I find myself wishing they were more like Signal.

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My main problem with Signal is that it's a mobile app with a desktop companion app. Ideally, I would prefer a federated messenger, but I would be completely fine with Signal if it wasn't a mobile-only app (you can't use the desktop version without first having the mobile app).

And it forces you to have a number.

Signal is the worst of them all when it comes to self hosting.

Signal's desktop app is slower to load and has less features than Element Desktop, despite both using the same stack of Electron and Sqlite.

Worst in terms of user freedom as well. Because according to moxie, everyone is incompetent to host their own. He was wrong

For me Signal is not an option. Any pretty promise can be broken on a whim in the same fashion Facebook acquired WhatsApp and could then do whatever they wanted with it. Any pretence of user-friendliness has been defeated when Signal started pushing their crypto and bar their users from using an alternative client. Centralised services are problematic by design, and almost always abusive.

No desktop web app. Makes it very annoying to engage in longer conversations on machines where I'm limited in what I can install.

tested signal years ago and the desktop client was literally unusable, would take major redesign to fix so i am assuming it is not better

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