“When you use Signal, your data is stored in encrypted form on your devices. The only information that is stored on the Signal servers for each account is the phone number you registered with, the date and time you joined the service, and the date you last logged on.”
This isn’t an ad, I wasn’t paid for this post. Just to clear the air: fuck facebook, fuck elon musk and twitter, fuck anyone who thinks this is a paid advertisement. I wish I was paid for this shit, I just wanted to spread the word. Thank you. 😀 👍
The worst part of using Signal is to try and convince all your friends/family to use Signal. Otherwise it’s a pretty great messaging app. You can’t edit messages once they’re sent, but other than that it’s pretty great.
I used to donate to Signal, and they made the stupidest fucking decision I’ve ever seen.
You used to be able to use signal (at least on Android) as your default messenger app, sending encrypted Signals to other users, or SMS to non-signal users. Have a normie family member who doesn’t know about computers? Easy, set it & forget it.
Now? They removed that functionality, so it only works for other signal users. Someone else had a good metaphor: imagine if http and https needed different web browsers & you couldn’t see one on the other. How well do you think https uptake would have been?
So fucking stupid.
I think that might be a narrow view though. Most of the world likely doesn’t use SMS anymore (for probably a decade). So removing SMS didn’t make much of a difference there, but increased security. Especially when people are used to use multiple apps anyways.
So the better analogy would be “imagine if gopher and http needed separate browsers”. Except they do.
Be careful, the mod of the sci-fi community just got banned for criticizing it.
I use Signal but it’s on its own path to becoming enshittified too. Less like Reddit, more like Firefox, the people in charge are just clueless about the signal userbase.
It won’t be long until there’s a shift to an alternative because the current president of the signal foundation is one step away from turning it into Snapchat.
Instead of pumping money into increasing awareness or enhancing reliability of the service, the Signal team have wasted effort on features that nobody asked for, including its very own crypto shitcoin (a major red flag for any company). They also remove features people relied on, such as SMS support.
It’s hard to trust the Signal team when they continually disappoint in such egregious ways.
I got rid of Signal after they added cryptocurrency to their app.
While I have no issues with cryptocurrency itself, it was a reminder that they have full control over the app. Now I happily use XMPP and Matrix for communication with friends and family.
Your friends and family use matrix? Ok, I understand, that you can pressure your family to use it, but are all your friends that geeky?
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Is this an ad? It feels like an ad.
Anyway I much prefer Signal but thanks to boomer co-workers I’m still also forced to use Whatsapp.
It’s an ad and it’s not even subtle about it.
Tried to switch to signal. But it’s useless without everyone i know switching over from Whatsapp. Which is like merged with our country at this point.
Welcome to life after 40 - I’ve been an early adopter all my life, but my network hasn’t moved with me.
As a result joining Snapchat has no value for me.
So I tend to use apps that are friend-agnostic like this and TIkTok.
Side note: my fave messaging app is Confide, it only reveals redacted words as you run your finger over them, and then deletes. So it’s impossible to screenshot.
It sounds like you’d still be able to take a video of it, then do a little bit of filtering and you’d have an image of the whole message. It’d take slightly more effort, but it’s not “impossible to screenshot.”
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Telegram requires a phone number too. So I don’t understand your point.
It does not require to share it with other people tho. Still as far as I know they save it on their servers. Signal tries to not save any metadata at all. That’s great.
I’ve been trying to get my wife to use signal for ages and she won’t budge. She won’t budge because she doesn’t want to install another app that from her perspective does the same thing as texting (she’s not as privacy conscious as I am and doesn’t really care that signal encrypts missages). Lately I’ve been trying to sell signal as mre reliable since my work office has shit cell reception and once in a while messages will git completely lost in the aether. Signal is more featurefull than sms/mms imho.
My sister, her husband, and one of my friends use signal so there’s that.
Ultimately I’d probably prefer everyone use matrix but it’s not as accesible as signal.
I laughed at your “…she doesn’t want to install another app…”. I have a close friend that told me the same thing.
I was able to convince my sister to install Signal so that we could more securely send financial receipts back and forth, etc.
More than one of you in this thread have mentioned Matrix. I realized I signed up for it during the Great Migration about 3 weeks ago, but I haven’t spent any time there yet. How is it the same/different/better than whatever else? Curious. (I suppose Google might be my friend in this situation.)
It’s federated like mastodon/lemmy (and might interoperate but idk). It doesn’t require a phone number. I don’t use it a ton but like that it’s decentralized.
Since we’re all using Lemmy, an open source, decentralized, self hostable platform, wouldn’t suggesting Matrix make much more sense?
I host a Matrix and Lemmy server. Even if Signal is completely trustworthy now, will it always be? It isn’t my server and it’s a single point of attack for anybody (including governments) to insert (or demand) a backdoor.
It is kinda slow, the clients it has are bad and also this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32780665#:~:text=based on…-,If%20you’re%20privacy%20focused%2C%20do%20not%20use%20matrix%E2%80%A6,metadata%20it%20leaks%20is%20astonishing.&text=The%20metadata%20that%20Matrix%20%E2%80%9Cleaks,email%2C%20or%20OMEMO%20encrypted%20XMPP.
It may not be perfect yet, but ill take the superior design approach (decentralized and self hostable) any day. The details can be improved over time. Matrix can improve its metadata handling, signal will never be decentralized and self hostable.
On top of that, if you get your friends and family on your instance like I have, the metadata isnt even a problem since everything is contained on my server anyway.
My friends and I tried Signal after the whole WhatsApp privacy issue thing arose.
Signal has been nothing but issues for us, plagued full of bugs. Images half the time would refuse to send. Videos would send but the audio would be slow even though the video itself was fine. Chat would load 200 messages prior then scroll down to the bottom on its own. The app doesn’t have a good way of handling media so it’d grow to be 50GB in size, then if you backup Signal messages that’d double in size again.
Our group chat recently moved away from Signal, it’s not perfect but at least are media is sending fine.
I’m not sure when and what you were trying to send but I use it since at least 7 years and never had anything like that, maybe you should give it another try someday 👍
Pictures and videos. Memes.
It’s not just me, everyone in the group chat of 8 people had the same issues. I won’t be giving Signal another chance.
Issues have been raised for years with no fixes
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/4387 - closed but not fixed https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9747 - 3 years old and not fixed
There’s more but I cba to find the issues.
Our group chat sends a lot of video memes. If they don’t play correctly then they don’t want to use Signal. We moved away from Signal 2 weeks ago. We’re in no rush to try it again.
I can’t reproduce any of the issues you’re mentioning. Signal is the only messenger that consistently “just works” over the last few years.
Ok, good for you. That doesn’t change the fact that out of a group chat of 8 people, it happened to every one of us, it’s happened to others and they raised issues on GitHub, and no one in my group wants to use Signal anymore.
Or should I tell them “Xengi on Lemmy said it doesn’t happen to him so we must move back to Signal”?
Yes please go around tell people that. Everyone should know I said that. /s
I think Signal is trying too hard to be secure, and they are missing a lot of convenience features.
For example, you can’t migrate from Android to iOS or vice versa. You’ll lose all your messages and groups.
Or it’s really hard to export all the photos someone sent you. I get that my iCloud library isn’t as secure, but I really want to make sure I don’t lose those photos if I lose my device. The photos aren’t that sensitive.
The security notifications are also well-meaning, but hard to make sense of. You sometimes get notifications for changed security numbers, when people change their phone, sometimes folks show up twice in groups, etc. It’s all a bit hard to understand and difficult to use.
And finally, it seems that messages are sometimes delivered a bit unreliably or with a long delay.
Small price to pay for security. Maybe some small features are worth giving Zuckerberg and friends access to the most intimate personal shit in your life. For me it’s not a problem.
This attitude results in the app never gaining any traction and losing what traction it had.
My main messaging app is telegram, what would be the advantage in moving to signal? ( Pretending I manage to convince at least my main contacts )
Telegram chats aren’t e2ee by default. You’re essentially putting your chats on a server owned by a rich Russian person as a hobby.
Garbage. And this is spammy.
