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Comment by Valkhyr | Hacker News Reader

Can't speak for the poster you are responding to, but as someone who also uses Signal for a portion of my social circle, here's my big one: Signal is tied to a phone number, so I can't use it from multiple devices/platforms (unless I want to show up as a different entity from each of them).

This alone is the reason why I personally would not freely choose Signal, and only use it because some of my friends insist :-\

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I have Signal installed on my laptop, and it works perfectly. Do you mean multiple mobile devices? I guess that's probably true, and I'm sorry to hear that that's a limitation for you. That said - isn't that limitation also true of every other major messaging application. I only know of SMS and WhatsApp - what alternative do you prefer?

Signal on paired devices works really poorly if you are a heavy Signal user (eg: 5+ daily active groups that are media heavy, over 5GB database size).

The Signal servers rate limit you severely, causing it to take tens of minutes (or sometimes half an hour) to catch up to where your friends are at. Brief losses of connectivity are near-unrecoverable without closing the app on either my laptop or Pinebook, and worst yet the read/unread status of reactions to your messages is not synced across to your phone.

Signal also just killed custom emojis for reactions to messages, by refusing to display them. Now my message history shows I have reactions on a message I sent, but I can't even see the darn reaction.

Large rooms (50+ members) in Signal will get your client rate limited quickly, preventing you from interacting with anyone on Signal in a timely fashion.

Element/Matrix comparatively just works across my laptops, desktop, tablet (somewhere Signal refuses to work) and phone. It uses a nearly identical tech stack for the client (Electron with SQLite) but it never seems to need to sync messages from the server, lag behind, fail to connect to the server or fail to send messages. This is with me being in a ton of active rooms on Mozilla's Matrix, bridged rooms with IRC and Discord, and my friends shitposting at incredible rates.

The chat ecosystem is moving, Signal seems to have veered off course :C

Good to know, thanks! I have a mental disconnect between "1-1/small group chat clients" (for which Signal works perfectly for me) and "group chat clients" (for which Slack works well for work. Discord is some of the buggiest and least-usable software I've ever used, but I appear to be in the minority there). To be clear, I'm not trying to shift the goalposts here - it's very reasonable to expect Signal to be good at both, I've just never done so (which is why I didn't know about those issues, and why I only listed SMS and WhatsApp as competitors).

I definitely see that those issues would be irritating! I've never heard of Matrix, I'll give it a look - thanks!

Matrix / Element should have a comparable feature set to signal for almost all use cases and supports traditional username/password.

Unfortunately Matrix still has the issue of key sharing between clients. If you want to read previously sent messages when you log into a new client for the first time you have to do the key sharing dance with one of your existing clients.

For me it's a little annoying, but I find it an acceptable tradeoff. However I could easily see how for many people this would be a dealbreaker.

Key backup makes this a lot easier, assuming you've saved the recovery key in your password manager. But it's still one of those frustrating points where it defeats the purpose of the exercise for the provider to be able to recover an account (or at least the content and trust within an account) for someone who's locked out.

You can use it on the desktop and it syncs fine. Have you looked into it recently?

I have. It doesn't sync message history. I have the desktop client on one computer, and if I set up the desktop client on my other computer (the one I'm on right now) it won't bring over all the past messages - it'll be like I'm starting fresh.

Yes. Because your desktop has a new private key and can’t access the other messages. This is the same if you log into a new device with iMessage.

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