this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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I am eagerly waiting for usernames and for something to happen that makes people go to signal. The few people I had there ditched it when it lost sms support.
I loved it up until it ditched sms support. The people I could get to use it great, but I was still able to use one platform to message all my contacts and that was key to me.
I've convinced almost my entire friend group to switch over to Signal
It took a long time and some big fuckups by Messenger, but we even got a group chat going on Signal after all
That's really impressive. I live in the land of wall-to-wall WhatsApp
I've noticed for my North American friends it's easy to convince them to move to Signal (from SMS or Messenger), but my European friends are all pretty entrenched in WhatsApp. On one hand WhatsApp is certainly more secure, but on the other we can't really trust a closed source implementation (and they'll still collect metadata which makes me uncomfortable).
I'm just glad I don't have to use SMS anymore honestly
Signal and Telegram using phone numbers instead of usernames is the silliest shit
You can sign up for telegram with a throwaway phone number, and you can add people with only usernames without ever sharing or exchanging phone numbers.
But you get stories now! Yaaaay 🌚
Signal is either going to die pretty soon, or it's going to become the very thing it was created to destroy (gets bought by Facebook).
Federated apps like element are the future, and element is already more stable and offers more features than signal. The only thing signal has over it is the ease of use for someone coming from WhatsApp or Viber.
ease of use is massive though. I really don't think federation is the future in our timeline. it would take some event actively pushing "normies" away from centralized services - I'm not even sure what that could be.
Most of my family luckily is still finding signal okay. Dropping sms was confusing to some, but i also get the argument for it, as some other struggled with selection of what kind of a message to send. Either way, hard to find an acceptable alternative to move them to