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Signal Introduces Stories

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Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#331

Post by anigbrowl »

klabb3 wrote: post #326
anigbrowl wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even a cynic like me wouldn't go so far as to assume bad intent here. Signal is open source so the file format should be readable and likely this is just an oversight, I guess it's not a highly requested feature. Have you filed an issue?

I never said anything about intent. If it's an oversight then maybe they should be thinking a little harder and listening to feedback from beta testers, of which I am one.

Backing up to the same device on which are running out of space is an extremely obvious problem, to which the solution is to just ask the user where they want the backup stored instead of deciding for them.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#332

Post by gspencley »

lynndotpy wrote: post #312
kilolima wrote: post #286

What are "stories"? What is the use case? If it's a low effort way to spam one's acquaintances, seems like a website/blog would be better for sharing images/text and also has the advantage of not being tied to some platform's walled garden. Also, why does a secure messaging app need stories? Is this part of a trend to make signal more like social media, or to balkanize the web? I think Telegram has something like thi…

'Stories' were made popular by Snapchat in 2013, and they became the most-frequently used part of the app. They're a good way to give life status updates to a lot of friends at once, and provides a good conversation starter. This revives friendships and keeps communications going. From my experience, they are a non-optional part of socializing. By my estimation, my social and professional networking has materially su…

> From my experience, they are a non-optional part of socializing

I must not have much of a social life then, since I've apparently managed to go 9 years without having anything to do with them. Maybe I'm just getting old.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#333

Post by XorNot »

This doesn't really seem to do anything I want. I have a channel with my extended family called "Baby Pictures" which is a "subscribe if you want to" channel for sharing pictures of my son without blowing up the other channels, and this seems like a use case for stories...but that 24 hour timer is kind of way too short for it?

This would be much more interesting to me with more options - namely: I'd like to be able to setup an untrusted client somewhere (Syncthing can do this, but its not a social app) which would archive the stream of content into a story in encrypted form for me, and let people with channel access recover it without keeping it fully cached on their phones. That way all those photos which I would like to keep would go somewhere where I could get them.

Obviously none of this is necessary, I do other things right now (Syncthing and not using inbuilt camera apps in applications).

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#334

Post by 2-718-281-828 »

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.

just that they have way more important features and fixes to work on. shows wrong prioritisation in my opinion.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#335

Post by anigbrowl »

hackmiester wrote: post #317
anigbrowl wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cool stuff about Signal is what happens under the hood. Nobody was asking for stickers, stories, or crypto. Those things aren't cool.

I'm sorry, but that's just not true. Stickers are widely used in the group chats I am in. I myself have created multiple sticker packs since the sticker feature launched. Before that, several people mentioned they thought Signal looked like a shitty app because it "didn't even have stickers." Ultimately there was no shortage of boring, cryptographically-secure apps. Signal is filling demand for an app that is both se…

Taking it up after it became available is not the same thing as asking for it. Sorry but this a frivolous cosmetic thing compared to security issues like Signal's ongoing linkage to phone numbers.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#336

Post by hackmiester »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #300
codethief wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don't understand here (though admittedly I haven't been following the iOS discussions closely) is why backups are possible on Android but not on iOS?

As I understand it, iOS backups normally go to iCloud -- where they're stored encrypted but the keys are held by Apple (i.e. not end-to-end encrypted, and not a zero-knowledge system by any stretch). This makes iCloud-stored iOS backups susceptible to subpoena, malicious employees, and/or good-enough hackers.

So, I have stopped this, because I do not use iCloud. Can I enable backups?

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#337

Post by gspencley »

dontparticipate wrote: post #301
aeturnum wrote: post #269

I'm still extremely disappointed in Signal's choice to drop SMS support, which feels like a key adoption vector to me. However, I'm glad to see that they're still building privacy-first versions of popular social networking features. This does the double-duty of giving privacy conscious folks access to those features and showing that there's no need to invade users' privacy to offer these things - instead when others…

My family members will basically all stop using Signal now because they didn't want two apps for messaging. This will make all my conversations less private rather than more. It was a really dumb decision. I was able to convince a lot of people to switch because "it's just text and voice messaging except if we both have the app then it's more secure." I will basically be alone in my usage of Signal after the change g…

Same. Only now I will be "forced" to ditch Signal as well, for the exact same reason. And I'm an uber-paranoid privacy nut who uses GrapheneOS on my phone.

Thing is, I have all of 2 close contacts who use Signal. The rest use the default messaging app on their phone. So I already had to accept the fact that most of my texts were non-encrypted while I continued to try to persuade people to install Signal. Which was easier to do when it could conveniently replace their default messaging app and give them better security and privacy without any sacrifice.

But like them, I also have zero interest in using Signal to text all of 2 people and a different messaging app for everyone else. As much as I want e2e encryption for my texts, and would like SMS to be universally replaced by something secure, it's not like I text enough (or even use a phone enough) for my texts to be a particularly large attack vector in the first place. It would be way more useful to get MFA codes sent through Signal than it would to have my close contacts switch (and they're not going to anyway so what does it matter if I'm the only one who uses it?)

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#338

Post by throwaway0x7E6 »

kibwen wrote: post #223
fitblipper wrote: post #199

I was worried about sharing broadly and leaking info from 1 contact to another, but it seems like the Signal team did all the right things here. When you create a story you can make it a group story or not. If you do not make it a group story, reactions and replies to stories get sent to you over your 1:1 chats and not shared across other recipients of the story. If you make it a group story, and share it with multip…

I'm still of the opinion that encrypted private group chats are an impossible UX problem (1:1 chat is fine). But if I were to trust anyone to find a way to do it properly, it would be Signal.

it is very trivial if you don't use unnecessarily fancy cryptographic protocols

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#339

Post by errantmind »

posguy wrote: post #316
errantmind wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could have supported it until SMS was dead and buried. Also, RCS looks to have an upcoming third-party API, so it was absolutely a choice.

RCS has been around since 2013 and the only alternative client to Google Messages was your device maker's app that was allowed to tie into Google Messages via a device vendor only API (but essentially these were just a skin for Google Messages). Google has not provided any public API for RCS, and they control the ecosystem fully. If Google wanted other clients to use RCS as a platform, there would be public APIs that…

Alright, thanks for the clarification. It looks like they opened it up for particular apps in the last few years but haven't yet gone beyond that.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#340

Post by 1MachineElf »

jvolkman wrote: post #282
1MachineElf wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On this new Google Pixel 7, the app launcher thing is limited to just 4 apps. Now that I can't use Signal for SMS, it has lost it's convenient spot on my home screen. I find myself using it less, so like you, I'm very displeased about their dropping SMS. The forum thread on Signal's Discourse about the change is full of snide remarks from their moderators, and it's extremely disappointing to see Signal community lead…

Tangential, but you can change the grid size to 5x5 which lets you have 5 apps in that bar. Settings -> Wallpaper & style -> App grid

Great, this is just what I needed.
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