121–130 of 972 posts
What's next ? What happens when Signal is bought by Microsoft and Discord is bought by Google ?
Signal can not be bought by someone unless the regulators approve it. WhatsApp was bought only after an explicit approval by regulators.
I'm already using Signal as a secondary messaging service (since someone I know didn't use WhatsApp) so I'll just switch to that. Luckily I don't have any friends on WhatsApp, so the transition will be easier. Let's see if my family cares enough about messaging me that they'll download Signal.
This 100%. So many responses talk about the "network effect", but realistically it only needs that one key person in everyone's phone book who refuses to use WhatsApp in order to move entire swathes of people to install Signal at least as a secondary app. Be that one person!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25668547
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25669657
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25668659
Edit: if you would like to avoid constant switching in the future, you have to think long-term and consider a distributed network, not another walled garden.
Been using Telegram for a long time. I don't trust it any more than I do with WhatsApp (therefore, Facebook), however it is well done and thought out, has a real desktop client with a real desktop UI toolkit and enough of my contacts are on it already, therefore it's the best compromise to me. I greatly dislike Signal's UI when I tried it out and I've read about some weird decisions lately (that "using a PIN? uploadi…
As long as I can be far away from the Facebook world, I’m happy.
I've never used WhatsApp (and only briefly tried some of the other listed messengers), but switching from one centralised and commercial system, once it runs into issues as many similar systems did before it, to another very similar system, doesn't seem quite wise. Personally I'm using XMPP and IRC for instant messaging, and tend to recommend the former: it's a nice and federated protocol, with users and software, an…
However, while I use XMPP on a daily basis, we have one big issue: There is no good iOS client. So far I have tested ChatSecure, Monal and Siskin, which all support OMEMO end-2-end encryption, but none comes even close to the quality you would expect. ChatSecure seems to be the most mature, but its development seems to have stalled and it has issues like not resuming the connection when the server changes the certificate (pretty often with letsencrypt) until the user confirms the new certificate (if the certificate is valid doesn't matter).
So I think XMPP is the right solution to the problem (being federated and an IETF standard), but the eco system is in need of developers who are willing to bring quality to the clients for all platforms.