> I feel like I will just give up and use WhatsApp and assume that I only had privacy pre-internet.

Yup, this is it. The point they've been waiting for us to cross. It was inevitable imo to not give up and surrender to it. It feels like we as a society are slowing transcending from the 4th to the 5th stage of grief.

I don’t think non-nerds really think about privacy online all that much. This privacy catastrophe is only felt in places like HN.

I talk to my friends, parents, and family about it a lot. They don't understand it, but they do care. Problem is that they don't understand how to fight back. They do not want to give up on Facebook. They also are afraid to switch to a service like Signal because "no one is there." So I think they care, but there's a big sense of helplessness. Honestly that's why I like projects like Signal. There's no way I can get people to use PGP through emails, it is too much work. But anyone can use something like Signal.

> They also are afraid to switch to a service like Signal because "no one is there."

I've been thinking about this a bit, and I'm going to stop short of asking people to switch, and just try to get them to install it (and maybe even get them to casually suggest their friends do the same, if the opportunity arises). It's a hopefully small, risk-free step to take, and the more people that have installs, the more likely it is that "no one is there" will start becoming not true, even if not immediately.

I work in tech and I don't know a single person on Signal. It was already hard enough to get my family to start using WhatsApp over the years, and I still get messages from some of them over Skype(!!!!) for some reason. Frankly, I have no strength for yet another switch, I'm staying with WhatsApp for the time being.

Your mileage clearly varies. Like many people here, I also work in tech. Even before the WhatsApp privacy policy fiasco, there were a good few dozens of my contacts on Signal. Afterwards, there was a push like I haven't seen in all the years I've been using it.

Like many people, I'd definitely prefer having just one messenger, but now I simply use Signal with everyone that's on it and only have to open WhatsApp a few times a week. This entire thing has to be seen as a process IMO.

> I have no strength for yet another switch

Pidgin with a shitton of plugins. If the only problem is the migration, that still works as a single client, albeit with drawbacks and hiccups. (I collected them at https://github.com/petermolnar/awesome-pidgin-plugins and yes, it'll need to be compiled, even Pidgin itself for some of the solutions. There's nothing user friendly about it, sadly.)

On the other hand... the only system I never had to migrate off is IRC. The funny bit of IRC is that it's not private in terms of security at all, but because it's anonymus, it still feels like it.

And so I keep thinking about needs when it comes to privacy: what do I really need in the context of internet communication? Anonymity, privacy, or both?

I don't have a definitive answer.

You could show them this Signal commercial. https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1354915823501025280?s=2...

> "no one is there" will start becoming not true, even if not immediately.

Still waiting for that to be the case. After 6 years of using Signal, I have a whopping... two... people in my contacts who also use it.

The most common response is still "Why don't you just use Whatsapp?"

Pretty much the only way we're going to see critical mass with Signal is if someone like Google were to make it their default platform for messaging.

I got my parents to install Signal a while ago, now in the recent 2-3 months their Signal contact lists have at least doubled when Signal got an unexpected boost by WhatsApp's privacy PR nightmare. I don't expect things to change much, though.

Because in the end normal users think about the functionality and price first, everything else second. Privacy? Just a neat-sounding bonus you can feel good about if your favorite app includes it and don't care about if it doesn't.

> Because in the end normal users think about the functionality and price first, everything else second.

I think the most important factor here is network effects.

Their reasons are completely valid honestly. There's nothing that feels like you have no power than using a chat app with none of your friends on it.

Only way to really take power back is make an app better than what's on the market, and have it respect your privacy. A very, very tall order, but I think it's the only way we can really take power away from big tech and give it back to the people.

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I'm not trying to say that their concerns are invalid. They very much are valid.

I don't think you can win by just having a better app. Marketing plays a big role. So something like Signal is going to be a major underdog because OSS and freeware don't have the same cashflow to do marketing. What I'm trying to say is that we need to be that marketing. Talking about data and privacy _is_ that marketing.

Sorry but Signal is just not a "better app". Yes, it has privacy and such, but the app itself is worse. I'm not even talking about missing features like not having chat backups, but the UI itself is slow and unpolished.

- scrolling contact list is slow and stutters - opening Signal displays empty frame far too long - it's not possible to add/invite a person during the call, you need to define groups for group calls - forwarding message from chat to chat is not working - messages in a chat take too much space. If a person sent three consecutive messages, don't display his name on all of them, just on first one.

And the worst thing is those polish fixes don't have to do anything with crypto and privacy. It's purely client side issue, but Moxie & Co. decided their priority is adding MobileCoint inside a chat app instead of polishing existing clients.

I'm not using signal as my main SMS app because until a week ago, it didn't notify me when I got a text. Which is kind of a problem.

A distinction without a difference. It matters little how much they say they care if the few taps to download a new app and some nonsense "but what if my friends list isn't totally full, the horror!" fear is what's stopping them, especially when they clearly know someone who can and is willing to help them (ie. you).

I wonder how quickly they would switch if WhatsApp started requiring a monthly fee to use it. I get the feeling that big sense of helplessness would suddenly vanish.

If they claim to care so much about online data privacy, let them prove it. They've already proven they care a lot about price.

Your view of the average user is unnecessarily uncharitable and antagonistic. People want privacy, but they also want to talk to their friends: that much is given. But…to basically any normal user, an app that offers privacy but doesn't let them talk to their friends is useless. Not everyone has the time or ability to go around proselytizing their acquaintances to switch to a new app to talk to them. To be honest, a lot barely have the time to figure out how to use a new app…

So how did they start using chatting to their friends with their current chat service in the first place? By that logic, few people would ever leave IRC or Skype or whatever they started using first. Users move, they just don't move for privacy. The fact that proselytization is even required to move to Signal is telling.

Everyone has time and ability to make their own choices with like-minded friends. They do it for everything else, that's how they started using WhatsApp and co in the first place. Their claims to caring about privacy are as convincing as a friend who keeps telling you "sorry, I'm too busy", "another time then?", "maybe", repeated ad nauseam. Then you see them at another party with someone else confusingly named "WhatsApp" and you realize they just couldn't make time for you, who is named "Signal".

Again, look at how quickly users switch when a service requires payment (IIRC WhatsApp did try to do this once and a lot of users chose to leave instead of paying). They're just too busy & helpless, right? How much proselytization did that take?

Whatsapp built its userbase over several years. It did so at a time where it had a clear value prop, replacing sms which cost a lot with something nearly free. It grew in popularity in eastern european countries, spread later in europe and then later in the US when Facebook acquired them.

This was a process, not a 1-day switch from skype to whatsapp. The network effects are real, and if you don't understand how difficult it is to get people to join a chat app, you won't win.

The network effects were real for SMS too, yet users still moved to WhatsApp because it was free (much to the chagrin of incumbent carriers), that's what users wanted.

Of course it's difficult to get people to join a chat app, and it should be. At a minimum you should need to provide something that users want and didn't have before. WhatsApp offered something new, it was an effective price tag of zero with phone number contacts. Skype offered something new and desirable (until it didn't). Snapchat offered something new and desirable. All of them had predecessors with network effects and still succeeded by giving users something they really wanted. They didn't throw their hands up and blame users.

Signal offers nothing new to users right now. "Privacy" is too abstract. E2EE? The few users who know what that is tend to know that Whatsapp already has it. In fact, those shitty crypto payments might be the only thing Signal does offer to users. But you also lose out on chat syncing for example.

Surprisingly though, Signal is gaining a bit of traction, so I think "Privacy" is still something people do want. But it has to be better defined.

And to be completely honest I don't believe in Signal. The current messenger wars kind of feel like a parallel universe's email wars "yahoo vs gmail vs hotmail vs live" or something. Coming up with a new messenger is easy. Most of them have the same featuresets. The underlying protocols should be compatible instead of this sorry state of affairs.

Matrix will probably win out in the end but it's going to be long-drawn and unnecessarily annoying for users in the mean time. It shouldn't matter if you're using instagram's UI, or messenger's, or signal's, …. You should get access to the contacts you want, and be able to cross-talk.

It's interesting how people turn into such app misers when it comes to messengers. It's upsetting to have multiple different ones, even though they don't eat up disk space.

Some are very loyal to the Zuckerberg offerings. They ride or die with the Zuckster.

It's because each app is stealing your data on your phone - personal life, financial things going across your phone.

Most of them have been busted, multiple times.

It comes down to risk exposure, gotta make a deal with one devil, but you don't want a dozen bad actors ganging up on your data.

Which is why privacy protection has to come from the top (i.e. regulators), because most people don't know and/or don't care.

"we" care, up to the point of "it's too much effort", and "we" have tried to do a grassroots movement to get people to use more privacy-focused apps.

But these apps, in the end, are still owned by companies who are not charities; they want to earn money, and digitally, it feels like you can only make money by selling subscriptions, ads, or printing a cryptocurrency - and subscriptions don't work because of (sponsored / investor funded) free alternatives.

Anyway, if you put legislation in place like in Europe, the companies will have no choice. In theory anyway; in practice they find and abuse loopholes soon enough, or just do things covertly, hope they won't be found out, and just pay the fine if something does come up. Which they can easily afford by then, not so much from the money they earn from their monetization method, but stock market value.

>Which is why privacy protection has to come from the top (i.e. regulators), because most people don't know and/or don't care.

I think there should only be legislation about stuff people care about.

Looking at the mass surveillance revelations by Snowden and other whistleblowers I'd say many people do care.

What makes you say people don't?

Some HN readers like me also don’t think about privacy much at all.

I like the sites and apps that accept my data as currency so that I can use/browse them without getting out my wallet. Plus I like seeing ads for products that I might want to buy. Win win.

...but it is a catastrophe, nonetheless.

What in the world? They don’t have to use it. This has to be one of the worst arguments I’ve ever seen. Did your friends throw their iPhones in the trash when ApplePay came about?

The argument is "this app, which promises privacy and security in ways I do not have the skills to verify, is made by people who also think cryptocurrencies are a good idea". That is a pretty compelling argument to people who think cryptocurrencies are all about scams and/or useless pollution (a sizeable portion of society). It suggests that the people behind Signal may not be as trustworthy as they're made out to be.

Whether or not a bunch of competent security gurus on HN assure us that yes, Signal is still great and no, Moxie didn't go nuts, doesn't really influence the validity of that argument outside tech circles. Don't forget that we've all spent years training our aunts and nephews to not trust the companies that make the apps they use. It's a major marketing mistake and they should've known better.

Also, ApplePay has nowhere near the same stigma associated with it as cryptocurrencies do, I think your comparison is silly.

FWIW, if Signal was new today and someone would pitch me "a super secure messaging app with built-in crypto payments" I'd not easily get enthusiastic. I've been trained to treat any pitch that includes the word "crypto" or "token" with high suspicion, because of the crap magnets those technologies have been historically. Too many people's "get rich quick" schemes sounded exactly like that a few years ago.

>or useless pollution Given the energy needed just for one transaction the currently popular ones are actually about useless pollution. It's not like bittorrent when it's not a technological problem but rather copyright owners agenda. In case of bitcoin, it is actually unsustainable technologically as a currency (as opposed to an asset). I get that cryptocurrencies can be efficient but not the ones that are popular right now.

> It suggests that the people behind Signal may not be as trustworthy as they're made out to be.

trust only works in retrospect (it can't be extended into the future to a party simply because they make a promise)

all such relationships have an expiry date (since as the trusted party evolves or needs to reinvent itself to satisfy shareholders). what can prevent this are bullet-proof contracts (that's not how people make decisions though - they never read the fine-print, review it when it changes and instead work on gut-feeling and emotions).

putting your trust into a brand/product is always going to eventually hurt you. A product having reached the size of Signal will most certainly throw part of it's user-base to the curb if it thinks it's held back by their opinions/goals.

The disconnect is people thinking Signal owes them something (when everybody actually used it for free until now).

> trust only works in retrospect

Nonsense. Trust provides a basis for present and future dealings.

please get in touch by email, I have a business proposal for you.

I highly recommend Robert Cialdini before making opinionated comments on trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence:_Science_and_Practic...

No, because, and this is very crucial:

I don't trust you.

sounds like you did not understand that this was rhetorical?

I understood that perfectly, and I pointed out to you that your rhetorical argument is invalid.

Not everybody. The people who donated to the project owes Moxie not using their money to get rich off a pump and dump scheme.

Is ApplePay associated with endless scams like ICO, extremely problematic security requiring extreme experience to avoid theft, massive transfer fees, lack of usability, endless scams and massive spam advertising such scam everywhere?

And several other serious problems.

Have you stopped using cash? Think of all the drugs and organized crime that rely on it.

You are being incredibly close-minded and only listing the cons of cryptocurrencies.

Nobody is being close-minded. I think you're mixing up "X is often associated with Y" and "X sucks because of Y". I don't think anybody in this thread is making the latter point particularly strongly.

The fact is that many people have negative associations with crypto. Even if they're wrong, it's still going to be bad marketing for Signal.

Cash is widely used for nonscammy purposes and I had plenty of good contacts with it.

My sole contact with cryptocurrencies is endless spam in mailbox, endless scam attempts in communities that I moderate and information about ICO and other scams. And <s>investments</s> gambling. And very rare cases of cryptocurrencies being useful for something.

And repeated info about being utter failure for payments. For comparison cash/credit card payment is done within 20 seconds for cc and within minute for cash. Both at cost of below 0.01 $ for payment.

Not taking sides here, just to nitpick that payment settlement takes a lot longer than that with credit card. It's like calling a bitcoin transfer with 0 confirmations "done", and which case it's actually faster than credit cards.

If there were to fix the bloody video call orientation before dwelling into shitcoins I might agree.

That will not make Moxie rich so why would he focus on that?

My customers in Latin America still use whatsapp so i have no choice but to use it even if they go full bitcoin mining malware.

Yeah, the feature will be opt-in as far as I've heard. Most of the people I've convinced to switch to Signal will either be unaware of it or not care.

To me it looks like people here are vastly overreacting.

> they don’t want anything to do with bitcoins

Honestly, this is a bad argument. You can use Signal and never send a gif or stickers. You don't have to do anything with ~~stickers~~crypto when using Signal. It is an opt-in feature that is probably going to not be used my 90% of people. This is just a bad argument surrounding the whole ordeal.

Now the arguments about: regulations, Moxie's involvement (stated he has no coins but there's other potential issues), and how the final system will actually look like (e.g. should it be a second app), those are valid arguments that we should be discussing. But the above one just isn't great and I'm tired of seeing it.

If you're trying to convince your friends and family to use some obscure tech nerd messaging app instead of what they're used to (and all of their friends probably use), it doesn't really matter whether their arguments are "good" or "bad" from a factual standpoint, because most people (or, at least, the OP as we can see here) don't really want to get into a debate defending the bad PR signal has created for itself. Getting folks to change the software they're used to for something new is a fundamentally hard thing to do even when you're providing a _clear upgrade_ (just look at how touchy people get at needing to change text editors/ides, or how vocally people complain about literally every web UI redesign), and every extra hurdle added to that process is going to make it exponentially harder.

It maybe a bad argument but it's a practical view. Governments around the world (see: India, China) have strict laws around crypto. By law of association, any service that remotely mentions this is severely scrutinized. I can hardly blame my friends if they want no part of this.

Crypto is so strange. You claim ownership over a string of 1s and 0s. Exclusive rights.

That's not how it works. It's more like there's this shared network of participants that has strong incentives to consistently agree that you own a numeric measurement of "value" and that you have the agreed-upon ability to elect to transfer portions of this value to other participants in the network (because you _know_ a specific private key and can irrefutably demonstrate that you know it even without disclosing it).

Most of my finances are just strings of 1s and 0s. My company pays me. They don't send pieces of paper to my bank. It happens via 1s and 0s. From there, 80-90% of my expenses get paid automatically (rent, most taxes, electricity, internet, gas, water, trash collection) all via 1s and 0s. And cash is slowly disappearing into 1s and 0s as well via phone payment systems.

You don't, though. That's more like IP law, where people really do claim rights over the usage of strings. Crypto is more like allocating a string on some servers with a decentralized process

I don't think cryptocoins are about "claiming" ones and zeroes, but instead having the ability to "use" those ones and zeroes, unlike anybody else.

Although ultimately the effect is similar to "claiming" them by virtue of being the only one (as long as you don't share the private key of course) that can operate on those one and zeroes (i.e transfering them to some other address).

Unlike, say, copyright, where even if you claim ownership, someone else can also operate on it (e.g. piracy), illegally of course, but still can.

Not too different from the 1s and 0s in your bank account. I bet you use cash for less than 1% of your transactions. Everything else is 1s and 0s.

Applies to intellectual property in general.

Banking is so strange. The bank grants you ownership over some pieces of paper that may not even really exist.

They are whitelisting the feature. So this is pretty easy to deal with. Government bans? Take off the whitelist. No more issues. Major services like Google Play will have to deal with this too. Most apps don't work the same way in every single country, they adopt to those countries' policies or get banned.

> They are whitelisting the feature. So this is pretty easy to deal with. Government bans? Take off the whitelist. No more issues. Major services like Google Play will have to deal with this too. Most apps don't work the same way in every single country, they adopt to those countries' policies or get banned.

Contrived strawman rebuttal: Government sees app "ThingX" now deals with crypto. ThingX indicates that different variants of the app can interact with crypto depending on the region. Government doesn't care because they're not tech savvy, bans ThingX because crypto.

Well, their opinion could be that Bitcoin is extremely wasteful and damaging to our environment for very little value, and so they do not want to support any organization that supports Bitcoin. A boycott, if you will.

I’m not arguing that position but I’m just saying that if that is the case, then their boycott is more reasonable than say a “stickers” boycott.

Mobilecoin is a proof of stake system and there is no Bitcoin involved. Proof of Stake systems are not damaging to the environment like Proof of Work systems (like Bitcoin’s) are or can potentially be.

Yeah there is a big education gap that just gets wider with stigma.

Aren't premined coins much less harmful to the environment? I'm not saying this is an argument for using it, but this is definitely true.

Working so the government can piss away my savings is extremely wasteful to my body and time.

Electric cars have zero emissions, bitcoin has zero emissions ;)

Seriously, most mining farms are using geothermal or water dams generators.

And others are running on stolen electricity in residential areas, sonetimes causing fires.

Electricity is fungible.

They should educate themselves on why bitcoin is useful and why it's not wasteful, rather than ignore it based on false assumptions.

This series of short articles is very good for those who want to learn the fundamentals: https://tomerstrolight.medium.com/why-bitcoin-the-series-660...

The argument in your link boils down to: it will bring the economy down to a deflationary halt, so it's friendly to the environment. Great.

There are 19 articles and the argument doesn't boil to anything. Just one minor argument is that deflationary money system reduces overconsumption. That's not a 'deflationary halt'.

> Honestly, this is a bad argument.

It is a protective heuristic for the non-tech people.

Basically, the more something mentions crypto coins, the higher the likelihood that it is a scam of some type.

It is not always true, but it is true enough for the average person and , in general, functions pretty well as a heuristic.

Thus, they hear about this new, previously unknown, chat service, and see an association with crypto coins, their scam detector immediately goes off, and they don’t want anything to do with it.

> Honestly, this is a bad argument.

No, it is a very good argument. Those who are using computers since pre-mobile era (which is everyone but zoomers) remember very well how simple programs slowly became more bloated and then basically became adware. This is what it is associated to.

If you implement any type of cryptocurrency possibility, KYC is around the corner in the United States.

Yes, it may take a while, but the glacier does in fact move.

I think it’s a valid argument. Once this is deployed everywhere, people will see the statements “Signal supports MOB” and “Signal has 20 million users” and make a conclusion, “20 million people can use MOB”. The only way to avoid being part of this statistic is to avoid the app.

In general, boycotting the product is the time-tested way to send messages to big corp. if you don’t like your clothes being made by child labor, don’t buy the brand. If you don’t like WhatsApp privacy policy, don’t install it. If you don’t like P&G spying on people in China, don’t buy their products. And if you don’t like cryptocurrencies, don’t use stuff from companies which support them.

Any time there's a project that's almost open-source, almost open standards, that's how it ends up going. If you'd gone for Matrix you wouldn't have that problem, because even if their developers decide to embed some bitcoin nonsense into the official client, the protocol and ecosystem is much bigger than that.

You might say that well I’m no worse off than before which is true but still feels weird that I was unable to use my existing riot im account when I wanted to sign into Mozilla’s riot server. I ended up creating a different login for Mozilla’s riot.

I think of myself as a technophile but element/matrix/riot made me eat the humble pie.

Is it possible you were trying to login without the full path? You're email isn't minot, it's [email protected]. Similarly, on Matrix, your username isn't minot, but [email protected]. Trying to sign in with your provider can be non-obvious, and would also cause the issue it sounds like you were having :)

Small correction. The syntax for MXIDs is @minot:matrix.org, not [email protected] in order to prevent people from mixing it with emails.

My mistake! I must have been stuck thinking on the email analogy

There is currently no way to port user profiles between homeservers of matrix. They have it planned, but I don't know the current progress on that.

Which is why I'm not converting my friends to anything at the moment. Matrix is slowly gaining adoption, but I can't recommend neither a client nor a homeserver. It is at a place where every university should run a homeserver, though.

That’s true. But there’s another problem with something like Matrix. It’s not to be adopted by the masses by design. The clients/apps are miles away from a nerd/tech savvy person would like to use and another few miles away from the UX non-nerds would want to see. So that’s dba anyway - dead before arrival.

I'm not associated with FluffyChat, just want to point out that it appears to be a Matrix client that meets the "UX non-nerds would want to see" requirement: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/fluffychat

What's wrong with the design of Element? I don't think it's anymore complicated than e-mail and even my grandpa has one of those

Design isn't the biggest issue of Element imo. The speed it. It's super slow. I used another matrix app (can't remember the name now) and that also had the same issue. And the speed wasn't the app issue I think as everything else worked fine but loading messages and sending them took forever. Has this improved recently?

It sounds most likely the issue wasn't with the client, but with the server. The most popular server matrix.org is dealing with a lot of clients, but its performance has been improved, well, "recently", by improvements to the most popular homeserver Synapse.

The next step plan is to move to Dendrite, which is a new homeserver taking the lessons learned from writing Synapse, as well as being implemented in Go instead of Python. But it doesn't yet do everything. You can try a dendrite-hosted server by using dendrite.matrix.org as your homeserver. (AFAIK it has its own accounts.)

And the audio calls. It was bad, it’s still bad while crypto is being added. I knew when I started aggressively trying to move friend’s family to Signal that this benevolent dictator thing will backfire someday. I didn’t expect it to happen so soon.

Now I still don’t want to use WhatsApp but I don’t know which other messaging app will replace it. I think none.

This comment has been shown every time a thread related to WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal is posted..

Exactly the same?

Or similar? Because as far as HN bubble/bias/hivemind goes "We like privacy, we like to complain, we dislike cryptocurrency scams" would be a fitting (though partial) description.

So people irritated by that change by Signal being heavily represented on HN is not surprising.

I don't get it. OPs comment seems completely unrelated to the article

Or use something open and decentralized like Matrix that no one single party can control the future of.

They could also use Signal and not have anything to do with bitcoins..

Signal will now forever be tainted by crypto, even if the feature never actually makes it into the app.

What about Wickr. (Assuming you and your friends are not seeking privacy from US government.) I think they have paying customers so unlikely to push ads or sell crypto.

What a weird assumption.

What?! How does anyone using Signal get any news about the "bitcoins"? None of my friends I converted even heard about it.

You don’t need to use bitcoins to use signal for messaging.

Good thing then that there won't be any bitcoins in Signal.

Signal intends to use a cryptocurrency called Mobilecoin, not Bitcoin.

To a reasonable approximation, they're the same thing. (You know they aren't, I know they aren't, I also *don't particularly care, either*)

I felt the same when fax machines started being released with internet connectivity.

Needless to say all the fax machine companies went out of business because no one wanted internet features associated with their faxes.