- federation (while P2P might be interesting for some, it definitely isn't something for everyone - yet, see below)
- scalable from private messaging up to thousands of users ((soon) with Spaces and threading)
- unlimited multi device with synchronization
- prospectively P2P with offline usage (Pinecones)
- open standard enabling competition
I haven't been very successful convincing people to join. Some tried but were immediately put off by the complicated UI. It takes too much explaining and hand holding.
Those constantly in-your-face "session verification" prompts are bewildering and useless. And then it's impossible to disable spell checking in the Element client.
I hope it continues to get better.
Being engineers, we did figure everything out, but I couldn't see any non-technical users going through the headache, particularly when Signal is just "install and you're done".
beeperhq is doing this for I believe $10/month (even iMessage). Free, reliable bridges would be the special sauce for Matrix IMHO.
* it can't save photos to the camera roll
* notifications are hit and miss
Blame your Android distribution https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/5085#issu...
(The setting is allowing Signal to run without "intelligent" battery optimization. Will also have to see if it affects battery life.)
It's not an excuse, but I've seen other people on iOS have similar problems.
Both of these issues do not exist on Android versions of Signal.
heck for years you could not even select multiple photos to share at once from file picker
I vivily remember how Signal didn't work for like 8 hours because it was during night in US and the responsible person was sleeping, so these 3 hours outage is nothing with this profesionally managed client/network
that last drop was when they started to nag me with mandatory PIN code through half screen, then we just left with extended family, F that
If you're on Android, check out https://dontkillmyapp.com/
Saving pictures also works fine.
1. Click Photo.
2. Click Share Sheet.
3. Click save photo.
I would like to say to each his own but the nature of communication apps makes them useless if others don't also use it. The typical response I get for this is some form of whataboutism. I will just use whatever else I find for now until they figure out a way to monetize it and care about user needs (such as not mandating phone numbers and being able to register the same number on multiple devices so I can use it on iPhone for example without stopping android usage) or some other app like threema will gain popularity like Signal.
What does one need to actually contribute code to Signal?
Lots of people are trying to contribute, but Signal is more and more becoming a black box, I say this as a t-shirt wearing (Open Whisper Systems) advocate, Signal is falling out of favor with many "OG" advocates.
The real question here isn't about which system is technologically superior (though HN gravitates to that question), it's which one is technologically superior taking into account network effects. Briar and Session may be great, and I wish everyone used them, but at present at least where I live it'd be very tough going. Getting people to use Signal isn't all that hard, the network is pretty robust in my communities (university city).