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Signal Introduces Stories

signal.org

11–20 of 480 posts

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#11
Nice, I like seeing new features being added - despite on my personal opinion about them. As someone else pointed out, the more feature parity we reach with WhatsApp (or other popular messengers) the fewer battles we'll have to fight to bring people over.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#12
I like it! Making it more "mainstream" is the way to go even if purists might say that it's feature bloat for their secure messenger.

It's similar to how it's good if more people use Tor for all kinds of activities as it doesn't immediately label you as suspicious just because you use Tor or Signal.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#13
post #2

I don't like this: it seems like Signal wants to morph into a social network rather than a secure messaging platform. I predict the next major features will be unencrypted public groups and API messaging access like Telegram has.

Would you rather live in a world where Signal is laser focused on secure messaging to the point where no one uses it? Telegram is growing rapidly because it's adopting social media paradigms. I use both, and I wish I only used Signal.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#14
So did Moxie leave because Signal got overtaken by Feds? Why is a secure messenger adopting the appearance of social media? Doesn't this work explicitly against the entire claimed reason for not having an account system?

I would love to hear tptacek's views on this.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#15

Personally I'd rather avoid the feature bloat. I also think it just waters-down the "secure" image they are clearly going for. I mean, broadcasting images to your contact list isn't exactly what I think of when I think "private messaging".

Then don't use it. There, it's private again.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#19
Am I in a bubble and these features are, in fact, widely used on WhatsApp?

I'm in groups with a whole lot of other people including a few who keep up with modern social media stuff, use TikTok, use Instagram, et c., and zero of them use the Status feature or Stories or anything but messaging. For us it's just ICQ/text with better media embedding (but still really bad, somehow). Some of us regularly use similar features, but only on other platforms, never on WhatsApp.

Is that unusual, and these are in fact much-beloved features by a good chunk of the WhatsApp user-base?

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#20

Personally I'd rather avoid the feature bloat. I also think it just waters-down the "secure" image they are clearly going for. I mean, broadcasting images to your contact list isn't exactly what I think of when I think "private messaging".

Everything about Signal will make more sense if you forget every opinion you've had or read on a message board, and accept that the project's mission is simply to transition as many people off insecure systems as they can. For example: message board nerds are apoplectic about Signal's phone number requirement, but the systems ordinary people were already overwhelmingly used phone numbers already. As communications trend towards ephemeral video messages (I have trouble understanding why, too, but then I'm old), that's where they're going to head.

The cool stuff about Signal is what happens under the hood. They don't want a special identity as a "private messenger"; they believe all messaging should be secure.

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