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Comment by tim-projects | Hacker News Reader

Pay each of your friends $50 one per month, to switch to signal. Problem solved

Signal is designed with the assumption that data is sensitive and you should err on the side of destroying it.

Facebook is designed more as a shared scrapbook, with the assumption that data is precious and you want to share it with your community, and you should err on the side of oversharing so you don't lose any precious moments. Signal is in no way a replacement for Facebook.

It is if Facebook was never a good fit for you in the first place.

> Signal is designed with the assumption that data is sensitive and you should err on the side of destroying it.

That's... Just not true

> Facebook is designed more as a shared scrapbook

Have you used Facebook in the last 5 years? Its nothing like this at all.

> Have you used Facebook in the last 5 years? Its nothing like this at all.

I use it all the time. Yesterday I was talking to a friend, and we were reminiscing about visiting another friend's house, and we looked up some old birthday party invitations to help us remember when we had been there.

This is exactly what I want Facebook for. The network has all this value baked in, but they'll have to look past its obsession with ads and slop.

Honestly it's all there, if you use the "feeds" view in the menu it cuts out all the random influencer garbage. The search, especially the event search, is not great, but honestly I hope they don't touch it because I'm more worried about them enshittifying it further than I am about getting some creature comforts.

When Facebook was food this was how it was used and what people liked. Nobody would care what they've done to the product in the past 10 years to optimize for money over mental health

$50 per month for unlimited, not $50 per friend, so your solution only works if you only have 1 friend, so it would work for me (self-deprecating joke) but may not for GP.

> Pay each of your friends $50 one per month

It an outlay of $50 a moth. Probably better to pay 50/number of friends though.

$50 a moth? How about just a lightbulb and an open window?

It took me several re reads to get it.

Or, better, Mastodon or Matrix, which don't rely on a single, easy-to-target server.

This works for friends and family members who are computer geeks. Signal for everybody else.

I don't see what's missing in Matrix. Yes, the verification may be somewhat cumbersome, but I helped to deal with it, and it just works now.

Everything about matrix is cumbersome and glitchy. I have last tried to use it a few years ago and it seemed that Riot/Element had the only decent clients, and those were all Electron on desktop and also seemingly for profit. Signal has the electron problem, as well as many others (like the backup UI being abhorrent), but at least the core functionality works without fuss.

> and also seemingly for profit

They are not for profit, developed by the matrix.org foundation.

A friend and I have been running a private Matrix server for almost a decade now, it's very lacking in comparison to what the average chat user (especially discord) is used to.

No custom emojis, no self-chat, embeds are inconsistent (e.g. encrypted rooms), multi-image uploads aren't a thing in many clients, adding text when sending an attachment isn't a thing, just to name things we've run into over the years. Most of these have been brought up to the devs many years ago, only to spend forever in spec hell and never actually make it into a release.

We're just tolerating these, because we explicitly moved off discord to have control over our data, but being tech savvy we can handle this. It's nowhere near good enough that I could use it with less savvy people.

> Yes, the verification may be somewhat cumbersome

It's a hard blocker. I was running an engineering co-op off it and the onboarding difficulties was what finally led us to switch to discord.

All members are good engineers, but the client apps just had too many rough edges.

I really want the project to succeed so I'll keep checking in on it every year.

Mastodon and Matrix do rely on a single easy to target server.

What are you talking about? Which server? They are federated systems with many independent servers.

And if the federated server you are on goes down. You lose everything. If the federated server you are on steals your information or censors you there is nothing you can do.

You have to choose a server that you trust. In centralized systems, you have no choice at all. If you can't find a trusted server, you can set up your own, ask a friend to do it for you, or pay someone to do this job. You are not bound to an artificial monopoly.

Trusting a server doesn't prevent it from being easily targetable.

Yes, it does. It's much harder to target thousands of servers instead of a single huge one.

And Big Tech are the one who host your account on thousands of servers versus federation where it lives on one. If that one server host gets sued or ddosed you will be unable to lose your account. Meanwhile Big Tech can withstand DDOS attacks and lawsuits.

You're mixing things up. Thousands of servers (i.e., federation) are private servers, not Big Tech servers. (Probably with some exceptions.) You can't easily sue or DDoS them all. You may not even be able to find them all.

The Big Tech single server will experience a lot more attacks, some of which it can't withstand. Related example: Apple App Store was forced to delete a hundred VPNs after the pressure of Russian government.

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