“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. 😀 👍
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 have been disappointed by Signal a lot.
- They tie themselves very closely with Google services, to the point that they refuse to be on FDroid by design
- There was a long period when they stopped publishing server side code when they were bashing others like Telegram for not open sourcing their server side code
- Their Linux desktop client is absolutely horrible.
They tie themselves very closely with Google services, to the point that they refuse to be on FDroid by design
While they do push the Play Store version, they also have an APK, and my understanding is that it does not rely on Google Play Services, though it might be buggier without them. If I recall correctly, the origin of Signal not being on F-Droid was related to the building and signature model that F-Droid used (builds by F-Droid, then signed by F-Droid’s keys), as mentioned in, eg, this issue. With that said, it has been pointed out that there are alternatives, like a separate repository, than, eg, the Guardian Project uses, and F-Droid apparently does now have a process for developer-signed apks.
Their general hostility toward outside developers and forks, however, and that the awkward server side code availability seemed to be related to the brazenly problematic cryptocoin advertisement, are extremely disappointing, however.
Just to confirm what you said, I used Signal on LineageOS for over 6 months with no Google Play Services (installed through Aurora Store) – definitely doesn’t rely on them.
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.
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.
Isn’t Whatsapp encrypted end to end?
Facebook owns 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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I would just use XMPP, but it’s not easy to use for people without technical knowledge.
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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.
Be careful, the mod of the sci-fi community just got banned for criticizing it.
My problem with Signal is that nobody I know uses it, which unfortunately makes it useless.
Other than that, I genuinely think it’s pretty great. But you’ll have to persuade people to leave Facebook and WhatsApp en masse before it becomes ubiquitous enough to be useful.
First ad I’ve seen on Lemmy so far
nature is healing
Signal is great for communicating with people you don’t mind sharing your identity with. Would love to see signal implement usernames. I’m really into simpleX chat these days —really cool project.
SimpleX looks interesting, thanks for sharing!
The iOS notification implementation isn’t super reliable yet but it works if you leave the app open
My favorite part is that you can easily self host your own server with a docker container
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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.
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
No. Instead everyone is enjoying using Telegram far more than buggy Signal.
