[juped]

Please recall that earlier in the thread, the following was posted:

"[Signal is] really an engine for revealing people's true preferences for messaging, which, for many people, tend to be that they want all the ergonomics of Slack a lot more than they want cryptographically sound secure messaging."

This comparison to Slack makes no sense - Signal replaces texts and makes them end-to-end encrypted. It's a straight upgrade to texting (except, apparently, on iphone, where apple won't let the app send plain old texts and the "drop-in replacement" quality is neutered). It requires a phone number to use, and is linked to that phone number.

Signal is right to be what it is, and if Apple got out of the way, I would insist on replacing all texts with Signal. Replacing my Slacks with Signal or my Signal messages with Slack fails to type-check.

[wpietri]

The comparison doesn't make sense to you, because you value privacy highly. It makes plenty of sense to people who don't.

People do literally compare them when deciding what group messaging app to use: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21746863

For people like that, end-to-end cryptographic security is at best a nice-to-have. And I'd guess that's circa 90% of people.

Signal's true value comes when lots of people are using it. I never bother with secure email, because almost nobody I know has it set up. But I use Signal for the great bulk of my texting, because most of my friends are on it. If Signal wants that to be more and more true, they have to compete with the other tools people use for group communication.