lol cope and be normal I guess? I understand insta isn’t great with privacy but it’s a group chat for your room mates. Make a burner account instead of forcing all of them to download some app they’ve never heard of for one group chat with people they are forced to be acquaintances with.
They’re likely all thinking you’re the odd man out because you’re making a fuss over a group chat.
You don’t have any context. I never made a fuss about it I simply suggested that we make a gc on Signal because it’s like iMessage for iOS and Android (cross compatible), but someone else suggested we can just create an old fashioned SMS group chat because they tend to miss notifications on other apps which is understandable and what we ended up doing. But the way this guy responded is a bit douchy for someone who does not know any of us and this is the second message we are ever receiving from him.
Couple summers ago we met some friendly folks drinking high proof vodka out of a Powerade bottle, hanging out on a dock outside Millinocket, and they invited us to go jump off a bridge. 20 miles down a dirt road they pull off their clapped out crown vic, miss the ditch, get out and walk onto a logging road bridge. Best day ever. Invitations to jump off bridges should be seriously considered.
Maybe the content itself isn’t useful, but they can analyze the sentiment and determine if you are diplomatic, passive aggressive, etc. which can be used to create a stronger profile of your preferences.
Roommates aren’t exactly people you can painlessly choose not to communicate with. This isn’t about other people personally choosing to using an app on their daily life, this is them pushing OP to install spyware on their phone.
If an app is ugly, that I can deal with.
If it is slow, then still, but I may disallow it from running in the background because of my battery. I’ll just check in at the end of the day or something.
Too few features? That sucks, don’t really care, it’s only for this group, they choose it. Same when it’s not comfortable for me or complicated.
But when it is spying on me, that is an absolute dealbraker I’ll not accept.
Here among the hillfolk we actually have a day for jumping off a bridge, this year it’s Oct 21. 800 foot drop. Just look up Bridge Day for the New River Gorge.
It brings a whole new meaning to that age old question when it’s not necessarily a metaphor.
I have been in these kind of conversation a lot with my friends who work in tech. Even in tech circles, people wills till fall back to ‘unsafe’ solutions due to convenient an network effect. It sucks that we don’t have a universal protocal for instant messaging that work for all platforms and is secured (f**k Apple for that). At this point I agree that it’s just easier to just move on and use a normie chat app with burner accounts (which is increasingly harder to make nowadays)
If I saw that, I’d have to ask at least one of them, why? Such an odd choice given that’s not its main use case, but I’m guessing the answers would be something along the lines of, “Why not?” & “It’s what my friends are on.”
yeah I think its that last one. They do it cause that’s what other people are using too. Also talking to random’s on the bus is like playing russian roulette here unfortunately.
It’s the same reason people don’t get caught up on researching and buying the best socks, the best toothbrush, the best light switches, and so on. Most of the time people just want their stuff to work, and sometimes they may want the best option but most people don’t care about how exactly their messages are being sent
That’s my kid’s primary way of communicating with friends. It’s popular among high school students, or at least the band nerd subset of high school students.
Yeah I’ve never seen insta used for group chats, but it is a commonly used app so I see their reasoning of “let’s just use the app that almost all of us already have set up”
This is why I never go in my friend group’s line chat, we have a discord channel with everyone in it but for whatever reason like half of them only want to use line
I do think you have to pick your battles when interacting digitally with people in your life, and I agree that you shouldn’t force anyone in to a solution they don’t want to use. But were I OP, I’d pick this battle. Refuse to use it, tell them they can leave you notes on the fridge.
I agree that you shouldn’t force anyone in to a solution they don’t want to use
Yeah…Person you’re replying to is saying, “Cope and be normal?” but also: the others are essentially trying to force/peer pressure OP/source of the image into a solution they don’t want to use. How is it that pushing people to do/use whatever’s “normal” is so acceptable compared to asking them to meet on more comfortable terms?
If the friends in the group chat don’t hit you up individually to let you know about those things, then why would you want to spend time with them in the first place?
Because most of the time they’re not leaving you out because they’re doing it intentionally, but because everyone else already has the info, you’re just making it much harder to invite yourself.
I was this person. I got left out of a lot of stuff because I wouldn’t join group chats. It’s not a hill worth dying on.
I would say not inviting that person is doing it intentionally, as everyone knows that person isn’t in the group chat. Also, it does not make you much harder to invite, it’s literally just letting your friend know outside of the group chat.
If your friends leave you out of things for this reason, they don’t want to hang out with you very much.
I’m 21 and a decent amount of my friends assume I’m already in the group chats where plans are made, and when they remember I’m not, push me to get an iPhone instead of switching to a platform where I can be included. It’s shitty, but everyone else gets the info so it’s okay.
Even my 36-year-old cousin said she wouldn’t date anyone who didn’t have an iPhone.
At this point, I’m happy Instagram has come up as a platform everyone usually has an account on (even if it fucking sucks) just so that I am accessible for friends to easily add me to groups.
You have no standards for privacy, if you cannot stand your ground. If you are so desperate for socialising that you cannot find a different set of friends, you will never really form lasting bonds.
Even my 36-year-old cousin said she wouldn’t date anyone who didn’t have an iPhone.
She has a shallow character. I would reject just after hearing that.
When I quit mainstream social media platforms half of my friend added me on signal and the other half agreed to just text me. Would I miss out on some group events? Maybe, but I don’t need to be in every one of them. If I want any sort of group gathering I’d just organize one.
Your cousin just sounds miserable and it’s really her loss for judging people by a tool of communication.
Friends will tell you about all those things anyway. If someone didn’t tell you about a party because you’re not on instagram they didn’t want to hang out with you anyway.
Lawl I’ve never NOT been invited to a party because I don’t have accounts on social media. What kinda of friends exclude you from “day to day activities” (I can’t NOT read that in the voice of Hank Hill) if you’re not on fucking Instagram?
My roommates and I had a groupchat that was used explicitly for all of those things.
Planning on the group chat was about the only talking about activities we’d do. If something was missed in the group chat, that was on the person who missed it.
We paid shared bills. That’s where we did all of the breakup of responsibilities and money requirements.
Being left out of group chats will absolutely have you left out of day to day activities since they now have to go out of their way to invite only you, since everyone else already has the info.
Friends can absolutely drop a SMS or phone call if Instagram/Snapchat mutuals is not possible. The pre condition is that you must be worth being a friend, and they must not be dumb enough. Usually all the “internet socials” people I see are shallow and stingy with fake smiles and good short talk upon first interaction.
I’m not sure either part is true given how many software and hardware engineers get churned out every year. I think what happened is the same kind of people who would never have touched a computer in 1992 now have even more powerful computers in their pockets, but they are used for only 3 or 4 different apps. For the most part, it’s very consumption driven versus interaction. Designed to be put into the pockets of plebs in order to drive revenue because it can’t be too difficult.
I would posit that most people working in business at this point don’t even need things as powerful as a modern PC.
I would posit that most people working in business at this point don’t even need things as powerful as a modern PC.
I’m not going to speak to the rest of it but this hit a sore spot. You’re exactly right. Most applications that most office workers use are web based. Heavy lifting is done on the server or, more commonly these days, through SaaS. Most workers could do what they need on a Chromebook.
Obviously there are some exceptions but not too many depending on what business and department you’re in.
All my friends have android phones and they are tech illiterate. This is common thing in every generation ig. Not a gen z specific thing. I have seen millennial tech nerds and tech illiterates
I think it’s less to do with IOS vs Android and more to do with phone vs PC (potentially even ones where you had to use command prompt to do things). File systems, OS corruption, ability to replace parts, etc are not really things a typical phone-only user is going to deal with. There are a lot of primarily phone, tablet, Chromebook users these days and it abstracts away a lot of the lower-level stuff that millennials were forced to deal with to use AOL Instant Messenger to chat.
Yeah you can say that also i recently fixed a friend’s pc which was not booting to windows, all i had to do was change the boot priority to the one with windows on it.
yep, a lot of people at my school have no laptop except the school provided Chromebook, use mostly iPhones, and due to using Chromebooks and iPhones for everything they never actually touch the inner workings of the OS
People have said that Linux sucks because there are barely any games and game mods for it
Yeah, go tell that to Steam about the steam deck lol, Stray runs great under proton, you can even get it to kinda-sorta work on low-end hardware
Still better then iOS, it’s a trade off tho, I used to flash a new rom like once a month for fun and because I was hoping to get an extra feature or a little extra power, really not necessary anymore with a good android phone. I did still root and rom my old android devices recently tho :P
If you really want to get angry have a look at this list. Storage and screen casting are some of the most egregious examples. Android may still be somewhat ahead of iOS but they are definitely converging. I don’t find Android to be the bastion of openness, customization and powerful features that I once did.
How is Storage and Miracast removed? This is just scaremongering. Yes some of the root directories can be an issue, but storage as in internal and SD card storage are fully accessible. Also, my Android 10 phone has screen mirroring that casts to more or less any TV (never tried Apple TV though).
Android has its pain points but they are not these.
No I’d say that it has more to do with improved usability and better design overall making them unable to fix issues when they do occur. There isn’t one specific company or system to blame. Nearly everything has, for better or for worse, been boiled down into a webapp where there is minimal potential for error.
It’s also not really fair to compare gen z to Millenials as Millennials have had nearly twice as much time to figure things out.
The way I see it, things have been filtered down to a design concept of “simplify until a toddler can figure it out” and that’s been followed by so many designs that everyone has overlooked all the drawbacks of designing in that fashion. People have become wildly content with simple apps that lack personal configuration or extended functionality because users now lack so much basic knowledge or expect crazy things to the point that if they come across any small issue they will call technical support, leave a crazed email, or complain loudly on social media long before they every actually considered solving the issue themselves or even checking online to see how others arrived at the issue. I kinda feel like I’m just rambling right now but for a long time society, at least here in the US, normalized and and removed negative connotations from the term “computer illiterate” to the point that it’s become not only the norm but the design goal.
You used to be able to find solutions to issues online, but now all you get are sites that scrape Stack Overflow and paywall it, or you get those 30 paragraph long articles that are actually 4 sentences to describe the fix.
Sounds like bullshit. I’m a millennial and most people I know know shit about computers. Even those who use them every day only know how to do the few things they need to do and that’s it.
So I don’t think gen Z is any worse in that, most people suck, regardless of generation, with computers and that’s it.
More people drive a car than understand how it works. They push the pedal and turn the wheel and get where they want to go. Of course that’s fine most of the time and we can’t all understand everything like a mechanic does. But when it’s something like a car or a computer that you use so, so much in your daily life and you don’t care to have even the most basic understanding of how it works… seems strange to me.
Its a phone vs PC thing. Less than 5% of Android community exists as enthusiasts who actively or formerly modded their phones in some capacity (rooting, bootloaders, one click root). Rest of the Android users are negligibly more literate than iOS users, and its mainly because of a real open filesystem and some people needing call recording feature.
I did put your claim that most Android users know more than ios users, I think most phone users only know and care about the squares on their home screen. They’re all terrible, but at least they can’t break their device by default.
I’ve basically never needed to open the files app on Android or iOS except on rare occasions when I needed to find a downloaded file.
If you used it, that is all that matters. It does not matter when even its just once that your friend or colleague or work guy sent you a document file, which you can work with in Android/Windows/Linux, but not iOS. The file manager also allows for your phone to work as a USB pendrive in clutch situations.
It’s because computers and phones have shifted to be simultaneously more complicated and with more intuitive UI for casual users. 75 years ago most people who owned a car could do a lot of routine maintenance and even some more advanced engine work because the cars were way simpler. Millennials just lucked out that they grew up in a tome when computers were way less complicated and also cheap enough to be consumer goods. It’s not because of any one company, but the natural evolution of the technology.
I wouldn’t say it’s lucky, there are tons of jobs that require & presume you to have the most basic knowledge about filesystem or folder hierarchy and the young hires I’ve had in the last few years act like I’m throwing them into an advanced calculus class. Mouths agape and eyebrows scrunched up as I slowly show them where files go, like I’ve invented fire in front of their eyes.
Hasn’t helped most of them in western Europe though, in a lot of elementary schools they now teach about basic computer skills like how folders work (and they spend weeks on that).
It’s never been about a specific company or anything, it’s just that more people are using computers and don’t actually have to learn anything to use them.
I train my company’s end users weekly and your just stating facts. People graduating college don’t have the computer skills that the 60 year old receptionist does, because she took the time to fucking learn because her job depended on it.
I’d piss on Steve Jobs’ grave if I knew where it was. And the propensity for schools to take the cheap route and use chromebooks in the classroom is the next wave.
“Apple just woooorks!” fuck off. Use on-prem enterprise accounting software, line-of-business applications or boutique software, anything in a manufacturing space and tell me how fucking well it just works.
Yes, there are 17 different packages from 25 different sources that you can Frankenstein together to make that enterprise work, but despite the bullshit that comes with it, enterprises run on windows desktop. And Sally, your word processor frankly is the same damn thing either way. You’re not that special.
as a gen zer myself I would follow it up with WHY? give me a reason WHY. I don’t really see a difference between instagram groups and signal groups. I think what it is for most people is some lame app they will download for only that specific purpose. The only reason why iMessage is popular is it’s the default. If the EU passed a regulation to force Apple to have a default messager that only supported SMS, and iMessage to be a separate appstore app, or even just an extension for the messages app. it would die within a year. Meta groups are only popular cause they are tired to 2 of the biggest social platform being facebook and instagram.
Signal is just a messaging app, and worst of all to a ton of people you have to share your phone number, something that is kinda intimate and you might only share it among the closer people in your friend group, even when signal launches usernames unless it builds something around signal it’s just another annoying messaging app to keep track of.
There’s an app called Session that is similar to Signal without the phone number requirement but then you have the issue of moving people to an even more niche platform
For some reason the session network (oxen network) now blocks my Hetzner VPS connection (I use for VPN). Have been a session user for around 2 years now and now I have to reconsider Signal.
There’s also threema which is pretty tried and tested and quite popular where I live (and also not connected to weird crypto schemes) but it of course has the same issue.
I love SimpleX because you can have multiple users and you can use 1-time invite codes so you don’t actually have to give anyone an identifier of any kind if you don’t want to.
I’ve tried to use session to talk to a couple family members but I just don’t get notifications, so I just use signal. (no I’m not on slow mode, I just use microG)
Security and avoidance of anti-features != anonymity. If you wanted that you would have to use something like GNU Jami which has account archives and is peer to peer.
I’m just grateful that the phone number requirement means less of a hassle for others.
You pretty much hit the nail. I doubt he has ever even used Signal in his life. And even if it was some lame all for a specific purpose, it is a better experience than SMS since Apple loves to gatekeep iMessage and Android users can’t use it.
I tried this before, but with asking someone why they liked the iPhone so much.
I kept asking why and they’d keep giving me non-answer types of answers. Basically, they had no reason. But that still didn’t stop them from liking their products.
I don’t know, dude. Even asking ‘why’ doesn’t work anymore.
Why should everyone use your recommended app tho? Try to look for a compromise. Yes privacy is important, but being that hard on yourself and others will make your life a lot less enjoyable.
I’ve grown up enough to understand that, but it still really bothers me how ignorant people are. You could go further: no curiosity, no adventure, no hobbies, and total lack of effort in almost every facet of life.
People just like to stagnate, and it shows in almost every situation. Not even technology related things, but everything.
My teenage little brother, as much as I love him, is kind of disappointing. He doesn’t do anything but play Roblox. When he is grounded (often) he elects to take pictures of his feet and say stupid things to his “friends” instead of holding real conversations.
I’ve never been able to get him interested in anything that requires a modicum of effort, except for modded Minecraft. He likes the machines, and has built cool things, so I know he has the smarts, but he doesn’t have the attention span or the patience to troubleshoot them if they don’t work the first time. He gives up and starts doom scrolling social media. He has expensive shoes, the latest iPhone, and perms his hair. My mother encouraged this vapid pretty boy personality he’s adopted, and I don’t know why, he wasn’t like that when he was younger.
He tries to make fun of me for having and Android phone and using Linux, and I explain to him that software development is what I do for a living and as a hobby. Look, I never ever ever see an ad, anywhere. He thinks AirPods sound good, and calls all earbuds “AirPods”.
And he’s not the only one, I’m tutoring a kid around his age for programming and math. This kid will answer “I don’t know” to every single question, and when I check every 5 minutes to make sure he follows, he is obviously preoccupied.
When I was their age, I hated school just as much as any other kid (and I still think it needs serious reform because it might cause this kind of damage that I’m describing) but I still spent all of my free time either outside trying to make explosives, reading, or programming.
As someone who did poorly in math and science classes because I spent all my free time reading Stephen King novels, binging horror movies on VHS, playing the original Final Fantasy, and walking around town aimlessly with my friends, I assure you we were there, and I knew people with even less motivation than myself.
I’m pretty sure I mindlessly checked out just as often. I cringe thinking about how I just used to watch TV ads without batting an eye. Imagine being numb to that.
I do understand the “lazy”, I saw them around me when I was a kid too.
It’s really simple: everyone is born curious, that’s how we learn to walk and talk, or the difference between sucking a thumb and chewing on sweets. Then, some get encouraged to keep being curious, while others get forced into strict rules and punished for any displays of curiosity, until they stop trying.
I almost got pushed over the line, was labeled a “bad kid” more than once for not following the rules, and just by a lucky twist of destiny, they couldn’t push me more into a mold. That lead to later rebellion, family conflicts, further attempts that completely backfired, and I ended up being one of the few weird kids in class who kept being curious. I still kind of envy some of the others, who instead of getting stifled, got truly encouraged in their curiosity, they’ve ended up much better later in life.
My point being, these people are not lazy, or like to stagnate, or like being ignorant. I’m sorry for your brother, it sounds like his curiosity has been beaten out of him into oblivion. You say your mother has encouraged it, and at the same time that he keeps getting grounded; that’s how the process works. If any time one tries to get out of the mold they get punished, while getting encouraged to stay safely inside, it leads to just giving up, at least until they get to live on their own, which prevents one from achieving their full potential.
As for the answering “I don’t know” to every question, I’ve seen it as a defense mechanism in people who got criticized/punished for every answer in an arbitrary manner, so they’d rather automatically pretend not to know, than risk thinking and saying the wrong thing. Not sure how you could help them, nothing of what I tried did work in that case. Hope you have more luck.
Everyone has a limited about of time, ability to learn, and executive function. It’s rational to be lazy about things that aren’t important to your well-being or interests.
That said, there does seem to be an issue where people are getting overly habituated to instant gratification and constant stimulation. Many valuable things don’t work that way.
I mean we all know, that modern social media overstimulates kids’ brains. But I think that they use it in the first place to cope stress, just as older people tend to smoke to cope stress.
What I hate about the person’s reply is that its not specific. There’s no opportunity for a counter argument or alternative option if the reason for not wanting to use something is that it “sucks”.
“I tried Signal five years ago and it was unreliable” would be a good justification, and there’s a good counter: its better now.
I think if you’re using on Android without Google cloud messaging, as many people in a privacy-oriented community might, delayed notifications are more likely. I’ve found that notifications are timely with cloud messaging using either MicroG or Google Play Services.
I use signal as my main chat app. I think it sucks. I often don’t get notifications in a timely manner (very widespread glitch on android) and because it stores images inside its own encrypted box, the app size balloons incredibly quickly. I cannot just empty out photos automatically, as with whatsapp, i have to export them and then delete them - manually.
I think it’s still worth it to not have facebook all up in my business, but the end user experience is shit.
13 on a pixel 6. Yes, unrestricted. Hey, maybe it’s for the better not to pick the phone up at every bing or bong. I can receive a phonecall if there is an emergemcy.
There’s your problem, the pixels since the pixel 5 have been dogshit for battery life. My wife had a bunch of problems with her 6, so we traded for a 7. Same problems. My pixel 3 was one of my best phones and I knew a bunch of people with 4s who loved them. Seems like since the 5 it’s been nothing, but issues. Then they introduced their tensor chip which is just an overheating battery sucker.
I bought the 6 as the 7 came out, and the battery was shit from the beginning. I out it down to being end of stock, it had probably sat on a shelf for a few months before i bought it, but perhaps i was being too generous :/
(I’ve been hearing that they’re coming very soon for several years)
Maybe if the devs worked with the community more then we could get them, but they don’t seem to accept PRs from folks outside their core team anymore (please correct me if I’m wrong)
No they actually are coming pretty soon, just in feburary this year, they had screenshots of the Signal app (a version that isn’t released yet) beiing able to register a username.
In Android 13, there are two different battery optimization steps, are you sure, signal is unoptimzied? I have had no issues at all. Even now without Google GMS, I receive them within 20 seconds. Edit: You can also bulk delete pictures fairly easy within Signal in the settings. Imho its the videos though, that take away the most memory.
Battery optimization in Android 13 is such dogshit. They should have had it as its own setting category to give users full control over which apps we want optimized.
Instead, they just optimize everything and put apps to sleep if you need them infrequently, all so they can brag about the battery life of their devices.
I’m always one step from going full third-party OS.
With root, it is not hard at all. You just net the “fix safetynet check” module for magisk. After that you’ll need to hide root within magisk: Hide magisk + Zygisk + enforce denylist. Some of the Apps might still detect the Magisk App somehow but for that, I recommend you “Hail” from Fdroid. It freezes / deactivates the apps you want and thaws them, whenever needed. In the frozen state, magisk won’t be detected, as it seems uninstalled to other apps. Hail is also incredibly nice for apps that drain your battery on idle. It is even possible to use GPay without any problems, though it is a bit tricky to set up for it to work. But there’s tutorials for that as well.
Yes, signal is unrestricted. I get your point about bulk deletion, but i have syncthing running that backs my photos up to my NAS every hour or so, and deletes them from my phone at the end of the month, so i keep space free. I cannot do that with signal. I wish there were an option to store images (from certain chats or groups would be ideal) in the clear. The videos are a real pain, yes. And i love videos of my nephews, but they blow through my phone’s storage like there’s no tomorrow.
“I think it’s still worth it to not have facebook all up in my business, but the end user experience is shit.”
I appreciate deeply what signal offers, bit that does not blind me to its shortcomings. It could allow flexibility in the area of media handling and that would be a big plus, imho. Or perhaps there is something in the codebase that genuinely makes that a huge pain to implement.
I use disappearing messages a lot more now, and my partner and i have a shared syncthing folder to share photos. And as you hint, there’s always going to be a tradeoff of security against convenience.
Your snark is misplaced. My complaint was never a complete lack of functionality, it was that it is not automatable, it has to be done manually, as the commenter above you so tersely but pointlessly, explained step by step.
If you set message history, it’s completely automated. My app size rarely is over 1GB. You can even set the media quality under Data and Storage so it’ll use less storage if that’s a concern.
Re: the notifications not coming, I’ve seen it similar from WhatsApp too. I reckon it depends much on which app you use more, so it gives enough battery time to keep aware of messages. Now I use Signal more, I think I’ve had more misses on WhatsApp.
That said, I’ve had a few weirder misses (for calls only, I think) that don’t seem to be from battery optimisation.
Pretty normal reaction after the announcement that Signal got rid of SMS support. A bunch of folks I used to talk to read that and ditched Signal entirely for FB Chat.
They had a good blog post about why - their take was that SMS is dying and the replacement was a moving target that was hard to support for reasons I’m forgetting. I agree it hurt them tremendously though.
Probably a lot. I was very annoyed myself, though it made android pretty similar to the situation on iOS where you can’t replace the default messaging app anyway.
It’s an area where I think we need a bunch of stuff:
Antitrust regulation to force companies to use open standards and allow customization
Folks like the Signal Foundation should get over themselves and run their project like a real open source project, where others can fork/modify/run both the server side and client side.
There’s so much anti-competitive bullshit regarding #1 from all sides, from carriers to Apple to Google to device manufacturers.
It is ironic that you call a Proprietary Data Harvester Platform User “Friendly”. Well forget users. Meta even collects data of non users to top off the grimness.
User friendliness =/= Privacy friendly. What I mean is that everybody there (aside from the linux kid) is comfortable with the app. More than goddamn signal…
I really do not see any logical basis that makes you separate privacy friendliness from User Friendliness. If a platform wishes to be user friendly, privacy is also one of the fundamental rights of a user the platform needs to take care of for it to be considered friendly to a user.
The fact that a lot of people, not ‘everybody’, are comfortable with Instagram has no strong points to consolidate your own position. It only describes how good the horrible marketting of Giant Tech Corporations is at entrapping millions of people into using it, generating life long addictions and the eventual wastage of time on degenerate culture. While the Corporations collect all that data available to them to further their own Capitalist interests.
Privacy does come at a cost and compromise. A slightly less funkier UI for a far more secure platform, for essentially 0 cost is a lot one could ask for, especially when you are comparing a Libre project made by a small organization to a proprietary project made by a Multi Billionaire MNC.
I will not be apologetic in saying that you are the child here who is tailing the mass of consumers without proper analysis.
I wonder what part of Signal sucks? Why do people hate things that try to protect your privacy, yet care about privacy when the time comes and bitch about it.
The UX is nice and modern, better than iMessage and other messaging apps I’ve used. Scheduling messages, group chats allow people to come and go (mod approved) all seem more modern than other chat apps
I hear this all the time, but to be fair it wasn’t even them. It was Google putting up “framework defenses” (with RCS, and now they’re doing the same with the native Android phone dialer).
Where Signal dropped the ball was their marketing: it was as easy as picking up their old app (TextSecure) so that they didn’t have to worry about feature clash with current Signal, then rebrand this old app as “Signal SMS” and boom, instant adoption because it’d be fairly trivial to “migrate”. And they get to steal the thunder from the apps that slowed down development.
UI is bad imo, lack of SMS is a complete disqualifier, nobody else I know uses the platform so I’m using it for one group chat only, notifications don’t work properly.
I think the UI is perfect, it’s simple and intuitive. The fact that they removed support for SMS is a bummer, sure. I’ve had issues with notifications before, but I haven’t missed any in months. Facebook Messenger (which I’ve fully replaced with Signal) was however a puring pile of shit when it came to sending notifications in time - just like Teams and Ops Genie!
Don’t you get charged for every SMS message? Here in Europe I’m grumpy everytime I need to send an SMS, because I’m being charged for something that is completely free through the internet. Not to mention that due to our local characters, an SMS is only 70 chars long.
That explains it, then. Here it costs around 11 US cents per message. So if you are messaging a lot, they will add up at the end of the billing period.
They synchronization is my main problem of signal. When I’m changing devices or stuff like that and I have to do a manual backup to get Signal back…with other services like Telegram what’s up whatever, you instant get your chats up again.
So me and my wife switched back to Telegram. I badly want to use Signal as my main communication but sync and horrible search options makes it harder to sell.
The sync might be a problem pretty much because this is not a cloud sync but a local sync. Your phone or desktop has to be online to be able to sync. Unlike telegram which stores all your messages, signal doesnt, thus needing a local sync system.
Or I can continue not using it like everyone else. It’s Signal’s responsibility to attract users, not mine. I’m all for it if they can gain adoption but I’m not investing any effort into helping them without pay
Uhhh THAT’S a broad brush… I use it, and I’m as far lefty left as left liberal can be, and my family is the same. And none of us are pedophiles to my knowledge.
I can understand OP’s desire to not plaster one’s entire living situation on a public forum. The startling lack of privacy awareness among people in general is frightening. In the 60’s there were actual riots over wiretaps on public phones!
Now we ask the wiretaps that we pay to put in our homes: “hey Alexa, can cats eat pancakes?”
It was a good in between step for non technical users to use it as their singular texting app. So while they still SMS with the unwashed masses, they could still be convinced to do encrypted texts and group chats with others. Doing away with SMS forced all these people off Signal since they didn’t want to jump between 2 apps, it was a huge misstep by them that I think cost them their future.
This is exactly the problem with Signal. I used to use it a long time ago, but they progressively made it worse. Finally they got rid of SMS, and refused to back down to the outrage. I looked back at the history of a messaging service that got worse with every update and switched to the default Google messenger, because it can do both SMS and encrypted messaging.
I have been using Signal for years and have not noticed it getting worse. Instead, I’ve noticed that it’s much more reliable about timely notifications than it was a few years ago.
I never much cared about it being able to do SMS or not. I got used to the idea that it was necessary to have multiple apps to talk to everyone in the early 2000s PC instant messenger era; there were some multi-service apps, but that was never a stable situation.
Pidgin and Trillian were both fantastic stable solutions back then, and it’s be real fucking nice to have that today, but everyone’s got their hand out to steal your data and offer you free services for the trouble and they don’t want to share.
I was upset about the SMS thing as well. I also switched to Google messenger app on my phone for SMS/RCS. While they do have encryption in transit, I’m pretty sure it’s not encrypted at rest on the server side like signal is.
Because I don’t want to have sixteen different messaging apps on my phone. While privacy and security are important to me, I’m also only so willing to put up shit user experience.
The reason I downloaded Signal in the first place was specifically because it could do both SMS and encrypted messaging. Then, over the years every new change either removed features I found useful (individual colors for each chat) or added ones that were just a distraction or actively bad (stickers, stories, PIN).
When they got rid of SMS and refused to back down, despite the outcry, I had no reason to keep it.
I’m well aware, and so is everyone else. And yet we’re all so apathetic about it that we’re not willing to put up with immediate annoyances to safeguard against vauge future potential problems.
The selling point for Signal for me was that I could tell people that it could do both SMS and encrypted messages, so they didn’t have to add an extra messaging app. It was literally encryption for normies.
Without that convenience? Fuck it. There’s no immediate value to me or any other normal person.
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