this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 106 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

Crazy how decentralization improves both, but they are vehemently against that. I trust them in terms of privacy, but their insistence on centralization, blocking third party apps, removing SMS, and refusal to support fdroid, I'm not a fan of the direction they've gone recently.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Fr. Fuck signal for removing SMS support

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I assume that is exactly for one of the reasons they mentioned in the article: increasing costs for sms

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wait. Signal was an SMS client. It wouldn't cost them anything for a user to send an SMS message. IIRC, they nixed the SMS feature for security reasons, not cost.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's what they told me when gave then feedback through their website.

There's no free lunch and corporations aren't the most trustworthy source of information though so maybe it was about cost.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

isnt signal a nonprofit? not a corporation

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Some nonprofit organizations are corporations and have pretty shitty practices:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_Wish_Network

The Morman church is another US 'non-profit organization' yet somehow hordes billions.

Trusting blindly without doing research because something is presented as a non-profit is a good way to be taken for a fool and separated from your money.

When signal made their own cryptocurrency which they entirely premined was a huge red flag. Dropping SMS support was an annoyance that broke the camels back.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah I think you are right. I too was really mad at Signal for ditching sms, and THEN having the audacity to ask for donations! This article shines a light on the reasons, wow.

Still, I would only donate if they kept sms in there. Not without sms because now it's just one more isolated platform and no longer a one-stop solution at it used to be.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

The sms cost is for account creation and verification on new devices, being an sms client didn't cost anything aside from maintaining that portion of the app

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

A bit of transparency at the beginning would've helped...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

One reason was worry that people accidentally send SMS when they mean to send a secure message

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Removing SMS support makes sense. The potential for a user sending something through SMS that they thought was going over Signal is high. Even for the savvier users who would install Signal in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (5 children)

It killed adoption, since now it's just another messaging app. Most of my contacts still use SMS, and will stay on it, so being able to use Signal was a smooth all-in-one experience. Now I have no point in keeping it installed because like 3 of my contacts use it, so it has no use to me, thus killing potential adoption.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

They've never had more users.

And if you had spent 3 minutes looking at r/Signal or the support forum before they disabled SMS you would have seen how many people were confused by the feature.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Exactly the opposite. Removing sms was the thing that finally made me recommend it to my friends and family. People understand sms replacements. People understand alternate messaging apps. People don't understand encrypted sms.

If you have people who love whatsapp, it's super easy to get them to use signal instead.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Sms was kinda shite on it. I ended up using my Samsung messaging app for actual sms.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

It killed adoption

Well for Yanks

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Perfect, that keeps you off signal and lowers their operating costs.

Because if you actually needed signal, you’d still be using it. Security and privacy is not about convenience or a “smooth all-in-one experience”. It’s about actual security and privacy. And that is what signal provides.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

That makes no sense. Anyways I've moved to Matrix mostly anyways.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
  • Signal wants to be as secure as possible
  • F droid has security issues
  • It makes perfect sense to me
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I mean, of course the company is against what will lose the company money.

They're not doing this because they care about privacy, lol.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Paying 19 million dollars in wages for 50 people....

There's profit there, for sure.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Profit can be distorted based on how much your paying employees.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It doesn't affect their money though

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I haven't been able to trust them since the get go, to be honest. Their whole stance against federation is.. FUDdy to stay polite: https://gultsch.de/objection.html