This is not good. I've moved so many people over in the last week. For purposes of getting them invested, this is a truly inopportune moment for an extended outage.
It is, but most consumers don't care, they just what their stuff to work 100% of the time as frictionless as possible, and, on top of all things, for free. Otherwise they just run back to the usual free surveilanceware.
I've tried and failed to convince some young, highly educated zoomer friends with good incomes to move away from WhatsApp and Facebook and even when I told them "Look, they're basically spying on you" they just brush it off and say "I don't care, it's fun, easy to use and all my friends are already there".
Ironically, it was easier to convince my boomer parents to move to Signal and they also understand and agree with the tradeoffs and extra friction for the sake of free privacy but younger people just want to be where their friends are and not feel left out (remember the blue vs green bubble stigma on iMessage).
The more someone cares about security and is willing to trade away other good things for security, the better a platform Signal is — but remember, this also flows the other way.
WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger offer the same level of security as Telegram. In fact, I think WhastApp is more secure since it does E2E encryption by default.
It's true that Telegram is about "fun" and not security. I just wasn't sure if you tried to imply Telegram is like Signal with a focus on fun as well, or you just meant most people don't care about security and would rather have fun chats?
WhatsApp, for all its faults is E2E-encrypted by default and all the time.
Not that it helps much unless you avoid activating backups and convince all your contacts to avoid backups.
I don't like WhatsApp (anymore), but we should stick to the facts.
If you look only at encryption, WhatsApp is even better.
Once you factor in the fact that all your metadata is vacuumed into Facebooks data lake and that it might very well end up in Google Cloud if either you or someone you chat with activate cloud backups.
(I am not here to defend Telegram's portrayal of itself as a secure messaging service — Telegram is grotesquely bad on that axis)
tg is light on resources like phone storage and bandwidth (and hence money) and has excellent multidevice support.
apart from that i don't belive one can have a seriously private conversation involving a device running popular versions of android/ios.
You carrot them with a unique way to ping you, over tech no one else has, and they see it like an intimate connection with you
I had my elder parents and SO use it for years before friends i consider privacy aware and tech savvy... For years
Added benefit: its a lot harder to share memes over a young network with no traffic.
I guess that may change now....
I too wish Signal engineers good luck!
(Even if I personally mostly use Telegram and hope for Matrix to "win", Signal is a fantastic piece of software as far as I can see, both as an extremely secure (I think) messaging client in its own right and also as an inspiration for other messaging platforms.)
Or obviously Signal.
When it comes to Matrix, it's a little trickier. Riot, the most common Matrix client does E2E encryption on DMs and invite only rooms. What I'm not sure is what happens if you send a private message to someone who is using Matrix client that doesn't do E2E. Will it fail to send? Or will it like fallback to not encrypted?
Fun fact: I didn't even write that.
The rest is not so much for you personally as for a number Signal fans:
I get it, I get it: Signal is best. But seriously: do you Signal fans have to derail every conversation?
Do you have to take a jab at every other messenger at every given opportunity?
Or can we agree that there's room for more than one solution? Because physical mail, email, irc, Telegram etc are probably going to stay around for a long time, at least until Signal solves:
- large groups
- backups
- grows a stable messaging API
- creates a Bot api
- and starts teleporting physical goods
- etc
Until Signal solves all this we are going to have to deal with other mesaging solutions.
Deal with it. Seriously.
Yes: Signal is probably the most secure now IMO.
No: talking down other messengers doesn't make it better.
@dang: apologies in advance. I've tried hard to keep it polite.
We are going to have to live with various systems for a long time, IMO hopefully "forever" since competition typically often does wonderful things.
I don't really have a horse in this race, just a guy who was scrolling through these comments and was struck how rude and ridiculous this remark is.
You're in a discussion thread for an article about Signal. You're the one who brought up Telegram and now you're having a little fit and accusing Signal fans of "derail[ing] every conversation"? This conversation is about Signal. If you didn't want people comparing it to Telegram, why did you bring it up?
This would be a good point, if it wasn't for the point that the only reason I brought up Telegram was to say I was a Telegram user cheering for the Signal team!
I know this happens a lot in other threads about other messengers, so it's probably a fair comment. But I find there is something ironic about someone commenting on a story about Signal that they use Telegram and then complaining that other users talking about Signal are derailing the conversation.
They operate on their own schedules and priorities, and it's tricky to get your PR into any of the clients.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
Good luck Signal team!
> We have been adding new servers and extra capacity at a record pace every single day this week nonstop, but today exceeded even our most optimistic projections. Millions upon millions of new users are sending a message that privacy matters. We appreciate your patience.
https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1350165610936766464
They've seen it coming, just never expected this much new traffic.
Based on my friends, mostly foreigners and English-speaking locals here in Hong Kong, Signal has grown about 20% in the past week.
I will continue to use iMessages for my iOS contacts. For SMS people I will gently nudge (hey, have you tried Signal? and then let the convo go where it does) and then use Signal as the primary for those people.
99.9% of messaging (for me) occurs via iMessages or SMS. FB Messenger is occasionally used for people who are more acquaintances (don't have their phone number).
I don't really have a good reason to not use iMessages (blue bubbles). Reasonably secure and Just Works. SMS on the other hand.... my least favorite part of SMS (besides the complete lack of security) is that media messages are crippled in quality. Photos and videos are compressed and distorted beyond belief.
not just android, they work with every mobile handset even with the poorest reception or (even lack of) data-plan.
i use ~200 sms per year, pretty constant since i got my first mobilephone.
kinda sad we didnt come up with something better thou.
https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1349577579091566592
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1347165127036977153
edit: as daniel_sk points out this is not a x5 increase but crossing the threshold from 10+ to the next 50+ mm downloads.
> The result was a mass migration that, if it lasts, could weaken the power of Facebook and other big tech companies. On Tuesday, Telegram said it added more than 25 million users over the previous three days, pushing it to over 500 million users. Signal added nearly 1.3 million users on Monday alone, after averaging just 50,000 downloads a day last year, according to estimates from Apptopia, an app-data firm.
> “We’ve had surges of downloads before,” said Pavel Durov, Telegram’s chief executive, in a message on the app on Tuesday. “But this time is different.”
As someone who semi-fondly remembers the Twitter failwhale, I really don't think a more conspiratorial theory than "a few million people suddenly tried to jump on" is required here.
Java/DropWizard app
And this is also not open source for my understanding: * Last commit was on 2020-04-22 * only a single committer (moxie-signal) * only „bump version to xyz“ commits * not a single PR is getting merged but all are just closed (one references „pr was created on wrong repository“) * not a single code comment in what I saw so far * there are also references to AWS and GCP but I could not find any reference to Microsoft/Azure (where their current IP is pointed to)
Is there some other place where the „real“ open source process is happening? Maybe some sources how their production architecture looks like?
Edit: here is a lot explanation for this https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/kxusy8/signal_needs...
I don't know if it is true, but for your peers it certainly is a different story to tell them about all the people who are switching than just about a service who had an outage. Hopefully, the next days will bring some light to the cause of the outage.
Last night a friend from India popped up on signal. I told him "Welcome!" and he said "You finally wore me down, I've left WhatsApp and I'm trying to move my family off of it..."
These are all people who have completely abandoned Facebook for WhatsApp and Instagram.
Please stop moving people to centralized services.
That shit works on a small scale. Serving the entire planet needs hierarchy and co-ordination.
Doesn’t necessarily mean everything has to be completely centralised, but some of the woolly wishful thinking you come across is not based in the real world.
EDIT: We know it was a joke. Maybe you are downvoted because of your username.
So is Signal. 'right wingers' are everywhere.
This has now become a usability and reliability issue for Signal.
anyways. It will be really difficult to convince my friends to remain on signal. At least they are technically sound. Thinking an excuse to come up with though. i donated money today too.