Wonder is it's related to the AWS's Degraded EBS Volume Performance in Northern Virginia? https://status.aws.amazon.com/
Signal is experiencing technical difficulties
31–40 of 262 posts
Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Telegram is great!
Telegram is not even in "secure" category, according to Bruce Schneier and other security researchers. They also meddled with Russian elections this year, blocking opposition bots, but allowing govt bots.
"Meddling" with Russian elections is a pretty strong statement, they just followed what Apple and Google did, and there was lots of discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28655937
Telegram is not E2E encrypted by default, so the other comment makes sense.
Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties
#33What'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.
Jitsi Meet. It doesn't require any account or installation. Just create a room and share the link or room name. https://meet.jit.si There is also a Jitsi app available for mobile devices, but it is optional.
I really like Jitsi.
But.
In a thread about a Signal outage with a request for an alternative "casual messaging" app - I really don't think open source video video meetings is a relevant answer...
Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties
#34What'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 what it is worth, creating an account on the matrix home instance using app.element.io or the matrix android app (haven't tried ios, but I assume it is the same) takes literally 3 clicks. Click register, select the matrix home server, type in your desired username, password, and recovery email (no phone # required or even requested) and click register.
The one part I see people struggle with is transferring keys across devices which is slightly convoluted (your keys are not stored on the matrix home server--for obvious reasons) but there are wizards to help you install your keys to a new device and for most use cases with phones completely unnecessary since you will always be using the same device.
Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties
#35It 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.
Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties
#36What'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, really good video messaging, voice messaging, video chats, and the best stickers on any platform.
It doesn't do E2EE by default (you need to manually flip on Secret Chats) and group chats are not E2EE at all, both of which make it HN kryptonite because apparently E2EE everywhere, by default, is the only thing that matters even though there are technical trade-offs to an E2EE-everywhere model. I appreciate I can flip on Secret Chats when I need them but do wish it was an option in group chats.
I selfhost a Matrix homeserver: it's nowhere near ready for primetime and misses a lot of those thoughtful touches less technical people appreciate. If you do want to try to onboard people to Matrix with the Element client (and be very careful because you only get one, maybe two shots with your friends and family before they go back to whatever they were using before) use Mozilla's homeserver for its vastly better performance and option of SSO sign-on.
Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties
#37What'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.
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.
Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Telegram?
Sorry, no. Although Telegrams has encryption it's by default Client-Server, you have to explicitly start a secret chat with individual people. Additionally group chats are not encrypted except between client and server. I'm not sure of a good alternative as simple as Signal
By default it's not e2ee, but this makes the distributed app model sooo much more user friendly. All your history is instantly available on the web client for example. Try that with Signal. The web client works if your phone is out of battery. Try that with WhatsApp.
Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties
#39It'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 says "Your version of Signal is now out-of-date, and you will not receive new messages until you update."
Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties
#40What'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.
SMS. It's on every phone.
Beyond that, there are free XMPP servers, and you can even run you own. Clients like Conversations, blabber.im are all wonderful. I've been using it with friends and my wife for years without issues, albeit I have my own server.