“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 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.
“I don’t want to give Zuckerberg all my information for free, or ever, at all” - is what I’ve said to people when they ask why I don’t have Whatsapp. For the most part, they shrug as if to say “fair enough”. By and large, it’s become an acceptable reason.
Through the past few years, I’ve been communicating with my five best friends via Signal. They installed the app and started using it just to stay in touch with me. Like I said - best friends, they did that for me.
But their gesture have been rewarded…! …with Twitter-thread-style text walls from Yours Truly! About whatever subject is on my mind that night.
From the 70s films of Robert Altman, to the impact of The Stone Roses on 90s British music, to the difference between Baroque and Rococo, to Major League Baseball rule changes, to Bitcoin miners in Xinjiang and Kazakhstan, to Neutrino Cosmic Background Radiation, to good ol’ fashioned meme shitposting - surreal memes, recursive memes, dank memes, bone hurting juice… you name it, we got it.
So far, they don’t seem to mind it too much. It doesn’t happen every day and I gotta feel inspired, as opposed to bored texting.
That’s what I always said. Signal only does one thing right, encryption, and that’s it. The rest isn’t great, they kept the server side code hidden for 1 year to implement the shitty MoxieCoin (so Moxie and his friends could get rich) and removed SMS recently.
I moved to Telegram and the features are so great there’s no way I’ll ever use Signal. If you really need E2EE you can use it in personal chats. For regular chats, the fact that you have access to all your messages from everywhere is really convenient.