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Improving first impressions on Signal

signal.org

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Re: Improving first impressions on Signal

#31

Post by Waterluvian »

Aulig wrote: post #28
Waterluvian wrote: post #15

Edit: I’m out of date for most of this. Way to go Signal team! See comments below my complainy post. Forcing me to recite my PIN every few weeks is one of the most irritating UX I’ve seen. I’m sure there’s some smart engineer explanation in terms of cryptography and being unable to recover it if lost. But just let me disable it if I’m okay losing my entire account if I forget it. Also last time I checked the binding…

Huh? You can disable the PIN reminder in the settings if you want to. Or is that not available everywhere? It's working for me on Android and Windows. I've disabled it as I store my PIN in my password manager.

Either that’s new or I’m just a loud bozo. Thanks for sharing!

Re: Improving first impressions on Signal

#32

Post by slownews45 »

bilal4hmed wrote: post #12
leevlad wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe your comment is misguided. The PIN is a security option that prevents a SIM-swapping attacker from registering a new device under your phone number unless they know the PIN. You can opt out of it (and it might be opt-in to begin with). You can also easily opt out of PIN reminders. Both of these options are in Settings -> Account. As for server state - my understanding is that Si…

My complaint with them is the whole thing with mobilecoin. They hid that integration for a year, by not pushing server updates and when the news hit, they promised to do an AMA explaining it all. Its been months since that has happened and the AMA never happened. Moxies involvement is very muddy and never clarified, it was a pump n dump at best. https://amycastor.com/2021/04/07/signal-adopts-mobilecoin-a-... That inc…

No kidding - what garbage that was. That said, I think they were able to pump mobilecoin (as a nonprofit!) to something like 6x before the dumps came.

After that I was gone.

Re: Improving first impressions on Signal

#33

Post by gugagore »

LogonType10 wrote: post #25
modeless wrote: post #21

Just got a new phone and migrating Signal was a total disaster. The first thing I did was login to the new phone which is apparently the wrong thing to do because you lose all your old messages and there's no option to import after you login. You have to logout but there is no logout . Gotta uninstall and reinstall, or clear app data. Next I tried the account migration feature which requires using both phones simulta…

Sounds like you footgunned yourself. When starting Signal for the first time it gives the option to register OR migrate old account. There's no UI in the world that can totally protect users from themselves.

That's only one part of the struggle that was mentioned. Even when using the migration feature, the comment reported it not working, and needing to manually transfer the backup file.

Re: Improving first impressions on Signal

#34

Post by rlpb »

modeless wrote: post #21

Just got a new phone and migrating Signal was a total disaster. The first thing I did was login to the new phone which is apparently the wrong thing to do because you lose all your old messages and there's no option to import after you login. You have to logout but there is no logout . Gotta uninstall and reinstall, or clear app data. Next I tried the account migration feature which requires using both phones simulta…

I recently moved phones and had the opposite experience. The Signal migration went very smoothly. Moving WhatsApp did not. I ended up managing to do it but not before about five attempts, each of which made me reauth my phone number and I hit rate limiting, etc.

Re: Improving first impressions on Signal

#35

Post by Aulig »

Waterluvian wrote: post #29
gdrift wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To send an SMS to a signal contact, press and hold the send button then from the popup select `Insecure SMS`.

Cool! Is there a way to say “always use SMS because this signal contact isn’t on signal anymore”

It looks to me like it's a per contact switch, so I think that's what you want, yea :)

Re: Improving first impressions on Signal

#36

Post by jakecopp »

> To keep Signal a free global communication service without spam, we must depart from our totally-open posture and develop one piece of the server in private: a system for detecting and disrupting spam campaigns.

Interesting. Matrix solves this problem by not associating a username with a phone number or email address (unless you opt in to). Does anyone have views on if this will work into the future?

I'm moved ~90 of my friends onto Matrix (along with plenty of group chats), and most of them quite like the Element [1] app (though there are rough edges on iOS I'm hearing).

[1]: https://element.io/

Re: Improving first impressions on Signal

#37

Post by Aulig »

Waterluvian wrote: post #31
Aulig wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? You can disable the PIN reminder in the settings if you want to. Or is that not available everywhere? It's working for me on Android and Windows. I've disabled it as I store my PIN in my password manager.

Either that’s new or I’m just a loud bozo. Thanks for sharing!

I've been using the feature for a couple months, but I haven't been using signal for much longer so I'm not sure. Before I thought of looking in the settings to disable the pin checks they really annoyed me too :)

Re: Improving first impressions on Signal

#39

Post by dan-robertson »

csydas wrote: post #20
noja wrote: post #14

Great, but... Please let people allow Signal to automatically save their media to their photo roll (or whatever ios calls it). The number of people I have met who require this and left Signal _after starting to use it_ is astonishing.

This surprises me greatly, as it's my biggest annoyance with WhatsApp and Google Hangouts or whatever they call it now (I've not yet accepted the new app, so it still calls itself hangouts, but clearly is using the new chat app backend...) I despise that it shows up in my main photos whenever someone sends a photo/gif/vid on these apps. Telegram segregates its local storage to a separate folder that Android doesn't s…

For WhatsApp it is just settings->chats->save to camera roll which doesn’t feel like a huge burden.

I think the way I think about it is that your phone's ‘photos’ app should have all the things you would think of as photos and things people sent you are included in that. Though I’m not sure what iMessage does (I think they don’t show up in photos. At least, things you take don’t show up). I also wish the app were better at differentiating between photos you took and photos that WhatsApp added, e.g. I once found a video of my feet walking through the snow in flip flops and I couldn’t remember where I was or why I did it, until I had worked out that it was my brother’s feet and came from WhatsApp. It would be nice to have some source metadata[1] and maybe a deep link back to WhatsApp, or at least have the app say “this is in the WhatsApp album by the way”

[1] ok, this actually exists for more recent photos and started exactly when I last upgraded my phone. So I am somewhat happy there I guess.

Re: Improving first impressions on Signal

#40

Post by girzel »

Waterluvian wrote: post #29
gdrift wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To send an SMS to a signal contact, press and hold the send button then from the popup select `Insecure SMS`.

Cool! Is there a way to say “always use SMS because this signal contact isn’t on signal anymore”

When you stop using signal, you can log in to the signal website and say "I'm no longer using Signal"; that will solve the problem with your Signal-using contacts. I just checked and it looks life you have to deregister your account from within the Signal app (ie, can't uninstall first). I'm pretty sure it used to be more lenient: I remember friends being able to deregister their numbers after the fact.
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