But sadly the competitors are as bad, just in different ways. Why has nobody yet managed to build a good IM client? It does not seem like we have come far from what we had back in the Pidgin days.
Whatsapp mentions don’t work (just show the name of the mention to the other users), and polls or albums don’t work.
Messenger disconnects every couple of days at this point.
Pasting links won’t always expand.
Attachments are always hit or miss.
So many small other things. Still love it.
This is par for the course with chat backups, though.
Messenger - Bad - No way to save chat responses of people you have talked to. This means you only ever have one side of a conversation, making it meaningless.
Twitter DMs - Bad - See Messenger.
Jami - Ehhhh - Saves a git local repository of messages. The only problem is message syncing is effing abysmal.
Dino (XMPP) - Bad - Does not allow backing anything up, this is "intentional". Depending on which protocol you use, as soon as you move to another device all the messages you _had_ are retroactively converted to Cannot Decrypt. They're my effing messages!
Discord - Good - Discord History Tracker (tedious to use but slurps everything up into a sqlite3 database that is itself, an official archival format)
WhatsApp - Good - Dumps a text record + files/images/etc. onto the phone's filesystem. This is reasonably easy to archive.
Signal - Mediocre - If you have an old Signal backup from 2018? That you could only transfer off your phone by deleting old messages? lmao you're effed. Load up a version from ten years ago, gradually update it and then maybe, MAYBE you can extract the sqlite3 archive? These days you have a .signalbackup or whatever which is an encrypted archive, and I assume that there's a tool to decrypt it, but uhhhhhh. Last I tried to use it it required way more RAM than I had accessible.
I'm not sure why anyone would trust Telegram.
Maybe you don't believe Durov's statement[0] about it. But is there any actual evidence anywhere that they've ever violated the secrecy of non-e2e private groups or messages for anyone? I've yet to find any.
But besides this, there is really a strong need for a web client, just like Telegram or WhatsApp. If only the protocol can be extended in such a way that it allows for integrating into a web app, that would be incredibly great.
I have always assumed no Signal web client was a choice made to improve security.
All our communication is over signal, so it is a nice record to have.
Signal and other messaging apps offer a 'search' bar across all sessions & history, so I doubt I'm the only one.
It's hard for me to imagine being so present-focused such a history wouldn't be personally useful.
Or, so worried about "someone [using] it against [me] in court" that I'd need more than the occasional auto-expiration, and specifically my messenger "protecting" me with intermittently-enforced loss-of-histories (on just theft/loss/hard-failure of primary device).
I had no issues at all since it's called Signal. I have no idea what people do with it to cause problems at all.
It would still be interesting to find out.
I've been on Android only btw.
The Android app is stable enough, but the UX of having to look at the phone while typing a reply on a normal keyboard is annoying. This is why I prefer Telegram every time.
I'm not sure what's going on for you, but it seems really abnormal.
There is now at least a reminder on the phone app that will prompt you a few days before one of your desktop apps is about to get unlinked.
Your portrayal of my comment is not even close.
Anecdotes that sometimes those problems don't occur are nearly worthless. Of course that's true - the original anecdotal complaint already implicitly relies on, & grants, the idea that there's some default, "hoped for" ideal from which their experience has fallen short.
To chime in, "never had your problems" thus adds no info. Yes, people lucky enough not to hit those Signal limits that cause others to lose data exist, of course. But how does that testimony help those with problems? Should their frustration be considered less important or credible, because of your luck?
The as-if portrayal is one way your anecdote will be perceived, even if that wasn't your intent.
Most apps on the market are E2E by default these days, and that introduces a whole host of complications. It's the wrong tradeoff for 95+ percent of users. If you can only afford 1 device and only switch to a new one when the old device breaks, E2E is a disaster in the making. For the overwhelming majority of users, making sure that they have access to their messages when they switch devices is far more important than being protected from the NSA. This is something most signal advocates are completely unwilling to talk about.
I didn't actually know Wire was FOSS.
That's (almost) incompatible with E2E encryption. You could do it via "social proof" or server-side secure enclaves and pins, but that's about it.