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Signal Introduces Stories

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Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#381

Post by Psychotherapist »

treve wrote: post #372
corytheboyd wrote: post #267

Of course my first reaction was "I hate this" but then I thought about it and whatever I don't care at all. I downloaded the update and it's a new tab. They don't force it on you at all. They very very clearly state that you can opt-out and how to do it. This was tastefully done, which is fresh air in the world of social media crapware.

A little while back I felt this way about 'stickers'. It seemed like a completely unnecessary feature I've never used and designed to achieve parity. Last week I spoke to my 20-something sister and learned that it's basically a must-have for her friend group, who sometimes have entire conversations just with stickers shared in her group. Had no idea, but in hindsight realized I'm no longer tuned in enough to know how…

I'm currently 20 and mostly use stickers for “repetitive” messages, like “Good Morning” and the like. Sometimes to convey emotions that are hard to type out at that moment, too.

Creating custom sticker packs is also fun, including memes or cute cats.

But of course I don't speak for everyone my age, and it's different for each culture and personality.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#382

Post by iudqnolq »

anigbrowl wrote: post #297
dont__panic wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish they would improve the app UI instead of focusing on features like this. Compared to other apps I use regularly, Signal feels kind of clunky -- the share dialog takes forever to load from another app compared to Telegram or Messages. The app feels like it's harassing me every single day to update. On open, the app often takes a few seconds of loading in my chats. Makes me wonder what core userbase Signal think…

Indeed. A simple example is photo-sharing, a critical function for many people. Every time you send you have to manually choose if you want higher quality over smaller size. You can't set a default option. You can crop crop photos, but the crop handles don't work properly and often spring back if you only want to crop in one dimension. There's an anti-pattern where there's a separate tool selection and tool edit UI o…

Fascinating. I strongly prefer Signal's editing tools over Google Photo's. If they shipped it as a standalone app I'd get it.

> Every time you send you have to manually choose if you want higher quality over smaller size. You can't set a default option.

I didn't even notice I wasn't sending high quality images. The setting they picked sends photos such that they look like original quality on my phone screen. If I want to view a photo on a high quality monitor or print it I'd send it some other way.

> There are pen and highlighter tools so you can draw on an image. but no shape tools, in case you wanted to blank out someone's face.

It's pretty easy to scribble it out quickly. I do use a separate app for sensitive redactions.

> It has degenerated into fanboyism at this point.

Fair criticism. My feelings about Signal are similar to my feelings about voting. It obviously sucks, but no one has figured out anything better after quite a few years.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#383

Post by Vinnl »

rch wrote: post #305
Vinnl wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They kinda were forced to by Android limiting what they can do: https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-blog-removing-sms...

This post seems say that they'd rather avoid the difficult programming challenges of working with the varied devices and protocols people use for communication generally, and just compete with other walled garden apps instead. I wish them luck, but it's a different trajectory than they were on a year or two ago.

It's not a "difficult programming challenge" if you don't even get access to the APIs for the new protocol, I don't think...

But there's also certainly something to be said for deciding where to spend your time. Sure, getting regular SMS right on many different devices might be a difficult programming challenge, but if that means you can't spend time on making sure your service scales, or that people are able to hide their phone number, or... Then that's not laziness, that's making a hard choice.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#384

Post by Vinnl »

agundy wrote: post #263
Vinnl wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They kinda were forced to by Android limiting what they can do: https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-blog-removing-sms...

Great context, though from an end user's perspective it was clear why and just left hanging with "find a new SMS messaging". The integration made adoption/integrating new users easier by allowing some to have one messaging app with progressive security for contacts on Signal.

Yeah absolutely, messaging wasn't great, although that's a hard thing to get right, especially considering how they have both very technical and pretty non-technical audiences.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#385

Post by Vinnl »

n8ta wrote: post #257
Vinnl wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case you haven't seen the technical motivation for removing SMS yet, see https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-blog-removing-sms... It doesn't look like it has anything to do with Signal's direction in particular, but rather the changing environment they're in. (Specifically Android/Google making things harder.)

"SMS is on the way out". I'll believe it when I see it. Apple isn't going to adopt it because they have no incentive to do so and apple has huge market share. Android hasn't even implemented it yet! We're killing super useful features because 50% (or whatever android market share is) of mobile phones might have something better next year??? Having SMS support as a workaround was huge for signal usability for me. Taki…

Well, Signal on iOS never had SMS support in the first place (for the same reason that it's now on its way out on Android).

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#386

Post by iudqnolq »

anigbrowl wrote: post #313
int_19h wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about other platforms, but Signal on Android supports backing up to a file, as well as direct transfer of data to another phone.

It supports backing up to a file that you can't specify. This is unhelpful in many use cases. Example: I am running out of space on my phone. I look, and see Signal is taking 4gb of space. But I would like to preserve a lot of that media. So I buy a mini-SD card and install it in my phone. Yay! Now to turn on Signal chat backups! Oh, but the backups are hardcoded to a location on your primary storage that you can't c…

> So I buy a mini-SD card and install it in my phone.

That's probably your answer. I don't know anyone who uses a mini-SD card. The last time I bought a phone no phone I considered had an SD slot.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#387

Post by Daniel_sk »

site-packages1 wrote: post #98
tao_oat wrote: post #95

My gut reaction to this was disappointment that Signal is working on yet another not-messaging feature a la their crypto integration... But the longer I think about it, the more positive I feel. I actually enjoyed using stories on other social media platforms before I left them. The idea of something similar, but end-to-end encrypted, is actually exciting!

I had the same thought process. I still use Instagram, but only post stories. It’s fun and less pressure than posts, and get to share fun and irreverent things with friends.

A lot of people (friends) I know on IG use it only for sharing stories.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#388

Post by sofixa »

patall wrote: post #182
sofixa wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because SMS is obsolete and nobody outside of the US(why?!??!) still uses it for anything else other than the occasional confirmation/MFA code.

To give a counter example, here in Sweden, SMS&MMS are used quite a lot. Including bidding for housing. And it's not due to a lack of alternatives.

Indeed I forgot the "I've never met you but need we need to make a transaction for some reason (buying a house or a TV second hand), so let's start with SMS which will work for sure".

For anything else, using SMS is like using Notepad to write books. Many better alternatives have come through in the decades since that tech was new.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#389

Post by Gentil »

I seriously think Signal missed the boat with this one. I was one of those folks who used the WA privacy policy change to attract folks around me to use Signal. It worked and they all started using Signal as well. It would have been an easy thing for Signal to prioritise Stories. That was the only thing that differentiated WA with Signal at the moment. Only thing we needed back then to make folks stick to Signal. Instead Signal was building some irrelevant cryptocurrency feature and split their own userbase in half. That feature was already going to be used by only a minority anyway.

Everybody went back to WA after FB's stunt on retracting the privacy policy. I am back to square one on who all are using Signal around me. I don't think there is going to be a better chance than what we got with WA policy change.

Signal had the funding, they had the tech and folks. The momentum, people, media and even people like Snowden, Jack and Elon Musk were with us. They chose something completely different and irrelevant to what would've helped make Signal a standard. What is the point in having this now? Majority of the users who were going to use it are already back in WA. This feature will be used only by a minority.

Another fascinating learning from the whole journey was that a lot of "loud" privacy folks use privacy through obscurity (like security through obscurity) to keep themselves private. They jump ship when their tool gets popular. And these were the loud ones during the whole discussion in Signal forum with respect to Stories. With AI advancements and big corps, we need more folks in the privacy space using private tech. If we don't accommodate non-privacy folks as well, this will be a harder fight than it has to be.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#390

Post by aembleton »

busymom0 wrote: post #341
corytheboyd wrote: post #267

Of course my first reaction was "I hate this" but then I thought about it and whatever I don't care at all. I downloaded the update and it's a new tab. They don't force it on you at all. They very very clearly state that you can opt-out and how to do it. This was tastefully done, which is fresh air in the world of social media crapware.

On iOS, there’s also a setting which lets you disable it entirely and hides that extra tab. I did it.

Yes, it's in the article and also works on android.
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