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Comment by meibo | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if this is because of all the new users, so maybe someone that has been using Signal for a while longer can pitch in: Is the Desktop experience really as bad as it has been over the past few days?

It took 4 minutes for me this morning to replay a chat of maybe 200 messages, and that's with one person. I can't even imagine how bad it must be with multiple big groups. Sending takes ages, often being out of sync with the phone app, and I get notifications for messages I replied to half an hour ago on my Desktop when unlocking my phone.

Not sure if I'd wanna stay on Signal at the moment if it stays like this, maybe Matrix is really the better choice - at least Element on the web is by far superior to signal.

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The desktop experience, at least for me, has been amazing. Very fast and clean.

The download times for messages / etc have been MUCH slower recently. I’m thinking it’s because of the load they are experiencing. As more people donate and as they scale for the load I imagine (and hope) it might even be faster than it was before.

I use Signal every day for 1:1 messages and a 1:2 group. There's basically no noticeable lag normally, i have very few complaints about the raw message functionality of Signal.

My complaints (if you can call them that) would be the general app quality on various platforms, and how much better Telegram feels. I'm a user that also enjoys all the stupid features that non-encrypted platforms have easier times adding. Gifs, stickers, drawing, reactions, /shrug - nothing necessary, but still.

So yea, functionally Signal works for me and my small group without much issue. It just doesn't have many Bells/Whistles.

I've never really had any issues with it over the last year or so, but the last week has been a bit spotty - but then my contact list has tripled in length since the whatsapp privacy update and news coverage - so I think its likely that it is demand.

I've setup a matrix homeserver yesterday, and in the process of setting up bridges to Signal/IRC etc so I get a single app with all the chats.

I'm not sure what you need from a web/desktop experience, for me it is a chat app, that I can send an image or txt , I don't really need anything else. YMMV

I would suggest to let it settle down for a few days, then see how it is. I would think that all whatsapp replacements are going to be peaking in use for the next week or so as people try out different things.

i didnt know you could set up bridges for signal. what does your server look like in terms of users? i want to test it out but dont know what i need to get started (besides the guides and all), just with the server

At the moment, it is me and a handful of other tech friends who are setting up servers of their own.

We've been installing things manually to test out different parts, but I think I'll be switching to a docker setup this weekend (purely for ease of setup)

https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

There are all sorts of bridges and bots:

https://matrix.org/bridges/ https://matrix.org/bots/

Once I have it roughly figured out, I'll look at paying to get some redundancy sorted, and then stick to this as my communications going forward.

I've been using Signal for years. Normally things are good. I'm not surprised by the hiccups since their userbase went up by >5x in the past week. I imagine it is very difficult to deal with that kind of scaling in such a short period of time.

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