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Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

status.signal.org

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Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#61

Post by MrDresden »

donkeyd wrote: post #35
unclekev wrote: post #10

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.

> "It's a free service with no actual income stream, driven by donations."

Completely agree with this point. Unless you are paying for the service (by being the product or via donations) you have no particular right to get upset with the creators of said service.

> "What do you expect?"

Professionalism and an understanding of the impact this will have on Signal's users. Some will be cut off from necessary communication channels while others might literally have their life depended on the service working.

This very delayed response from Signal, coupled with some of the stranger behaviour of the last year and inability to host my own servers is really pushing me towards looking at Matrix as an alternative.

And for the record, I've donated to Signal for the last 3 years.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#63

Post by ranguna »

cranekam wrote: post #52
NikolaNovak wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Casual Messaging? Family? Facebook Messenger, Hangouts, Google Chat, and above all SMS / iMessage. Whatsapp by all accounts is the most popular (as much as I personally detest it). I know I know, not HN-fare exactly, but they're easy, popular, and work. That's all that most of our's social network actually cares about. There's a lot of discussion in this thread about detailed encryption/security policy, but while I a…

> Facebook Messenger, Hangouts, Google Chat, and above all SMS / iMessage. Whatsapp by all accounts is the most popular (as much as I personally detest it). Given you’re calling out WhatsApp specifically as a service you detest I’m going to assume you rank it last of all these options. Why is this? WhatsApp is E2EE, has a simple UI (at least IMO) and doesn’t store messages centrally. If I claimed to be a privacy nut…

Because past experience matters and Facebook has failed quite a few times on the privacy spectrum

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#64

Post by theshrike79 »

emptysongglass wrote: post #36
toastercat wrote: post #5

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…

> I selfhost a Matrix homeserver: it's nowhere near ready for primetime and misses a lot of those thoughtful touches less technical people appreciate.

This is true. I've been on IRC since the mid 90's with ircII and BitchX and even I find Matrix/Element to be tedious to navigate.

There's exactly zero chance I will suggest it to anyone non-technical until they get their clients up to snuff with the competition.

Telegram and Discord are the two best IRC-replacements, both offer easy native bot support and tools to manage bigger group chats (100+ members).

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#65

Post by theshrike79 »

novok wrote: post #49
emptysongglass wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'll take proper native bot support over privacy for my everyday chats any day. And by "chat" here I mean a channel with multiple people.

For 1-on-1 it's all the same to me. Telegram is still the easiest, since I can have the same chat history on multiple devices easily.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#66

Post by teekert »

LordAtlas wrote: post #4

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…

The people I got on Signal that dropped it (and not everyone did, it stuck for all my in-laws), did so because everyone was on WA anyway, including the people they used Signal with. But they all confessed that the usability was comparable (except for that pincode, which I turned off for some people that didn't understand it and when I explained, didn't need it).

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#67

Post by circularfoyers »

XorNot wrote: post #41
donkeyd wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dom…

Is it possible that Signal don't want to go down this path as it potentially puts them at the whim of the demands or requirements of paying businesses? Which demands/requirements may not be aligned with the degree of privacy which set them apart from other messenging apps.

If not this, could another reason might be that they're still a small team and this, along with the other changes that would presumably need to come along with it (accounts that aren't tied to a phone number), are what are holding them back.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#68

Post by croes »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #58
LordAtlas wrote: post #4

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 pushed some people to change to Signal. We are all back now and I feel pretty dumb for having done that.

Why do you feel dumb?

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#69

Post by everfree »

donkeyd wrote: post #35
unclekev wrote: post #10

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.

Are there any good paid alternatives to Signal? Looking for: Good UI, E2E, shared source native phone and desktop apps, group support, reliable push, easy setup.

It seems to me that all the alternatives are either free and suffer from some of the same issues Signal does, or don't have all these features.

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