The privacy-focused messaging app arose from a fringe culture that emphasized individual autonomy and skepticism of authority. As it tries to go mainstream, can it escape its roots?
If you are willing to use Signal, you already don’t mind a tiny userbase, so why not use Session (or maybe Matrix) and enjoy privacy, security, AND anonymity?
Signal has always been clear that privacy!=anonymity and regards people who want both as both stupid and unusual. Its always been a weird dance to watch.
I haven’t done any Signal app recruiting in my circle of contacts (in fact, I don’t think I’ve talked to anyone about it) and I have 14 contacts that have it installed at the very least. I don’t think it would be a huge push to make Signal more prevalent.
The uphill battle is making a dent in iMessage adoption, which seems to be deeper and deeper entrenched every day.
Signal is by far much easier to get family/friends to use than Matrix or Session. Downloaded it to my parents’ phones and told them this is how you contact me.
They dropped the native sms integration. IMO, that was the best tool for adoption. Make it seamless for people to move over from their native SMS messenger and people will use it. Going full closed, only signal to signal, meant I needed to use multiple messaging apps for different people. And I had to remember who is on which. It’s been a headache.
Well this is interesting. I hadn’t heard of Beeper before. Many years ago I used Trillion (I think it was) as a chat aggregator. It fell apart pretty quickly, but Beeper looks promising. I signed up for their wait-list. We’ll see what happens.
A friend used it. Once he didnt had data. He only got his sms notifications as soon he got data back. It was an interesting feature, but seems a bit bugged to me.
The concern with Session is that theyre based in Australia, a country that is in the 5 eyes, and their government passed a bill
forces companies to provide a backdoor when ordered to, the company cannot deny to create this, and they can’t declose that they got ordered to ether. [A great video talking about said bill] While the Session devs say their services are resilient to these threats, [see their FAQ] it’s best to remain cautious.
If you are willing to use Signal, you already don’t mind a tiny userbase, so why not use Session (or maybe Matrix) and enjoy privacy, security, AND anonymity?
Signal has always been clear that privacy!=anonymity and regards people who want both as both stupid and unusual. Its always been a weird dance to watch.
Because the ux for signal is superior and I don’t care about anonymity when I’m communicating with friends and family.
The right tool for the right job, and signal is the right tool for general communication, but I wouldn’t use it for my virtual pals.
Essentially, I see entirely different use cases for decentralized options like matrix, session, xmpp.
I haven’t done any Signal app recruiting in my circle of contacts (in fact, I don’t think I’ve talked to anyone about it) and I have 14 contacts that have it installed at the very least. I don’t think it would be a huge push to make Signal more prevalent.
The uphill battle is making a dent in iMessage adoption, which seems to be deeper and deeper entrenched every day.
Signal is by far much easier to get family/friends to use than Matrix or Session. Downloaded it to my parents’ phones and told them this is how you contact me.
this is exactly what I did to my mother
(this sentence sounds so scary out of context)
They dropped the native sms integration. IMO, that was the best tool for adoption. Make it seamless for people to move over from their native SMS messenger and people will use it. Going full closed, only signal to signal, meant I needed to use multiple messaging apps for different people. And I had to remember who is on which. It’s been a headache.
Beeper is a lifesaver: https://www.beeper.com/
You can self-host if you prefer: https://github.com/beeper/self-host
Well this is interesting. I hadn’t heard of Beeper before. Many years ago I used Trillion (I think it was) as a chat aggregator. It fell apart pretty quickly, but Beeper looks promising. I signed up for their wait-list. We’ll see what happens.
Signed up for the waitlist. Thank you!
A friend used it. Once he didnt had data. He only got his sms notifications as soon he got data back. It was an interesting feature, but seems a bit bugged to me.
The concern with Session is that theyre based in Australia, a country that is in the 5 eyes, and their government passed a bill forces companies to provide a backdoor when ordered to, the company cannot deny to create this, and they can’t declose that they got ordered to ether. [A great video talking about said bill] While the Session devs say their services are resilient to these threats, [see their FAQ] it’s best to remain cautious.
Because the UX is horrible and they (especially matrix) have a ton of privacy/security issues that Signal doesn’t have
I use Session because it doesn’t require a phone number.
SimpleX is also a good alternative, though a bit immature still.
Session is pretty slow in my experience, since it — as I understand it — works in a similar way to Tor. Images and videos are especially bad
Matrix is hella buggy, Session part of the lokinet weird ancap crypto scheme, XMPP is god tier
Briar, now that’s a thingy