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Comment by rollcat | Hacker News Reader

My fam chat is currently on Telegram, but there recently (Durov's arrest) was a long discussion about that; everyone is actually interested in switching to something E2EE and/or self-hosted. But we want to keep the core features: share photos/videos, keep a history, 1-on-1 voice/video calls, etc. So the main alternatives are WhatsApp, and (distant second) Signal - the latter doesn't offer history for newly joining devices.

If self-hosting in general wasn't such a PITA, I'd probably research the options and set something up. But honestly, I'm burnt out with trying to maintain even the most basic setups. I have a Raspberry Pi with NixOS under my desk that hosts Miniflux over Tailscale, and I can forget it exists 99.7% of the time - until I accidentally unplug it, and 6 hours later, wonder wtf happened again.

Now multiply the problem by the average funny cat video size and crappiness of my residential uplink. Won't happen.

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> Signal doesn't offer history for newly joining devices

This is a great feature for privacy though

This is not a feature, this is a limitation. It would've been a feature if Signal offered you a choice of whether the history should be synced up or not (perhaps with a default of "no" for existing users, to maintain the established expectation). As it is, this is a limitation.

In order for Signal to provide this history, said history would have to be stored on their servers, massively nerfing one of their core competitive advantages.

This “limitation” is the ultimate advantage from the perspective of Signal’s core competency.

It could be saved on devices and supplied as needed from that device history. They wouldn’t need to keep it on their servers. I don’t think you can fault signal for not wanting to do that, but it also means signal is a terrible communications platform if you want that sort of thing.

Exactly, matrix.org has this feature IIRC.

> It could be saved on devices and supplied as needed from that device history.

Then what if a new person joined the group convo? Do they have a right to see everything that everyone has said in that group convo, right back to the beginning? What if someone objects to sharing past conversations? What if sharing past conversations is a legitimate security concern to the group?

How does one filter out those past statements by someone who doesn’t want to share past statements? With security-state and foreign-state moles being a rather big issue in some groups, this is a legitimate rabbit’s hole that needs addressing. Some companies that standardize on Signal may not want any prior convos to become available to new entrants.

Personally, I see the lack of history to be a very real competitive advantage, and not any sort of a nerf.

Sure, your own history can be shared between installs on devices that you yourself own. But that is your chat history, meant for only you.

When you switch to a new phone, Signal can sync the history just fine.

When you add a new computer, Signal refuses to sync the history.

Does Signal, in fact, enjoy any competitive advantages?

Where I live (Canada) only a single person I know uses Signal. Everyone else is on Whatsapp and/or iMessage. As far as I am concerned, Signal is a wasteland.

I have received 400% more spam on Signal than I have received real messages.

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