The same kind of posts happened when zuck changed the private policy of whatsaap a few months ago, everyone was migrating to Signal. Who uses signal now?
It's the typical anti-<whatever> hate waves that happen in HN. Outside of this bubble, people don't really lose sleep over it.
Signal is a very good example because WhatsApp is getting more popular as the days go by as opposed to what one could possibly infer from the waves of posts that appeared not long ago here about it.
It's just so important to separate this otherwise insignificant group of minds vs the many other several millions that aren't here and don't share the views - or perhaps (some) do but then it comes down to the network effect once again which has always been a present issue in every alternative among other factors. This time won't be different I'm afraid.
I just counted all of my signal chats that have had activity since the beginning of September and there’s 34 of them. On WhatsApp that number is 29 and on iMessages(not SMS) it’s 21.
The best way I’ve found to actually get people to keep using signal after you’ve got them to download it is to respond to their WhatsApp messages on signal. It won’t take long until they stop initiating conversations on WhatsApp.
Or do what I had done - delete whatsapp and text them saying it’s either text messages or download Signal from here [link]. Everyone I gave a shit about had done that.
I use WhatsApp. Everyone in Latin America uses it. I don't believe that Zuckerberg is reading my chats, and not concerned enough about E2E encryption to bother evangelizing another app to everyone I know.
Is there a proof that there is no backdoor in WhatsApp? Client code is not released. By default it does unencrypted backup to cloud. You don't know if encryption keys are leaving device.
I don’t know if there’s proof, but I have a friend that works on the team that I trust. I’ve also seen the tools for analyzing the metadata for police warrants and they only deal with metadata (because content is encrypted).
For signal - phone numbers as IDs allow them to retain no other info on their servers. They don’t have your phone book (though if someone gets your device and forced you to unlock it that’s different, but then they’d have your contacts anyway). There’s a reasonable tradeoff here imo to retain as little as possible server side. Signal is also working on a non phone ID option iirc.
Same problem. I have multiple groups on WhatsApp that I don’t want to leave, but don’t believe they’ll migrate. Three family groups, close friends, school parents, son’s football club.
A lot of these people were the last to migrate to WhatsApp from email and SMS, and will now be the last to migrate away from it. And they’re a huge majority compared to the early adopter crowd we see on HN.
Have you tried a WhatsApp-bridge with element/matrix? You could use matrix internally while being available to clients via WA. I would strongly discourage any company to use meta-clients internally.
I'm having a bit of a... culture shock? Not sure how to call it. We're a small company from an eastern european country, building one product and trying to make it into the big world. We don't have the luxury of caring about if a messenger app is meta or not. Is it doing its job? yes. Is it encrypted? Sortof, but truth be told we'd use it anyways.
If we have extra time we spend it on checking backups, or improving performance, or researching new cool stuff we can add to our product. Which messenger app to use?! Yeah, definitely culture shock. Severe, too.
This was the event that pushed me to go XMPP only for messaging. Pulled in my family and some friends. Internet standards without vendor lock-in is now a requirement for me.
The sad thing is that I jumped to Matrix (with Element) and waited for the influx; 2 people moved. The rest either stayed on WhatsApp or moved to Telegram (to be fair, almost all my contacts, including my mother, actually did move to Telegram from WhatsApp). No signal, no matrix.
Matrix is nice in theory but Element is not very nice and the messing around with keys is not something most people will understand. This needs to be automatic by default, not a complete pain as it is now.
We have an example of a perfect chat client UI; Telegram. Why is no one just copying it verbatim for matrix? This is a question to, mostly, Element developers really. I don’t know why it is quite as unfriendly as it is, but of course we can all jump in and help out, that’s why I keep using it and sponsoring it. Even though I can only talk to 2 people.
> This is a question to, mostly, Element developers really
o/
We’re currently rebuilding Element on mobile (and native desktop apps) so it behaves much more like Telegram or similar, built on matrix-rust-sdk. The codename is currently Element X, but it will shortlyish replace Element proper.
Quite possibly the most responsive native social media application for all platforms.
It's got free storage (basically free Google Drive), behaves like Messenger, has public channels and groups like Discord and YouTube, mind-blowing cloud sync, can connect to people without sharing a phone number and tons of features that I can't really list here but you can check them out here: https://t.me/TelegramTips
Couldn't have said it better. If they would have e2e for all chats & groups I would live in this thing. It's much better than Slack etc for me, but I trust them even less than Slack.
Matrix has, like Slack, sub conversations which I like, so they have, on the server, everything that Telegram has and more, is open source and I can host myself, but the clients :( Yes, I can write one myself or help with Element. I guess this is something to really think about as the commercial offerings are simply not very good outside Telegram but I don't really trust them with my data.
Yeah, I'd really like an option for permanent E2EE on all platforms but I trust Telegram with my data.
As long as they're not selling it to advertisers and their apps remain FOSS, I'm fine with sharing my data.
I also really like Telegram's privacy policy (https://privacyspy.org), which is why I'm okay with cloud side encryption instead of E2E.
Every E2EE app that I've tried in the past, has been a UX nightmare and cloud sync is something that's extremely essential to my workflow so Telegram has been a pretty amazing free service.
This seems a bit different, given that Musk's leadership has a high potential to very radically change Twitter; he did just lay off half the company, for example.
People keep talking about laying off half the company like it's a bad thing.
Don't get me wrong, there are lots of negative factors to laying off staff and I'm not denying those.
But anyone who has worked in a large org, especially a public one, knows that there is excessive bloat. Many people at large orgs do nothing. They go to great lengths to ensure it looks like they're doing something, which I guess is something itself.
PS - I'm neither for nor against the layoffs at Twitter.
I think even if he was correct that Twitter has a lot bloat that needs to be cut, I really struggle to believe you could accurately judge who or what needs to be cut when slashing your 7000 employee business in half within 5-6 days of walking in the door. The chance of making big mistakes and cutting critical staff and teams is very high.
I think that even worst is that it does not look fair or transparent at all. Which means, remaining employees are going to be demotivated and resentful. It is going to be chaos organizational, competences will be unclear etc. Which will make organization as a whole more dysfunctional then it needs to be.
Exactly. It smells very strongly of the same kind of overgeneralized superficial thinking that leads people to believe that less moderation is always good. You can’t possibly expect that everyone in your company will be 150% invested work-any-time business evangelists. Maybe the 50% who are left now have to work double? Are they so incredibly enthusiastic about the job to take the hit silently?
Technically I use it (although I haven't had a legitimate message on there since ... 2016?) but I'll tell you what I don't use any more - WhatsApp. It's either iMessage, Telegram, or for a (dwindling) handful of annoying people, FB Messenger.
All my family and about half of my friends are still using it. In, almost everyone who I know who joined during that time stayed, but most still use WhatsApp and Telegram as well.
Signal is a very good example because WhatsApp is getting more popular as the days go by as opposed to what one could possibly infer from the waves of posts that appeared not long ago here about it.
It's just so important to separate this otherwise insignificant group of minds vs the many other several millions that aren't here and don't share the views - or perhaps (some) do but then it comes down to the network effect once again which has always been a present issue in every alternative among other factors. This time won't be different I'm afraid.