Live data from Hacker News

Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

status.signal.org

201–210 of 262 posts

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#201
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 communicati…

> others might literally have their life depended on the service working If your life literally depends on a service, make sure to pay for that service. Also, make sure to have a backup.

But you can't sue them when you are dead.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#203
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So to return to your original post: >"Actual multi-session clients across devices." Not available with E2EE >"No Electron." Sure, because you need all 32GB of RAM but not your human right to privacy. Also, this is an argument against Signal's client, not excuse why you can't have E2EE on non-electron native client. >"Truck loads of features and thoughtful touches everywhere." So, eye candy. Not very strong argument.…

Hey bud, you're really writing aggressively. I'm not really here for that. But I do think it's important to debunk misinformation and this: >>"video chats" > Not E2EE ...isn't true. Please see https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/video-calls

You're right in that the 1:1 video chats are E2EE, but not group video chats. This is my concern, but since you weren't making the claim, it's my mistake and now fixed.

It's not my intention to be aggressive towards you or anyone else. It's the argument (or lack of arguments) I'm attacking, not the person.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#204
post #153
post #125

I ditched Signal about a month ago. Transferred my last group chat to iMessage. Most of my friends don't care about privacy, I tried to love Signal for 2 year, I recommended it to friends, only to give up and make a fool of myself. But after so long, the fact that I regularly don't get notifications of new messages is inexcusable. So in my inner cirle, Signal has damaged people's willingness to improve privacy. Thank…

iMessage has several problems I have outlined here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21425897 After reading it, you might want to reconsider Signal again.

Never said iMessage was my choice or it's safe so you are arguing with yourself here. I said that I transfered one of my group chats there. Wasn't really my choice but a group choice. Your comment and knowledge is very impressive but not a single of this helps me convince my family or friends to transfer to yet another chat application. Not so long ago I've read all over HN that I shouldn't use Telegram, because it's Russian. Now people recommend it all the time. What changed? And if iMessage has so many problems, which app does not have them? I can answer for you: none. Messenger & iMessage FTW and we can't really do anything about it.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#205

Fwiw I've been using Signal as my primary communications channel along with email for the past few years. There's an outage once a year or so, but I can live with that. It just works--for voice calls, video calls, chat, groups, etc. The real question here isn't about which system is technologically superior (though HN gravitates to that question), it's which one is technologically superior taking into account network…

I think Matrix is a very hot candidate here - federation (while P2P might be interesting for some, it definitely isn't something for everyone - yet, see below) - scalable from private messaging up to thousands of users ((soon) with Spaces and threading) - unlimited multi device with synchronization - prospectively P2P with offline usage (Pinecones) - open standard enabling competition

I agree Matrix is promising and I use it on a regular basis, but I wish they made it easier for non-technical people to join and use.

I haven't been very successful convincing people to join. Some tried but were immediately put off by the complicated UI. It takes too much explaining and hand holding.

Those constantly in-your-face "session verification" prompts are bewildering and useless. And then it's impossible to disable spell checking in the Element client.

I hope it continues to get better.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Matrix is a very hot candidate here - federation (while P2P might be interesting for some, it definitely isn't something for everyone - yet, see below) - scalable from private messaging up to thousands of users ((soon) with Spaces and threading) - unlimited multi device with synchronization - prospectively P2P with offline usage (Pinecones) - open standard enabling competition

I agree Matrix is promising and I use it on a regular basis, but I wish they made it easier for non-technical people to join and use. I haven't been very successful convincing people to join. Some tried but were immediately put off by the complicated UI. It takes too much explaining and hand holding. Those constantly in-your-face "session verification" prompts are bewildering and useless. And then it's impossible to…

Granted, this was about 1.5 years ago, so a lot has probably changed, but when a fellow engineer friend and I decided to switch to Matrix, we have a lot of trouble getting the end-to-end encryption working. It required a lot of finagling and sharing of keys and was pretty annoying.

Being engineers, we did figure everything out, but I couldn't see any non-technical users going through the headache, particularly when Signal is just "install and you're done".

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#207
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm seeing usage fall off among my network, because it doesn't replace WhatsApp: * it can't save photos to the camera roll * notifications are hit and miss

I'm guessing your an iPhone user. It's not an excuse, but I've seen other people on iOS have similar problems. Both of these issues do not exist on Android versions of Signal.

Yeah I had exactly the same problem myself on iOS, I'm really promoting it to all my friends and family but this is quite a bad bug. Also I've noticed that sometimes that calls don't connect through and the person will only notice the missed call when he relaunches the app.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#208
I have very limited experience with Signal, but it has an issue I cannot figure out that massively limits the appeal for me. I very rarely get any sort of notification. If I open the app on my OnePlus 7 Pro running Android 10, it'll flood me with missed notifications. But that's about it. (I think it has notified me in the past without opening the app, but I can't remember for sure.) I'm sure it's not designed to work this way, but I haven't worked out how to fix the broken notification system on my phone. Some online friends use it for coordinating plans, so I'm "forced" to use it (and try to remember to "check" it from time to time), but I do wonder how common my issue is. Presumably quite rare!

Does Signal work better on other platforms? (For me, no - I also have it installed on Windows and do not get notifications.)

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#209
post #183

Fwiw I've been using Signal as my primary communications channel along with email for the past few years. There's an outage once a year or so, but I can live with that. It just works--for voice calls, video calls, chat, groups, etc. The real question here isn't about which system is technologically superior (though HN gravitates to that question), it's which one is technologically superior taking into account network…

I'm seeing usage fall off among my network, because it doesn't replace WhatsApp: * it can't save photos to the camera roll * notifications are hit and miss

Oops, just seeing this. I put a similar comment about notifications not working for me on Android or Windows.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28670777

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#210
post #183

Fwiw I've been using Signal as my primary communications channel along with email for the past few years. There's an outage once a year or so, but I can live with that. It just works--for voice calls, video calls, chat, groups, etc. The real question here isn't about which system is technologically superior (though HN gravitates to that question), it's which one is technologically superior taking into account network…

I'm seeing usage fall off among my network, because it doesn't replace WhatsApp: * it can't save photos to the camera roll * notifications are hit and miss

On iOS:

1. Click Photo.

2. Click Share Sheet.

3. Click save photo.

Post reply on HN