To which my non technical friends don't know which to choose and didn't bother at all and went back to using WhatsApp.
If that is the consequence for multiple fragmented clients then no thanks.
back
1 comments
Just recommend the client you are using?
Yes, and everyone went back to using WhatsApp as I said, including me.
Nobody bothers with Signal and all these other fringe privacy apps or alternatives.
That is my point.
No, nobody in YOUR circle bothers with it. Approaching 50% of mine does.
Don't project that laziness onto the entire populace, enabling others to feel comfortable that it's "too hard" to use Signal....that's awful.
> Don't project that laziness onto the entire populace, enabling others to feel comfortable that it's "too hard" to use Signal....that's awful.
Unfortunately WhatsApp has a lot more staying power and social inertia than you would ever realise, regardless of how large a social circle is, and your anecdote doesn't change that either.
Until Signal supports all or most of WhatsApp's features I don't see this changing.
Signal does support most of WhatsApp's features though.
Great, so this means I can use Signal to backup my messages on my old iPhone with an iCloud backup to my new phone right?
You can transfer all your messages from your old iPhone to your new one though[1].
[1] https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...
No, supporting most of anything doesn't mean having the one random thing you need as a certainty. But also yes, messages are transferrable.
This didn't age very well.
people are still using WhatsApp anyway, thats the whole point.
I've had a lot of success getting people to move over to Signal personally. I have 400ish contacts on WhatsApp, and at least 150 on Signal, from like 5 or 6 before the T&C update from WhatsApp.
It would be a lot better to get people on federating networks like XMPP (the Internet standard for IM) or Matrix (currently has a better iOS client) instead of moving them from one walled garden to another.
I agree it would be a lot better, but
1) I don't have the infrastructure or the time to self host at the moment, and almost none of my contacts have the ability.
2) My XMPP experience (using Conversations and a couple of free servers online) was inconsistent. No attachments were delivered, message storage was limited to the client side, and a few niggles in general.
3) Matrix.org tended to be slow and unreliable for me, definitely more so than Signal. And as mentioned, I can't self-host right now.
If I could, I would have moved them to an open network, but for the reasons I mentioned and others, it's just not at the same level of convenience or usability yet. I might be more tolerant of these issues for advocacy's sake, but my contacts certainly wouldn't be.
I hear you (and others), which is why we're trying to solve these kinds of barriers to XMPP adoption, with Snikket. It's a preconfigured server that can be self-hosted, or there is a hosted service available (you can migrate between them). Also included in the project are client apps with consistent feature set and behaviours across platforms (currently Android/iOS). This includes things you mentioned such as smooth file sharing, server-side storage, end-to-end encryption, etc.
It's still relatively early days for the project (launched last year), but I guess my point is - if the things you listed are all that's holding you back from XMPP, try Snikket and give us some feedback :)