HN tends to be a younger crowd whose peers cycled through a number of social-networking and messaging apps as popularity waxed and waned. But older generations don't see any compelling reason why they should bother splitting their conversations over multiple apps, when literally everyone with a mobile has texting. Being a drop-in replacement for texting, so they could have additional features without additional hassle was the only thing that convinced them to switch and now it is gone.
I've given up evangelizing Signal, and resigned to the idea that cross-platform RCS is the only thing that will bring encryption to the majority of my contacts.
What is your definition of younger and older? Anybody born in the 70s or later experienced an ongoing procession of instant messaging choices. I would tell you it is precisely that experience that informs my apathy towards the latest and greatest Hot Thing, and makes me appreciate boring old SMS (and by extension, iMessage) that I know will just work with anyone I meet.
I also get the fatigue. Moxie said centralized because they needed to move faster. But Signal has always moved very slow, so it does feel off. But to be fair, it's not like most messenger apps do much.
Signal is only like 42 people.[0] You gotta triage a lot of stuff. I wish the feature still existed, but I can totally understand why they did that. I'm pretty sure not all 42 people are programmers.
[0] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
Agreed. I put most of the blame on Google for deciding to implement RCS as a feature of Messages, rather than an Android OS library/service that any developer could use like SMS.
I don't like splitting my conversations over multiple apps when literally everyone with a mobile in Argentina has WhatsApp. SMS costs money and having it in the same app as a free messaging platform sounds risky :P
Most people don't. The issue isn't what country I live in (fuck man, I got SMS, WhatsApp, Signal, Slack, KakaoTalk, and I've even forced some people to not contact me through some apps so I could reduce). You missed the actual content of the message about how there is a reasoning for this change beyond Signal. You got to be careful with blame because there are often things upstream that cause things downstream but the fingers are often pointed at what's downstream, not upstream. We can't resolve problems if we only focus on downstream. You have to consider both. I hate it too, because it is the mental version of using multiple apps. But that's the way things are and I want to actually reduce the problems, not run around with a box of bandaids.
I thought RCS explicitly wasn’t E2EE?
Based on how those work, the answer is likely: When a SIM from a mainland mobile company is in the device, E2EE is disabled.
People's eyes glaze over and they go right back to using WhatsApp, which offers nearly everything Signal does, but also full sync. Most people don't care about the differences in privacy.
Might be worth reading this comment from the devs[0]. I wish the feature existed too, but I get it and don't think all blame is on them. For lost devices, well... is that a bug? Where would the backup come from? Signal is anti-cloud, as they should be.
BUT, I do think people store too much data. Pictures, messages, etc. I think we're getting very little value for maintaining all of this and that it is mostly laziness. Don't get me wrong, I do it too and I like it and it does come in handy time to time, but my life wouldn't significantly change were this not the case. It's something I'll be irked about when I hit the speed bump the first time but move on quickly (like quitting Facebook). 99.999% of the time it would just result in me asking someone about something months ago and it's never been anything important (because if it was, I'd have made that information redundant, and that's not a action because Signal, that's an action because the information is important and I do this wherever that type of info comes from.) Truth is that >>99.9% of that data is junk. It's only the nuggets we care about and I think it's a bit weird we treat it all the same.
[0] https://community.signalusers.org/t/ios-backup-keeping-messa...
If they want to extend this transfer ability to other platforms, they could do what some comic/manga reader and video player apps have done and bundle in a tiny web server that allows the user to download/upload files with a web browser protected by a username and password, which is started/stopped as needed. As a bonus they could offer this on Android too for wireless backup management.
There’s also nothing stopping them from building Signal clients such that they’re able to directly connect to each other over the local network and do whatever transfers are required that way.
Apple doesn’t prohibit of any of these. I wonder why they weren’t explored.
Wire E2EE messenger on iOS does something similar and allows the user to save the file to any storage provider.
There's also nothing stopping you (or anyone else here) from adding such a feature. Either into the official, Molly, or one of the other forks.
You may also be interested in this feature request.
Here's my advice: don't sell security as the foremost feature. Sell it as "iMessage, but for everyone." You got stickers, reactions, high quality videos and images. Then mention security, it is the cherry on top.