Item — HN Reader

Yes, it's definitely time for some slightly enhanced armchair activism!

Convert all active whatsapp contacts to signal? 80%? 50%?

Same for Facebook messenger!

It needs to be uncomfortable enough - if they want to communicate with us and are minimally tech savvy ("click link to install app") they have to switch to signal.

That's it.

I'm starting to send out messages over my morning coffee.

Let's do this together:

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007060592-In...

9 comments

It's wild to me that

1. There are tons of replies in this thread. People have very strong feelings about signal.

2. Some people feel VERY STRONGLY that the pin numbers are stupid, and it has a terrible UX.

3. Some people feel VERY STRONGLY that the phone numbers are the simplest, most straightforward thing to use, and they would hate Signal if they didn't support it.

4. Some people feel VERY STRONGLY that they don't want their phone number used as an identifier, and it's a failure of Signal that they use them.

And it seems like many of these replies assume that their own position is the only possible one to take (or at least the only intelligent one!).

Imagine working on Signal and trying to create a product that pleases all these people, as well as even less technically minded folks, while having none of the usual analytics at your disposal to measure actual user interaction!

My hat's off to Signal. I admire their work but I don't envy their position.

I’d rather keep using messenger than switch to signal. Nothing that requires my phone number, and even worse, uses it as primary identifier, is something I want to switch to (and no, obviously I don’t use Whatsapp either). I realize that in this mobile-centric world that makes me a grumpy old man, but for me, my E-Mail is the important ID.

I switched phone numbers a few years back and I can't use Uber because my account is tied to my old phone number and the new phone number already had an Uber account. It's so dumb.

I’m curious why you see a difference between the two? Phone companies have been giving away your phone number for years, it gets more spam then my email address at this point, which has made me disable it for all incoming calls except those in my contacts.

At this point, none of us even use phones, my family pretty much use Zoom and at work everything is Google Meet, my phone function is basically a dead function at this point.

I don't truly own my phone number. I barely control it. I can move it from provider to provider, kind of, but it's still not _my_ number – the number is a side effect of having cell service. In particular, if I move to a new country, what happens to my phone number? (Having recently done so, I still don't know: for now, I'm paying two cellphone bills, but that's obviously not a long-term solution, and I don't know what is. Port it to Twilio, I guess.)

You can make the argument that I don't truly “owns” the domain name off of which my e-mail address hangs, either, but it's a much better situation than phone number ownership. There, at least, the constraints of ownership (rental) are clearly defined, as is my ability to move it between registrars.

Yeah, that's pretty much my thinking. Phone numbers are extremely brittle. And I didn't even think of changing countries, which might be in my future.

My phone number is tied to a geographical location. (Sure, I can keep it alive, but now I am collecting phone numbers as I move around).

My email represents me, and I fully own it with minimal upkeep costs.

I'm not sure I understand you. You ask me why I see a difference and then list reasons a phone number sucks?

It sounded like you saw phone numbers as something to protect, keep private. I was asking from that frame of reference, and then pointed out how non-private they are today.

Yes I think they suck, but do they suck more or less than en email? Not clear.

They're working on being able to use it without a phone number, though doing so in a privacy-friendly way is forcing them to overcome some challenges first: https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1281353119369097217

Phone numbers are an awful identifier.

I don't see why you're responding that to a comment about allowing non-phone number identifiers?

Maybe look into Status?

https://status.im/

I'm a core contributor at Status, and the team I'm on is currently developing a desktop client[1] to complement the mobile client. We have alpha builds for Linux and macOS, and soon Windows.

Status uses the Waku[2] protocol.

[1] https://github.com/status-im/nim-status-client/releases

[2] https://specs.vac.dev/specs/waku/waku.html

All I want is messenger. Status seems to do way too much. I don't want a wallet, a browser or anything else (not even to mention that I don't know a single person on macos and barely anyone on iOS)

Sure, maybe it's not for you.

One thing: I don't think it's unusual for a user to have little/no interest in the wallet or dapp browser. In that case they simply use it as a chat app that's focused on privacy and security while ignoring the other features.

I haven't had an account on Facebook or the like for years, and I started using Signal when it came out. I've been evangelizing it, and I never used Messenger or Whatsapp or any of those services.

The uptake? Like ~30% of the people I'd like to contact bother with it. The rest, it's even worse - we get stuck with SMS. And a lot of conversations I just miss, period, because they're groups of people in one of those other ecosystems (and missing those is a price I'm personally OK with paying, but not everybody will be).

The situation is just really bad. Signal is a good baby step forward, but it's not really the answer for most people, because they're sticky to wherever their network graph of contacts already is, and they're not going to switch just because the one weird nerd in their life isn't available there.

We need to turn to propaganda. If you support tracking and insecure communication, think of your children who will get burnt by insurance companies having access to their data. Thousands of [company] employees will look at your nudes if you share it on there. They might look at your kid's photos that you don't want them to. The republicans and democrats (depending who they support, switch) will look at your kid's pictures. The FBI will look at it. The cops will have access to it and then will target your kids in future. Why are you ruining yours and my kids future?

are you OK with THAT? You support children harassment by cops?

Throw some biased media page calling big companies bad. Not a hard thing to do today or write an opinion piece on popular news journal site and reference it. Medium works too.

We also need to cancel people for supporting these platforms.

Always a good sign when guilt is used to coax someone into using a product. "Don't you want the best for your family?"

I've been converting people to signal for years, I've got everyone in my life to switch except for my parents and 2 coworkers.

I gave up after realizing that Signal will not deliver message for a couple of days and that message notification doesn't work. Why wasting personal credit on something that is clearly inferior from the usability point of view.

And after it started insisting on creating a PIN each time I start Signal, I finally deleted it from my phone.

You can forget about security if you can't get a seamless user experience.

Oh God, the PIN creation is so annoying. Whatever possessed them that that was a good idea? Note that even after creating the PIN the app doesn't quit nagging you, it 'helpfully' continues to remind you to re-type it so you don't forget.

Plus, it's just a terrible UX for a SMS client. I really wanted to like it, but it's just too obnoxious to use. I've certainly not recommended it, I've had better luck switching relatives to Linux mint (seriously, I am not exaggerating). Creating a group MMS is annoying, and there's a nag screen if you try to call someone from a message within the app. I understand that most of these problems are due to the secure nature of the app, but trying to use it as your full-time SMS client is just too much of a pain. I'll likely still keep it installed, as the 1 thing it does do is make it really easy to transfer files/send messages between devices (send messages to yourself, then download them using the client's for other OS's).

Since it's open-source and on GitHub, you can go there and raise an issue with this feedback. You can't do that with WhatsApp or other closed-source alternatives.

Personally, I don't feel the UX is "terrible", I can use it to do most of the things that I could do in WhatsApp. My friends and I also tested out the video call feature and found the quality to be the same, if not better.

https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1281353119369097217

> I gave up after realizing that Signal will not deliver message for a couple of days and that message notification doesn't work.

That has never happened to me.

It has happened as recently as last month with a relative of mine. On that phone, the messages would get delivered only when Signal was manually opened; if Signal was not the foreground application, messages for it would not get delivered (but WhatsApp delivered messages correctly on the same phone). It's as if the Signal server had lost the association between the Signal account and the GCM token used to deliver the notifications.

I think it used to be the case back in 2015 or so, I believe they meanwhile fixed the issue. For sure it hasn't happened to me for a couple of years now.

Ive done that too. But I've experienced a lot of people removing it again.

The result is uncomfortable, since Signal never knows the other side removed it, so messages land in thin air. Several times did I have awkward moments when someone was angry "I thought you'd let me know if it was cancelled" - "I did - I sent you a text about that two days ago! On Signal!"

To switch, or to use it? Many people I know contact me through Signal, but their primary means of communication still definitely is WhatsApp, and they'll have to consciously remember to open their install of Signal to contact me.

> Convert all active whatsapp contacts to signal? 80%? 50%?

They can start by removing the atrocious phone number verification first.

This is exactly why I never got further than their login/signup.

Being forced to give them one of my 'most unique identifiers' (my phone number) was an absolute 'no'.

What about the Matrix platform? I personally prefer something that doesn't require a phone number as an ID.

There are some good-looking and user-friendly clients

https://matrix.org/clients/

The only way to do this is to build an integration that makes the switch DEAD SIMPLE. If it involves someone being highly motivated to switch over themselves without any help its not going to gain steam.

If I'm gonna make it difficult to get in contact with me, I think I'd rather make them use a federated system rather than one platform.

I switched to my own xmpp server instead. Never going back.