YSK: Signal is a great secure private messenger app comparable to others on the market.

I still wish they hadn't dropped sms on android. A few family members dropped signal as soon as they needed another app for messaging.

First ad I've seen on Lemmy so far

The worst part of using Signal is to try and convince all your friends/family to use Signal. Otherwise it’s a pretty great messaging app. You can’t edit messages once they’re sent, but other than that it’s pretty great.

I wish they hadn't gotten rid of SMS though, that was the biggest sell for me over other options. I'm never going to get more than 2 or 3 people I regularly text to switch...

Is this an ad? It feels like an ad.

Anyway I much prefer Signal but thanks to boomer co-workers I'm still also forced to use Whatsapp.

I do not like the fact that Signal requires a phone number to be used. If I want to talk to someone on Signal, I need to give him my Signal registered phone number. I do not understand why can't they introduce User name like Telegram so we do not have to reveal our phone number to others.

I have been disappointed by Signal a lot.

• They tie themselves very closely with Google services, to the point that they refuse to be on FDroid by design
• There was a long period when they stopped publishing server side code when they were bashing others like Telegram for not open sourcing their server side code
• Their Linux desktop client is absolutely horrible.

I use Signal but it's on its own path to becoming enshittified too. Less like Reddit, more like Firefox, the people in charge are just clueless about the signal userbase.

It won't be long until there's a shift to an alternative because the current president of the signal foundation is one step away from turning it into Snapchat.

Instead of pumping money into increasing awareness or enhancing reliability of the service, the Signal team have wasted effort on features that nobody asked for, including its very own crypto shitcoin (a major red flag for any company). They also remove features people relied on, such as SMS support.

It's hard to trust the Signal team when they continually disappoint in such egregious ways.

Signal is great for communicating with people you don’t mind sharing your identity with. Would love to see signal implement usernames. I’m really into simpleX chat these days —really cool project.

Tried to switch to signal. But it's useless without everyone i know switching over from Whatsapp. Which is like merged with our country at this point.

Yeah, then they got rid of SMS capabilities.

I got rid of Signal after they added cryptocurrency to their app.

While I have no issues with cryptocurrency itself, it was a reminder that they have full control over the app. Now I happily use XMPP and Matrix for communication with friends and family.

Since we're all using Lemmy, an open source, decentralized, self hostable platform, wouldn't suggesting Matrix make much more sense?

I host a Matrix and Lemmy server. Even if Signal is completely trustworthy now, will it always be? It isn't my server and it's a single point of attack for anybody (including governments) to insert (or demand) a backdoor.

Signal is good but I just can't make the people I text regularly to switch.

I found the hardest part was convincing people to move away from the incumbents such as WhatsApp / FBM etc as all their contacts / friends / family were already using those platforms.

People in the comments saying others in my network wont install so its pointless for me. All i want to say is Mate , dont be a sheep. I had 1000+ contacts and i installed signal then sent a message to everyone saying i am on signal and uninstalled whatsapp. Around 200 contacts moved to signal just because they value me Tl;DR know your worth

Or just use Matrix/Element. No phone number needed, plus federation!

I personally prefer apps on the matrix network! Www.Matrix.org has a list of client apps, but I've found Element is great on windows, steam deck, and android! Call quality and chat stability can get weird sometimes, but overall it's very very secure and pretty feature rich! 🙂

From the little bit I researched, it's kinda similar in the way that the fediverse works! It's decentralized, and one account works everywhere. Good stuff!

Signal frustrates me, because Signal Foundation is clueless on what people actually want and it just feels like their product direction is so baffling it somehow turned into another failed Google messaging app without being a Google product(they even hired a former Google exec to run Signal!) I've never touched their crypto or stories, and I thought the SMS support removal makes zero sense and their justification is flimsy at best, it gave me Hangouts flashbacks.

The main problem with removing SMS support isn't that I can't convince my friends and family to switch any more(though very annoying), it's that since Signal has marketed itself as a highly private messaging app, it now has a certain reputation of being used for... particular things. Without SMS support, even having Signal installed on your phone looks suspicious, since you can't say that you're using it as a nicer SMS app anymore.

The issue with Signal is hardly anyone I know is on it.

I'd love to switch to Signal but the lack of sms makes it a NO from me. Everyone I know uses sms on their phone, and there's no way I'll be able to convince them to use two messaging apps when sms is already universal and convenient. 😭

I prefer matrix since no phone number is required for signup there.

Do they still require your phone number to sign up?

Got a surprising amount of contacts to move into signal from Whatsapp, though the iMessage gang can't stop iMessaging.

As an android user, I don't see why you would want to use something that restricts your secure messaging to a single platform.

As a result of Signal's poor decision to stop SMS service, I frequently forget to check my SMS app for messages.

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I've used Signal for years. Absolutely incredible messenger that does it all, and then some. Much better UX than FB Messenger and Whatsapp.

I've used Signal from the earliest days. It has its flaws, but for the average human, it's the best fucking end to end encryption message platform around.

Been using Signal for a very long time now, with my SO, parents, brother and a few friends. But it's inevitable to also use WhatsApp side by side. Selling/Buying on the local marketplace? WhatsApp. Workplace colleagues? WhatsApp. That group of buddies where only 1 or 2 converted to Signal? WhatsApp.

I absolutely LOVE signal! And I’ve even gotten my friends convinced to sign up recently and move some of our group chats! Yay no green bubble and yay privacy!

I've been trying to get my wife to use signal for ages and she won't budge. She won't budge because she doesn't want to install another app that from her perspective does the same thing as texting (she's not as privacy conscious as I am and doesn't really care that signal encrypts missages). Lately I've been trying to sell signal as mre reliable since my work office has shit cell reception and once in a while messages will git completely lost in the aether. Signal is more featurefull than sms/mms imho.

My sister, her husband, and one of my friends use signal so there's that.

Ultimately I'd probably prefer everyone use matrix but it's not as accesible as signal.

Question: in 2019 Australia passed an encryption law that requires every piece of software used in Australia to have a back door for law enforcement to access to ‘counter terrorism’, wank, wank.

Does Signal have back door access in Australia?

My problem with Signal is that nobody I know uses it, which unfortunately makes it useless.

Other than that, I genuinely think it's pretty great. But you'll have to persuade people to leave Facebook and WhatsApp en masse before it becomes ubiquitous enough to be useful.

I heard its used by media people to contact each other or their sources which is a little convincing.

I use signal on my phone and laptop but a while back they stopped supporting tablet versions. Wish they would bring that back.

I've been using Telegram primarily and it's nice being able to logon to any device and have my chat history, but it doesn't seem secure at all. I imagine the NSA has direct access to it.

Love signal, just for me, I know 2 people who use it. Tried to get a group chat to move there but WhatsApp has too big a grasp.

I love Signal, but was unable to convince enough of my network to migrate. They are mostly stuck using Meta's spyware (Instagram and Whatsapp). In the end, Telegram seemed like a good mid-way for enough of my friends and peers.

This smells like a paid advertisement.

After convincing a shitload of iMessage users to get telegram, I'm not going through that again.

Hello there, and welcome to our community! I hope you like it in here.

Could you please include some body text as to why should people know this, and how would that help them? It’s our second rule. Thank you :)

It has its downsides as well. Though better than WhatsApp and telegram obviously

https://www.freie-messenger.de/en/warumnicht/signal/

What about Matrix? Much better, IMO

The only information that is stored on the Signal servers for each account is the phone number you registered with, the date and time you joined the service, and the date you last logged on."

Ahem, and a list of contacts, they've improved since, but it used to be that this was a simple hash of the phone number which is obviously vulnerable to a very easily generated rainbow table.

If only they still supported sms....

My main messaging app is telegram, what would be the advantage in moving to signal? ( Pretending I manage to convince at least my main contacts )

Garbage. And this is spammy.

I think Signal is trying too hard to be secure, and they are missing a lot of convenience features.

For example, you can't migrate from Android to iOS or vice versa. You'll lose all your messages and groups.

Or it's really hard to export all the photos someone sent you. I get that my iCloud library isn't as secure, but I really want to make sure I don't lose those photos if I lose my device. The photos aren't that sensitive.

The security notifications are also well-meaning, but hard to make sense of. You sometimes get notifications for changed security numbers, when people change their phone, sometimes folks show up twice in groups, etc. It's all a bit hard to understand and difficult to use.

And finally, it seems that messages are sometimes delivered a bit unreliably or with a long delay.

I used signal for about a month and kept having issues with it. After i removed it from my phone i received over 100 texts i never got while using it.

My network is all on Signal and Signal has been good to us. Matrix may become the way of the future but for now Signal is a good place to be for this lot.

I see a lot of people here struggling to get contacts to drop sms and imessage. i have had success in getting a lot of friends on signal because cross platform group mms is dogshit.

i can't get any whatsapp people to budge though

I've been using signal for a few years. I'm now in a situation that I use two different phones but signal only allows you to be connected to a single device, and you only see the messages in your history for the particular device you received it on. You can't migrate messages, the UI is extremely basic and isn't a responsive design so you have no control over window size on larger screens. There's just so many annoying little things about it, but overall it's pretty solid. I'm looking for a better solution now though.

It really needs some more effort put in on UI design, data migration and linked devices. Development is very slow. I hoped it would improve but nothing has changed for years.

Signal is great. I wish more people used it because I trust it more than anything that’s a product of Facebook. No matter what they claim, I always worry there’s something they aren’t admitting to.

Signal set the industry standard for encryption and privacy, and it's what I tend to point people towards. The one down-side is that it is still tied to your phone number, so solutions like Element/Matrix or XMPP with OMEMO might be a little better for some use cases. My wife, kids and I use Conversations(.)im for our intra-family chats and use Signal for talking to everybody else.

I am a fan of Signal but mine has been broken for like six months now. Anyone else getting this bug? I try to open it and get an error 'Couldn't open Signal, send a bug report to troubleshoot' etc. I sent the bug report to the developer team at the address provided but they couldn't really figure it out. I've tried deleting the app and reinstalling and all that to no avail.

Use Signal to talk to my gf. Had her get it so we didn’t have to use some shit like SMS or Snapchat, since I’m on iPhone and she’s on android. Had a couple of issues with messages not going through but since she upgraded her old phone it’s been fine.

Furthermore, they don't have metadata about who you're talking with.

And here is the The Unofficial Signal Messenger Community on the fediverse: link

I've been using Signal for over 10 years now, since it was TextSecure. Never looked back.

I would just use XMPP, but it's not easy to use for people without technical knowledge.

Only issue I've had with Signal in the past is sync between desktop and mobile, is this still as bad as I remember?

As many others have said already, I loved signal until they ended sms support. I'm not going to have two separate messaging apps. Especially when 90% of people I know won't use signal and don't care about encryption. I just use the Google messaging app, which in my opinion is way better than Samsung's app. I enjoy rcs support and as I understand it, there is still e2e encryption.

That being said, if I'm doing anything illegal I'm going to force the people to use signal or something safer. As much as I love Google, I'm not going to trust them to keep me out of jail. Nudes would probably be the most sensitive thing I'd trust Google with.

Oh and I dont mind the Facebook messenger app if you use the secure mode. Hate Facebook though, just the messenger is ok.

I don't know the details, but, even though I appreciate the tech behind it, in my experience signal hasn't been that great (not even accounting for the need to ask people to install it). The calls always have a delay, the UI isn't as responsive as either Telegram or WhatsApp, no ability to edit sent messages, no history when logging in from a computer. Any of these aren't that big of a deal, but definitely a downgrade compared to the competition.

I suggest Session as well. No phone number required and uses onion routing network like Tor. One caveat though is notification is spotty.

Personally, Telegram is my favourite one. Feature complete, a ton of convenience features as well, totally secure if you want it instead of cloud storage etc

I use signal on my phone and laptop but a while back they stopped supporting tablet versions. Wish they would bring that back.

I sometimes wonder who’s paying to run the servers, and where that money originates.

The bridging capabilities of matrix make it unbeatable for me. I can't make everyone switch to it, but damn has a lot more been willing to do so when I show them they can have discord, telegram, whatsapp and more in one app.

Why is it so few people care about what they use?

Signal is great if you wish to procure from a certain person a certain substance which isn't legal in your state but should be.

Wasn't this on the list of apps that the gov had accessed user data?

Questions:

1. On an andriod phone Signal replaces your messaging app, right?
2. Signal is NOT like Viber, Whatsapp, etc. right? No video chat, just text?
   ETA: When I say "replaces your messaging app" above, I'm referring to "normal" texting on your phone, not whatsapp, viber, etc. Sorry I wasn't clear.

Cool but most people don’t want another messenger app and aren’t concerned about privacy.

I prefer matrix since no phone number is required for signup there.

I like Signal but it badly needs message editing capability.

Be careful, the mod of the sci-fi community just got banned for criticizing it.

I want to keep using signal with my friends that use signal. If I get an SMS text, it currently goes to signal with no way to respond. If I were to use the native Android messenger or a third party app, would it only receive sms or would it also receive signal messages as well since it's linked to the same number?

It is good for what it does, we use it at work for out of office chats.

The people that run signal are a fair bit sketchy though, telegram is a generally better option.

Signal is shit, its a honeypot. It requires your Phone Number and that the persons chatting have each other in their contacts on device, even if you convince friends not to use WhatsApp, WhatsApp, Google, Apple and every other App, someone installed that can access your contacts knows your Name, Phone Number and People you are connected to.

Signal relies on NSA Cloud Servers and "security" features of Intel Processore that are going to be broken or probably there already is a backdoor.

You can't have it on multiple devices with multiple accounts, its a closed ecosystem and doesn't have a big community involved with checking the code. They get funded by US Gov. and tried to put obvious backdoors in their desktop apps.

Use Matrix.org , I also heard good things about SimpleX.

nice try FBI

Telegram does exist you know

My friends and I tried Signal after the whole WhatsApp privacy issue thing arose.

Signal has been nothing but issues for us, plagued full of bugs. Images half the time would refuse to send. Videos would send but the audio would be slow even though the video itself was fine. Chat would load 200 messages prior then scroll down to the bottom on its own. The app doesn't have a good way of handling media so it'd grow to be 50GB in size, then if you backup Signal messages that'd double in size again.

Our group chat recently moved away from Signal, it's not perfect but at least are media is sending fine.

Signal is a great secure private messenger app until you realize that the keyboard is a third-party piece of software and is thus easily compromised. This is doubly so for people in CJK space where third-party IMEs are absolutely essential; Signal doesn't provide its own keyboard under its control and it certainly doesn't provide IMEs. So any keyboard/IME can phone home with everything you type into your "secure" app.