I will take anything that could make people switch from Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp to Signal, even if my preference actually goes to Element / Matrix.
Lately, people around me have been installing Signal, or I've met people would already have Signal, and it's been enjoyable to, at last, participate in fun group chats. They didn't miss me before but I'm happy to be there now.
Signal works well. I'd like to be able to edit messages and react with multiple emojis like with Element/Matrix, but most importantly, Signal needs to look cool and to be something people want to install and use.
Element/Matrix too, by the way, but they need to focus on usability first at the moment.
This seems like such a strange addition. My use of signal is primarily group chat or as an SMS replacement. It is hard for me to see the benefit of adding stories like this to what to me is a tool for directly messaging specific individuals. I would be interested in hearing from people who think this is a good change.
I can discreetly share text, images or videos with a subset of my contacts all at once without bothering them in a private conversation. They all appear in order and in full without some algorithmic trickery, they get flushed after a day or so and my friends can decide if they want to give them a look or not.
It's a very nice feature especially for the kind of general stuff that I wouldn't want to personally send to people and clog our conversations.
Yes!
I love stories.
They are a subtle way to share cool stuff and avoid to be seen as annoying if you are the type of person that likes to share nice things ^^
I share your indifference to the medium, but people out there do occasionally publish stories if such feature is available. If Signal makes it possible to say "you can keep publishing your stories too" when joining, and as a result more people move off WhatsApp (or, more generally, embrace the idea of platform independence), I can pinch my nose and enjoy the long-term side effect.
happy they're adding this. one more important feature to replace whatsapp and instagram for normal people.
stories is a great feature by letting you post however much you want and letting the viewer choose to view/skip/ignore the content easily. plus its ephemeral by default which is another good feature imo.
everything should be e2ee. anything which helps convince your mom/sister/dad/friends to use signal is a good thing.
God fucking dammit. I literally just put my reputation on the line with family last week that we should all switch to Signal. All I want is a decent E2EE messaging app.
Between this and their upcoming crypto payment system, I’m thinking I made a huge mistake switching from Telegram.
I'm confused at how stories may make this no longer a decent e2ee app. Is it that you actively dislike stories and don't want other people to have the option to use them? While you may not want them, is it possible your family does and this may even make it easier for them to switch to Signal (and stay) than not?
Not trying to add snark, just genuinely curious why the addition of stories would detract from its e2ee nature.
Ah, spreading too thin. Yes, I think that's a possibility. I also think not developing certain features can make one lose relevance. It's a trade off, no? I guess it just depends on someone's definition of a feature being "useless" and "irrelevant." Someone else sees live location as a necessary feature, I've never used it. Whereas I use statuses on WhatsApp almost every day.
Yup. Social media is constantly searching for the perfect product by trying out ridiculous but interesting combinations of technologies. Something works, we try out different stuff and hope to make progress.
But where is progress taking us? Should we follow it blindly?
Exactly. Maybe it's all just a very clever proof of waste. Advertizement industry certainly looks like a cancer on collective conscioussness. Maybe art can supplant it. Extravagant displays of nothing in particular.
Figure out a new business model and I imagine many platforms will gladly move away from advertising. Advertising, unfortunately, has a pretty strong growth model. People get something for free and advertisers pay increasing prices for the one ad spot and when the spot maximizes its price, the platform creates more spots. As most business models, it burns out eventually, but subscriptions seem to burn out more quickly.
I'm disappointed as well. I wish they would fix bugs such as messages presented out of order, non-stop ringing when syncing messages you've already read on another device, or add a robust backup solution.
I agree matrix is the dream but getting people to use Signal was hard enough and the UX of Element is good but not _quite_ up to snuff for the general populus yet.
Related : I converted some friends to Element+Matrix. Then some unbearable bug showed up in Element UI and we had to move away immediately (I reported the bug to the Element project, and a year after the correction is still in progress) so I moved us to the next best solution : Signal. It works really fine. (although a pain not offering conveniences like : easy chat backups, and difficulty to move your conversations to a new phone and stuffs like that...)
I can't wait for the Matrix ecosystem to be mature enough !
Since then basically none of the specific bugs I cared about got fixed (that I think could be unbearable to me, some of them definitely are, not sure about all), which are: 8751, 9437, 9811, 10287, 10577, 13263, 13485, 14323, 14424, 15416, 15565, 16123, 16184, 16763, and 16807, all these were all opened before my comment, and everything earlier than 16123 is more than one year old and still open. Maybe one of those is miok's. Newer ones raised since then that also look important to me at first glance: 20046, 20005, 19929, 18458, 17838, 17218.
Yes. We now have a dedicated crypto team which is literally wading through that bug list. It's taking longer than I'd like but folks have momentum now and are on the case.
(I cannot find my own ticket which was a dupe of these ones)
The first mention of it is 2.5 years old.
For my non tech friend this was so annoying (whatever she tried that stuck message was still there) that she wanted a solution fast. I gave up after a few tries to solve this. (Like the classic : uninstall / reinstall) And I decided she didn't have to suffer this, just because I have ideals about software philosophy. Thanks god, Signal exists and my friends were okay to trust me on this one more time :)
I really hope to come back to Matrix one day ! (We really enjoyed it for nearly a year before this bug came up)
Thank you, I am really glad this old bug is gone. I haven't had the chance to check the fix yet (and the bug is pretty difficult to reproduce). I'll let my friends know about this conversation & fix :) In the long run I really hope to bring people back to Matrix. Thank you and the team for your work !
Matrix[1] is fantasising and WhatsApp/Telegram are reality.
Signal is somewhere in the middle trying to be something that solves nobody’s messaging problem except a small set of people (journalists, whistleblowers?) where the communication is mostly like “A needs to discreetly communicate with B and they both can use Signal”, anything other than that it’s pretty useless (yes, I’ve tried it for really long and convinced many others to try it).
1. Especially all the clients. And not again Fluffy chat please. Name alone puts off most.
The feature that I missed the most after switching to signal was Live location sharing. It is just so convenient to find your friends while going out or going to the street exactly at the time someone is there to pick you up.
Wow I did not realize that Signal was missing this. I think they are focusing on getting more people on board than building a great app.
Too many people blame Matrix but I love it. It's UI is not as polished but hey I can work with it because sooner or later all these centralized apps run after revenue and ruin the most basic stuff that these app should do: messaging.
what happens in your decentralized system if one of your friends has their account registered on a naughty naughty server that just got blacklisted by the righteous admins of your instance and now you can't talk together anymore? does that person need to make a completely new account just to send some messages to you? does a migration scenario exist? and if it exists, does it warn your contacts and transfer everything seemlessly?
Last time I checked Matrix was researching about the topic of multiple homeservers. So you could just use a local homeserver on your device and a remote homesesrver with a fancy name simultaniously. This would also enable users to communicate P2P. But I don't know how advanced this system is yet.
Don't you get this if you click on the "+" icon? I see options for Camera, GIF, File, etc. then "Location" and I've sent my location this way. Using iPhone.
The development of Signal, sorry to put it harshly, seems to suffer from a split brained syndrome. On one hand they’ll focus on adding stickers, stories and other trivial features to help appeal to a broader user base, but on the other hand they’ll refuse to implement basic and important features that people need in a chat app, like chat backups (there is no backup option for iOS, only a device to device transfer…so if you lose or break your device or switch to a new device after selling your old one, your chats are all gone).
I don’t recommend Signal to others because its priorities don’t match mine and that of others I know. I do use it, but I treat it more like a fragile platform where anything can disappear any moment. Don’t share or keep anything valuable on it.
The fact that Signal is another centralized platform that not only requires a phone number but also exposes your phone number to others (like in group chats) are larger issues for me.
I’ve been trying Element (from Matrix), but its UX is quite poor. I just wish chat apps would copy at least some of the UX of Telegram.
Everyone has different UI feature desires so ill put that aside for this comment; flexibility is my key reason for Signal losing favor.
What the Matrix solution gives me:
- chat from multiple devices with history upon login (I read they're working on downloadable exports/backups) from any client;
- zero knowledge webapp logins (e.g. the work laptop on VPN, app.element.io in a Chrome tab) just use your Security Key like MFA;
- trivial and easy bridging with other endpoints (IRC, XMPP, etc.) it's not perfect but it works and I use this daily chatting with friends on other networks;
- choice of many clients whether actual apps or web interfaces (yes, it's early days and rough around the edges but the capability is there and happening) unlike Signal;
- distributed (federation) server designs baked in to avoid single company server lock in (Signal is opposed to this, goes hand in hand with using only their clients);
- less trouble and better client experiences about around the above than XMPP ecosystem. I just get annoyed using the XMPP versions of my bullet points above (and I've really tried, honest)
Is Matrix/Element perfect? no, lots of rough edges being worked on especially with the e2ee keys (my opinion). But I see healthy work, continual improvement and a good future ahead.
And yet Moxie spends a ton of time and effort attempting to convince everyone that working on protocols and federated systems (not just "Web3" and crypto-adjacent stuff, as in his article yesterday, but the entire space: he gave a scathing talk a year or two ago you can find a copy of, though he interestingly hadn't wanted it recorded) are useless and that no one should waste their time building them :(.
> On one hand they’ll focus on adding stickers, stories and other trivial features to help appeal to a broader user base
> I’ve been trying Element (from Matrix), but its UX is quite poor. I just wish chat apps would copy at least some of the UX of Telegram.
I think Signal may be trying to copy some of the UX features that drive people to WhatsApp and Telegram, while maintaining the security. Adding stickers and stories with e2ee is probably quite the challenge and maybe less challenging than a creating secure solution, especially connected to the cloud.
I personally am grateful they're adding more features and agree, would love for Signal to add UX elements at the rate of Telegram. BTW, I don't think Telegram has stories, which is a feature I really love on WhatsApp, so I think if Signal has that, it may be easier for me to get people to switch to Signal.
Well, one of the big reasons people use services like Snapchat is so they can talk to people they meet in semi-sketchy circumstances without giving out their phone number (which can be used to track or stalk them). Moxie seems to insist that the only way to build a successful service is using telephone numbers, but clearly that is false as the world's largest unencrypted messengers--which should be the enemy, NOT WhatsApp!!!!!!!!--do not use phone numbers as identifiers and allow users to hide them even if they are collected.
> Moxie seems to insist that the only way to build a successful service is using telephone numbers, but clearly that is false as the world's largest unencrypted messengers--which should be the enemy, NOT WhatsApp!!!!!!!!--do not use phone numbers as identifiers and allow users to hide them even if they are collected.
I don't think Moxie insists on this. I remember reading this on the Signal blog[0] a few years ago:
> Social apps need a social network, and Signal’s is built on the phone numbers that are stored in your device’s address book. The address book on your device is in some ways a threat to the traditional social graphs controlled by companies like Facebook, since it is user-owned, portable, and accessible to any app you approve. For Signal, that has meant that we can leverage and contribute to a user-owned portable network without having to force users to build a new closed one from scratch.
> However, many Signal users would also like to be able to communicate without revealing their phone numbers, in part because these identifiers are so portable that they enable a user’s conversation partner to contact them through other channels in cases where that might be less desirable. One challenge has been that if we added support for something like usernames in Signal, those usernames wouldn’t get saved in your phone’s address book. Thus if you reinstalled Signal or got a new device, you would lose your entire social graph, because it’s not saved anywhere else.
> Other messaging apps solve this by storing a plaintext copy of your address book, social graph, and conversation frequency on their servers. That way your phone can get run over by a car without flattening your social graph in those apps, but it comes at a high privacy price.
I intentionally drop all messages from time to time (typically once I get a new device). Am I the only one who feels like loosing old conversations is just fine? After all, I don’t remember all conversations I had in person as well.
I understand that loosing them at an unexpected time can be annoying and a backup is useful, but I personally never had a use for that feature and knowing that it is annoying for someone to keep all my messages around forever is something I consider positive.
Yes. I keep my iMessages forever, and even back them up (as well as my photo library) as part of my desktop backups.
I’m switching my social networks to Telegram after Signal burned up its good will focusing on features they want versus what their users want. Do I care if it’s as secure? No, I prefer the convenience and superior UX iMessages and Telegram offers.
Really unfortunate, as it was Signal’s race to lose after their bump in usage and shoutouts from popular folks using it.
I don't generally need to preserve all my messages forever, but I often do refer to recent ones, say from the last few weeks. I have switched devices a couple of times with Signal only to be stuck thinking "oh crap, did I agree to do X on Th or Fri?" The lack of sync for SMS with their desktop client also makes it basically useless to me, I'm sure that's more secure, but I wouldn't mind being to opt-out, especially on a contact-by-contact basis.
> Am I the only one who feels like loosing old conversations is just fine?
Same here - but maybe if doing Business then somebody might want to keep them (e.g. to keep track of whatever your customers told you in the past? Just a guess...).
(btw. I think it's not "loosing" if you don't mean something like "letting them free", but "losing". "losing" vs. "choosing", I kept mixing that up until recently... :P )
What I would like as a feature in Signal is "polls" (e.g. to choose with a few friends to which bar/restaurant to go, when to meet, whatever).
But now unluckily I'm back on Whatsapp as even after having abandoned it, within almost 2 years most of my friends refused to install Signal -> in the end, on 31.Dec.2021, I decided to admit that I failed, and I reinstalled Whatsapp :(
> Am I the only one who feels like loosing old conversations is just fine?
I find text based instant messaging to be shallow and vapid and I have very little interest in them. Texting is best used (for me at least) to coordinate real life plans (I'll be in front of X at Y o'clock) or quick task-oriented notes (Hey babe, can you grab some sliced turkey if you're still at the store). If you want to actually talk to me, call me or let's meet in person.
This attachment to one's messaging archive is IMO a symptom of data hoarding. 99.9% of text conversations won't be interesting in the future because they weren't interesting when they were happening.
That said I do like enjoy the feature where all of the photos from a given conversation are easily accessible.
The first message I got from my girlfriend was a response to me sharing some music with her and asking for a song back. She sent a small video of her cat complaining.
If I could have backups of entire conversations, I wouldn’t have to export and save every single video and picture being sent with Signal.
I recently decided to watch a movie that my ex-girlfriend had recommended to me, and I was able to quietly search for it in the chat history since we're no longer on speaking terms so I couldn't ask her.
On the other side, when I broke up with her I also used the chat history to point out some times she had tried to lie to me. That was a bitter satisfaction I could probably have done without.
Hey sorry I saw this a couple of days late. Glad you think it's cool! It's closed-source at the moment, but I do dive into technical details in newsletters [0] whenever I can. If you prefer RSS [1] we have that too.
>Am I the only one who feels like loosing old conversations is just fine
not only do I think it's fine I think it's actually healthy. I think the ability to search and turn over every word said in the past can produce some pretty neurotic and bad behaviors. There's a fun Black Mirror episode about this in one of the earlier seasons.
I set signal to auto delete messages older than 2 weeks. There is zero reason to keep messages of a personal relation longer than that, for me at least. I am prone to nostalgic romanticizing, and not having access to past messages kind of solves that problem.
Same here, I don't get that insistence on backups at all but I get that others might feel differently. I wouldn't be surprised that this is more prevalent in us techie types than the average user of chat apps.
Yeah, I was evaluating a few group chat options to replace iMessage for a large group, and the lack of message backup and strong multi-device support is the reason Signal probably won’t work. One of the most confusing aspects of iMessage (before recent years) was that it didn’t sync chats to all devices. Some devices could get into a messed up state, not have all your messages, etc. Apple solved that problem with iCloud backup, which lets the cloud store messages.
Not seeing your complete chat history on a new device is just not tenable for the average person, and a selling point of signal was that I could use it on windows or Linux, where I can’t use iMessage. I also heard adding signal on an iPad or second phone cousin be messy too.
Compare that with telegram, which is extremely fast across any devices, has even more features, and is slightly easier to use…
I mean, encryption in transit and at rest is good enough for most people. I agree philosophically with e2e encryption, but practically, is it all that important for average chat users, especially if it means sacrificing features people actually use?
It would be best to have backups built in, but in the mean time wouldn't Signal Desktop be a way to make backups?
I moved my home directory to a new computer and Signal Desktop started like if something changed. Sure you would lose your messages on your phone, but you can still access them on your computer if needed.
On a rooted Android phone, you could use oandbackup to backup Signal. If you care about these things, maybe consider using a rooted Android phone?
I agree with you on the centralized platform aspect and the use of phone number (which is both a blessing (this makes it easy for new users to join) and a curse). I also agree with you on Element's UX, but it's getting better and most people can use it fine. I have a few groups on both apps.
I personally prefer Element, which seems more open than Signal and which I can actually use correctly on the PinePhone. And definitely didn't requires the hoops I had to go through because I don't have an Android phone or an iPhone. Axolotl [1] still needs some work.
> the centralized platform aspect and the use of phone number
Don't forget how Signal built MobileCoin integration completely in secret for a whole year. Public was kept in dark just so $MOB insiders could benefit handsomely.
> I do use it, but I treat it more like a fragile platform where anything can disappear any moment. Don’t share or keep anything valuable on it.
Fwiw most people I use signal with have auto-disappearing messages enabled, so all our comms are ephemeral anyway.
And for private messages, that turns out to be totally fine. I read it, act on it if necessary, open any links in a browser, download any files sent, and then have no need for the message to persist beyond that.
This isn't Twitter where I'm deliberately creating a public record of commentary for like-minded folks to find and engage with me on, that needs to persist for a long time. Signal for when I've already found those folks and need to have private OTR conversations with them.
For me personally, adding stickers is much more important than chat backups - at least on a day-to-day basis. The last time I switched devices was 3.5 years ago, the last time I used a sticker was 3.5 hours ago.
SchildiChat (Android and web) is an Element fork focusing on simplifying the UX and making it like WhatsApp, Telegram etc. Them not having an iOS version is very unfortunate
I'm skeptical that chat backups are that important to the average user. It's very important to me (I even wrote a little Android app to automatically upload the encrypted backup to GDrive every time one is created), but nearly everyone who I have promoted Signal to hasn't cared much when I warn them that the chat history/backup situation is bad.
The first thing to do is install Signal on one or more devices and have them sync. When it is on your computer you don't loose your conversations if your phone breaks.
But I agree : no easy backup in Signal is a major pain !
From the Electron based computer version of Signal you can use some js and backup conversations though. (No "restore" option though)
Until they allow people to make bot accounts, theplatform eill be limited to person<>person communication. The actual strengh of WhatsApp is that companies are ditching their phone / support chat for whatsapp only. Which is the worst of both worlds.
Agreed. I tried to implement a simple bot that would notify me about home security stuff but it ended in a rabbit hole that all points to a git comment of one of the devs stating possible account bans if an account is used for automated messages or even person to person messages using anything other than the official app.
They're taking a play out of Facebook's strategy book: copy every feature of your competitor as quickly as possible. In this case, it seems they're going after WhatsApp and they're copying WhatsApp's status feature.
This seems like a smart move for them because they can run for parity with WhatsApp and they'd still have one major benefit Facebook has been in a very tight spot to match: privacy.
Most people don't seem to care about privacy, but if they start losing their (privacy aware) friends and family to Signal, they too will consider installing it as well.
If they acquire enough network effects, they could hollow out a large chunk of WhatsApp, unless WhatsApp starts offering features Signal can't offer (e.g. better integrations into Facebook's other properties).
So Signal is missing a basic feature like location sharing and they chose to go ahead with implementing Stories. I guess they are focusing more on getting new users than making a great app.
The thing is none of these centralized apps will ever get messaging right. Because no matter how good the intentions of the team are sooner or later the higher management or the PM wants to have bigger piece of cake. This in the end ruins the most basic functionality that a messaging app should do right: messages.
What these teams do not understand is it's okay for an IM app to not keep adding fancy features. Focus on providing security fixes and minor improvements that improve user experience. If you keep focusing on getting more people you will end up with yet another social app like Instagram/Snapchat. We do not really need more of that stuff. Consider this: if people who built electric grids kept adding unnecessary features to it, we would not have a robust infrastructure like it today. They built them and then those people left to work on something more interesting. We need more of that in Software. What we currently have is millions and millions of engineers trying to figure out how to keep users glued to their app.
As a counterpoint, if I want to share a message or photo with many people on Signal right now, I have to create a large group and choose whom to invite and I think give it a name and have it persist unless I actively delete it. If I want them to be able to reply directly to me, they may have to do some gymnastics to copy and paste the photo in a private message to me or forward it to me.
Since those options doesn't easily exist, I use WhatsApp or Snap or IG to achieve that because I may still want to communicate a message to all my contacts and find the outlet that lets me do this.
So I hear you on the element of focus to maintain robustness, I just think it may always be a trade off between doing one thing very well and adding new things.
Also, while you may see location sharing as a basic feature, I see it as an advance feature and see stories as a basic feature. Which basic feature should they add or should they not add any new things?
I'm sorry, since when is "location sharing" a "basic feature" of a messaging application? Can't you just send them a maps link to your location? Or your GPS coordinates?
For a messaging application whose intended target audience includes dissidents, location sharing even as an option sounds dangerous.
Especially given this from your comment: Focus on providing security fixes and minor improvements that improve user experience - when UX includes such irrelevancies such as "avoid getting users vanished and/or killed", the guiding principle should be: no footguns.
A secret tracking device that reveals the location of the rebels secret underground base certainly sounds dangerous, but allowing dissidents to share location of the protest for everyone to gather at seems almost necessary for a modern messaging app! How else do you get to that critical mass of people in the main city square? In the end, it's just a tool that isn't inherently good or evil.
> So Signal is missing a basic feature like location sharing
Signal does have location sharing, but not live location sharing. You can share your location, but it will not update your location for the recipient as you move around. Here's a tutorial: https://www.hardreset.info/devices/apps/apps-signal/share-lo...
The parent comment suggested that Matrix would support stories and the first implementation (which I guess could be considered the reference implementation) is called "FluffyChat"...
It’s a short-lived (usually 1 day), short length video or photo on your account that any of your connections can view as part of a carousel of other stories. You can post yours and/or view your connections’ stories in sequence.
I.e. You go into the app. 10/100 friends have posted stories. You watch them one after another (without needing to go to each friends account) to see what they were up to for the day.
So another unnecessary feature coming to a chat app that no-one asked for - just like including their own cryptocurrency in the messenger.
After all, from a privacy perspective it is still a disaster to create an account by using your phone number to sign in. From a typical user's perspective it is basically a worse version of WhatsApp that still cannot backup your texts and conversations properly, so why bother switching at all?
The users will still sit on WhatsApp due to the latter still being the case. Once your phone is lost, stolen, or you have a different phone, your conversations are lost if you are using Signal.
I really like that aside from being a highly secure communications channel, Signal has now also replaced most other social networks for online interaction with my real friends.
WhatsApp has had stories for years, just called statuses. Most of my American friends don't use it or know they're there, but my East African friends use them all the time. Frankly, most of my US friends aren't even on WhatsApp or Telegram or Signal. I don't know where they are :-D Maybe iMessage, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook.
How do you define the difference between a messaging app and social media app? Many seem quite blurred to me.
It's the blurring of lines that some users are objecting to. Instagram is a perfect example where yes, important communication happens via Instagram messages, but the problem is that once the app is open, it's exceedingly easy to accidentally spend minutes/hours listlessly scrolling. In order to avoid listlessly scrolling, users will uninstall the app or set time limits on it, or other techniques to avoid it sucking up so much time. Compare this to a 'plain' messaging app without a broadcast stories feature - there isn't the same distraction factor and for those that abhor the algorithmic-feed and distraction factor, it's a huge turn-off to add that feature.
Go into Instagram/Twitter/TikTok/Snapchat/Facebook and try and turn off the stories/feed. You can't, that's the main engagement loop for the app!
Why are you conflating a finite amount of content generated by only your contacts on a daily basis with the infinite amount of content suggested by an explore section? After the couple of minutes or less that it takes me to check out the stories of people I care about the content is exhausted, there is no more stuff to check and look at. When I look at all my Whatsapp stories there is no algorithm that shows me content from random people around the internet.
The reason why Whatsapp (and Signal with stories) is completely different from Instagram is because everything happens only between you and your contacts and there are no other avenues into the outside world, no "discover" tab. That's what makes them a messaging application vs a social network imho, you can't be hooked on Whatsapp more than you can be hooked on MMSs
Ah, yeah, fair point. When I was building an app, I tried to make it as not addictive as possible, and yet the thought that would come to my mind was that if what I make is not that addictive, they may just use the other one. So this back and forth about not wanting people to be addicted to it but also wanting to be compelling enough to pull people from the other ones. I've thought about this with podcasting—I don't want people to listen to my podcasts all day, I'd prefer they also talk with people around them. That being said, people will listen to podcasts and would I prefer they listen to me over someone else, given no matter what I do, they may spend X hours per day listening?
I appreciate you saying what you did about the blurring.
I didn't think the "Stories" feature would be as controversial as "MobileCoin" integration but apparently it does on HN? This would just push me to disable it (if possible) whenever it is finally rolled out or, inspire me to remove it from my system.
Could you elaborate over what the "one thing" a messaging application should do actually is? Because I could argue that sending people pictures, videos, documents or general file blobs is waaaay outside of what a "pure" messaging platform should offer
I can tell you that posting a story is clearly outside this domain, but as for the exact set of features, that's a harder question.
I like the idea of MMS tho, so I'd personally like messages to be like short and quick e-mail. Packaged up media is nice to be able to send as opposed to just links, since they are more direct. Though links are good too, esspecially when files are large and might be shared with multiple people.
Building a streamlined interface still remains an unsolved problem it seems, which is why it pains me to see yet another chat app fail to prioritize features effectively.
Right now signal's infrastructure could figure out (if it stored data that everyone claims it doesn't) which IP address is sending messages to which IP address. If stories end up being implemented as a group conversation with all your contacts, everyone will be reasonably frequently sending a message to all their contacts, which changes the above into "which IPs are contacts of which IPs".
As much as people complain about patents, maybe patenting things like stories and stickers in social media / messaging would've kept them from being playbook items that we see in the journey of every single online product. It's tedious and rather lazy compared to developing new ideas.
few predictions on why this PR is an indication to Signal falling into the chasm:
1. The Signal team will soon realize that adding social messaging concepts to a private messaging app in a safe way is possible and more importantly is wanted by a big subset (early majority) of people.
2. The early adopters of Signal App will feel offended as they were looking for a strictly principled secret messaging app.
3. The target market of early majority will not see much difference in Signal and other options and they will stick to the app where their network is already at.
Stories are not something I need from a chat app. I wish these apps would stop the ideal of "constant feature growth" and focus on core competencies. Signal is a SMS/chat app for a privacy focused audience... I do not see an overlap for a stories.
Ffs! Just have cross platform backup/restore and migration, accounts not tied to phones and multi-device accounts already! I have heard others complain about this for years now.
I can code but I don't code for a living, these things seem like they would take at most two weeks dev time, is there a complexity I am missing here? Or do they just not care? I have all but abandoned secure mobile messanging at this point. They either die from lack of adoption or live long enough to become the villain.
One of Signal's main purposes is to be used by Snowden types (whistleblowers, dissidents, journalists, etc.) – or, at least, it used to be. Messages Are Private is the most important principle for Signal, even if it means messages are lost.
Accounts not tied to phones, I don't really have an explanation for. It was in the works two years ago, but I haven't heard anything since.
There are better alternatives like Briar for snowden types. Signal is always competing against telegram or whatsapp and comparing themselves. Integrity and reliability are critical security properties.
Apparently they have too much money? I thought I donated to help them be a strong encrypted messaging app and survive for the long term. Not to tack on a bunch of social media features.
What I think keeps me and many of my friends in East Africa hooked on WhatsApp is the ability to post statuses (stories). It gives me a strong reason to come back to the app as it helps me with conversation starters. I frankly might love if signal has it.
Yup, called Statuses. In iOS, it's the bottom left corner of the menu, click that and you can add a story near the top next to My Story. Probably similar UI for Android.
> What other apps are common among you and your peers?
Ironically, I'm in the US but used to live in East Africa and have lots of friends out there. So I'm not sure what's too popular out there nowadays besides WhatsApp and TikTok. Some apps probably for managing mobile money, but not sure.
I'd be extremely curious to hear about any the money management apps (even if you're not sure which one is dominant, or the information out of date). I'm guessing the main apps in the US (Venmo and Paypal) don't even operate in East Africa.
Ahh, well, I'm not sure of any new players, as of a few years ago most of the telecoms have their own form of mobile money transfer. It mostly started in Kenya with m-Pesa years ago, where people could send money thru USSD codes. Now these companies have apps to do it, like Airtel, Safaricom/Vodacom, MTN, Togo, etc. Some companies in West Africa appear to be going hard for the market in consolidating across telecoms, like Paystack and Flutterwave, one of whom I think got investment from Stripe and the other from Visa I believe.
Facebook added stories to Facebook itself, Instagram, and Whatsapp a few years back, almost certainly in an attempt to claw some users away from Snapchat.
Lately, people around me have been installing Signal, or I've met people would already have Signal, and it's been enjoyable to, at last, participate in fun group chats. They didn't miss me before but I'm happy to be there now.
Signal works well. I'd like to be able to edit messages and react with multiple emojis like with Element/Matrix, but most importantly, Signal needs to look cool and to be something people want to install and use.
Element/Matrix too, by the way, but they need to focus on usability first at the moment.