this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
426 points (96.9% liked)
Privacy
32159 readers
279 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Signal really is that better replacement for WhatsApp since the functionality is identical, others would have to force people to get used to the different ui and the options.
Everyone. Everyone. I mean everyone here misses the biggest plus for WhatsApp compared to pretty much every other messenger. Signal is pretty much the only one as "simple" as it.
We are all too big of privacy geeks to realize what non-tech-savvy people go through with these.
Sign up process is dead simple from your phone. It is literally as simple as putting in your phone and PIN. Once you hit the "choosing server" on people using matrix for the first time, you have already lost them. Completely. The exact same thing happened with mastodon and lemmy. People who had no idea about how federation and decentralization were instantly lost
Backups: backing up is a process that the users have to do on a lot of matrix clients, or not available. People want to be able to simply move to a new phone by installing the new app, logging in, and being right back with all of your old messages. Even on signal you still have to restore the automatic backup. If you don't have that file, you are screwed. I can't remember if Element will sync your messages automatically to a new device.
Those 2 things and population are literally the only thing that the average person actually cares about outside of other people being available on the platform.
Except Signal UI is... Not good. It feels like using a texting app.
Between the UI and dropping SMS support, I can't get anyone to use it anymore, and people I had using it have moved on.
Dropping SMS is really frustrating - it was the big selling point I had.
I’m one of those people who thinks SMS has no place in a private messaging app. Signal is the gold standard, and enabling sms merely legitimised this incredibly non private and antiquated messaging protocol.
And gave a constant reminder to people that something better was right there.
And put things in one place.
You're letting perfect be the enemy of good. At least with SMS support I could get people to switch to "this new texting app", and we'd then have a proper Signal encrypted chat. And when they texted someone else, Signal would append the "you could have encryption too" signature, generating a conversation about it.
The people who moved off of Signal went back to SMS entirely. How is that better?
but it is a texting app...
Huge bummer. Kind of understood why they did it but they lost a lot of people because of this.