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Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

status.signal.org

41–50 of 262 posts

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#41
post #35

It frustrates me to no end that it took them 3 hours to officially acknowledge this outage at all. A single tweet 3 hours AFTER the outage has started is just not acceptable [1] [1] https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1442354759009247232 Edit: Yes I know signal is free and funded by donations. I've donated multiple times. I still don't think 'free' is a a valid reason for not informing people sooner. It's just unpro…

It's a free service with no actual income stream, driven by donations. What do you expect? I don't think we have the right to hold them to high standards because you get what you pay for. Signal has always been a bad choice for messaging in practice. In theory it's really secure and all, in practice, they have security issues that don't get fixed and no real reason to provide a quality service.

Amongst other things they could take some action to develop an income stream that isn't whatever is going with their cryptocurrency endeavor.

Signal could easily start offering named, verified accounts as a paid service for say, businesses, to have secure texting to their customers. Heck, named personal accounts for this would be ideal to. This is a service which has direct value to me (I already pay for an email domain for the same sorts of reasons).

Signal's product is the sort of offering which ticks so many security textboxes that it would be a no brainer, and getting even 1 big enterprise pushing it out to their customers would guarantee adoption.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#42

It's really annoying that they didn't even acknowledge the problem officially. Till about 15 minutes ago, their status page said everything was fine. Their Twitter account still doesn't mention any technical problems. But the service has been having issues for at least 3 hours. [1] Most people I know that started using Signal a few months ago are now back to using Whatsapp. Privacy is a nice feature to advertise, but…

Counterpoint - I'm completely happy with signal. The useability, contrary to some comments here, is wonderful. In particular I love the desktop app, it was easy to get family to use and does everything I need smoothly and with good privacy.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#43

It's really annoying that they didn't even acknowledge the problem officially. Till about 15 minutes ago, their status page said everything was fine. Their Twitter account still doesn't mention any technical problems. But the service has been having issues for at least 3 hours. [1] Most people I know that started using Signal a few months ago are now back to using Whatsapp. Privacy is a nice feature to advertise, but…

I haven't had reliability problems, but I do find it annoying that if I don't update my app frequently enough, they just cut communications entirely. That is, I don't get notifications that I've received new messages anymore. I usually find out about this when someone emails me to say they've sent me a message on Signal, but I've not responded. Instead of silently failing, I wish they would pop up a notification that…

I can't imagine this is an intentional choice by Signal. Always assumed it had something to do with the OS silencing unused applications.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#44
post #37
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SMS, WhatsApp, if you don't care about security and/or privacy. Perhaps Telegram but I recall reading some commentary on their crypto that made me hesitant. Conversations is a good XMPP messenger, and it supports crypto extensions, OMEMO, etc.

> security and/or privacy WhatsApp is arguably more secure than many of the alternatives. Just look at the repo for Signal. For privacy it probably isn't, when you're in the US, that is.

Whatsapp is owned by Facebook. That automatically disqualifies it.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#45
post #42

It's really annoying that they didn't even acknowledge the problem officially. Till about 15 minutes ago, their status page said everything was fine. Their Twitter account still doesn't mention any technical problems. But the service has been having issues for at least 3 hours. [1] Most people I know that started using Signal a few months ago are now back to using Whatsapp. Privacy is a nice feature to advertise, but…

Counterpoint - I'm completely happy with signal. The useability, contrary to some comments here, is wonderful. In particular I love the desktop app, it was easy to get family to use and does everything I need smoothly and with good privacy.

[deleted]

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#47
post #35

It frustrates me to no end that it took them 3 hours to officially acknowledge this outage at all. A single tweet 3 hours AFTER the outage has started is just not acceptable [1] [1] https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1442354759009247232 Edit: Yes I know signal is free and funded by donations. I've donated multiple times. I still don't think 'free' is a a valid reason for not informing people sooner. It's just unpro…

It's a free service with no actual income stream, driven by donations. What do you expect? I don't think we have the right to hold them to high standards because you get what you pay for. Signal has always been a bad choice for messaging in practice. In theory it's really secure and all, in practice, they have security issues that don't get fixed and no real reason to provide a quality service.

This is exactly right. lol. Its funny, take a step back and you'll see this thread is everyone complaining that a messaging app that's free had an outage and the company acknowledged there was an issue and they are working on it, but took 2 hours to do it. A free app that as you pointed out is run on donations.

And the same people would also complain about alternative apps finding ways to monetize while still offering the service for free and keeping it reliable.

How spoiled are we? :)

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#48
post #42

It's really annoying that they didn't even acknowledge the problem officially. Till about 15 minutes ago, their status page said everything was fine. Their Twitter account still doesn't mention any technical problems. But the service has been having issues for at least 3 hours. [1] Most people I know that started using Signal a few months ago are now back to using Whatsapp. Privacy is a nice feature to advertise, but…

Counterpoint - I'm completely happy with signal. The useability, contrary to some comments here, is wonderful. In particular I love the desktop app, it was easy to get family to use and does everything I need smoothly and with good privacy.

Sounds like you have a relatively new smartphone and never used Whatsapp.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#49

What's a good alternative to Signal on Android for casual messaging? I don't think Element is a good fit since it's not easy to ask a friend or family member to sign up for Element whereas it's simple to install Signal.

For casual messaging , Telegram is fantastic. Actual multi-session clients across devices. No Electron. Truck loads of features and thoughtful touches everywhere. It's easily the slickest and if you're looking to have friends and family who don't have a lot of patience for technical issues actually convert and stay converted, it's the only one I've found to do the trick. Searching through your messages by type, reall…

WhatsApp has a better privacy story than Telegram, because every chat is a 'secret chat' by default. If your using signal, a priority for you is private chat with something the normies in your life can use, otherwise you'd just use whatever is the most popular where you live.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#50

It's really annoying that they didn't even acknowledge the problem officially. Till about 15 minutes ago, their status page said everything was fine. Their Twitter account still doesn't mention any technical problems. But the service has been having issues for at least 3 hours. [1] Most people I know that started using Signal a few months ago are now back to using Whatsapp. Privacy is a nice feature to advertise, but…

how much do you spend on the service that's so crucial to you? What do you expect to get when giving nothing?

Whoever is keeping a Whatsapp Account nowadays shits on the privacy of all their addressbook contacts and can't be helped, obviously. It may not be a friend.

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