I will take anything that could make people switch from Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp to Signal, even if my preference actually goes to Element / Matrix.<p>Lately, people around me have been installing Signal, or I've met people would already have Signal, and it's been enjoyable to, at last, participate in fun group chats. They didn't miss me before but I'm happy to be there now.<p>Signal works well. I'd like to be able to edit messages and react with multiple emojis like with Element/Matrix, but most importantly, Signal needs to look cool and to be something people want to install and use.<p>Element/Matrix too, by the way, but they need to focus on usability first at the moment.
This seems like such a strange addition. My use of signal is primarily group chat or as an SMS replacement. It is hard for me to see the benefit of adding stories like this to what to me is a tool for directly messaging specific individuals. I would be interested in hearing from people who think this is a good change.
happy they're adding this. one more important feature to replace whatsapp and instagram for normal people.<p>stories is a great feature by letting you post however much you want and letting the viewer choose to view/skip/ignore the content easily. plus its ephemeral by default which is another good feature imo.<p>everything should be e2ee. anything which helps convince your mom/sister/dad/friends to use signal is a good thing.
God fucking dammit. I literally just put my reputation on the line with family <i>last week</i> that we should all switch to Signal. All I want is a decent E2EE messaging app.<p>Between this and their upcoming crypto payment system, I’m thinking I made a huge mistake switching from Telegram.
If this gets more people to use safer, better messaging apps and/or fund Signal, I'm all in.<p>There's no place for purism, I just hope they add a way to disable stories for unwilling users.
The feature that I missed the most after switching to signal was Live location sharing. It is just so convenient to find your friends while going out or going to the street exactly at the time someone is there to pick you up.
The development of Signal, sorry to put it harshly, seems to suffer from a split brained syndrome. On one hand they’ll focus on adding stickers, stories and other trivial features to help appeal to a broader user base, but on the other hand they’ll refuse to implement basic and important features that people need in a chat app, like chat backups (there is no backup option for iOS, only a device to device transfer…so if you lose or break your device or switch to a new device after selling your old one, your chats are all gone).<p>I don’t recommend Signal to others because its priorities don’t match mine and that of others I know. I do use it, but I treat it more like a fragile platform where anything can disappear any moment. Don’t share or keep anything valuable on it.<p>The fact that Signal is another centralized platform that not only requires a phone number but also exposes your phone number to others (like in group chats) are larger issues for me.<p>I’ve been trying Element (from Matrix), but its UX is quite poor. I just wish chat apps would copy at least some of the UX of Telegram.
Until they allow people to make bot accounts, theplatform eill be limited to person<>person communication. The actual strengh of WhatsApp is that companies are ditching their phone / support chat for whatsapp only. Which is the worst of both worlds.
I miss Signal "Android Tablet". Shouldn't be too hard for them as they already have the Desktop part.
Look at this close and unresolved PR from 2014.
<a href="https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/614" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/614</a>
They're taking a play out of Facebook's strategy book: copy every feature of your competitor as quickly as possible. In this case, it seems they're going after WhatsApp and they're copying WhatsApp's status feature.<p>This seems like a smart move for them because they can run for parity with WhatsApp and they'd still have one major benefit Facebook has been in a very tight spot to match: privacy.<p>Most people don't seem to care about privacy, but if they start losing their (privacy aware) friends and family to Signal, they too will consider installing it as well.<p>If they acquire enough network effects, they could hollow out a large chunk of WhatsApp, unless WhatsApp starts offering features Signal can't offer (e.g. better integrations into Facebook's other properties).<p>It'll be interesting to watch how this plays out.
So Signal is missing a basic feature like location sharing and they chose to go ahead with implementing Stories. I guess they are focusing more on getting new users than making a great app.<p>The thing is none of these centralized apps will ever get messaging right. Because no matter how good the intentions of the team are sooner or later the higher management or the PM wants to have bigger piece of cake. This in the end ruins the most basic functionality that a messaging app should do right: messages.<p>What these teams do not understand is it's okay for an IM app to not keep adding fancy features. Focus on providing security fixes and minor improvements that improve user experience. If you keep focusing on getting more people you will end up with yet another social app like Instagram/Snapchat. We do not really need more of that stuff. Consider this: if people who built electric grids kept adding unnecessary features to it, we would not have a robust infrastructure like it today. They built them and then those people left to work on something more interesting. We need more of that in Software. What we currently have is millions and millions of engineers trying to figure out how to keep users glued to their app.
Seems like Stories will come to Matrix as well - through FluffyChat and Minestrix!<p><a href="https://youtu.be/tLlSGqzgzhg?t=1045" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/tLlSGqzgzhg?t=1045</a>
So another unnecessary feature coming to a chat app that no-one asked for - just like including their own cryptocurrency in the messenger.<p>After all, from a privacy perspective it is still a disaster to create an account by using your phone number to sign in. From a typical user's perspective it is basically a worse version of WhatsApp that still cannot backup your texts and conversations properly, so why bother switching at all?<p>The users will still sit on WhatsApp due to the latter still being the case. Once your phone is lost, stolen, or you have a different phone, your conversations are lost if you are using Signal.<p>Oh dear.
I really like that aside from being a highly secure communications channel, Signal has now also replaced most other social networks for online interaction with my real friends.
Whelp, there goes the neighborhood.<p>Honestly, why can't we just make products and services that do one thing and do it well. Leave "stories" to the social media applications.
Right now signal's infrastructure could figure out (if it stored data that everyone claims it doesn't) which IP address is sending messages to which IP address. If stories end up being implemented as a group conversation with all your contacts, everyone will be reasonably frequently sending a message to all their contacts, which changes the above into "which IPs are contacts of which IPs".
As much as people complain about patents, maybe patenting things like stories and stickers in social media / messaging would've kept them from being playbook items that we see in the journey of every single online product. It's tedious and rather lazy compared to developing new ideas.
few predictions on why this PR is an indication to Signal falling into the chasm:<p>1. The Signal team will soon realize that adding social messaging concepts to a private messaging app in a safe way is possible and more importantly is wanted by a big subset (early majority) of people.
2. The early adopters of Signal App will feel offended as they were looking for a strictly principled secret messaging app.
3. The target market of early majority will not see much difference in Signal and other options and they will stick to the app where their network is already at.<p><a href="https://www.businessillustrator.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/innovation-distribution-curve-650px.png" rel="nofollow">https://www.businessillustrator.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/...</a>
Why?<p>Stories are not something I need from a chat app. I wish these apps would stop the ideal of "constant feature growth" and focus on core competencies. Signal is a SMS/chat app for a privacy focused audience... I do not see an overlap for a stories.
Ffs! Just have cross platform backup/restore and migration, accounts not tied to phones and multi-device accounts already! I have heard others complain about this for years now.<p>I can code but I don't code for a living, these things seem like they would take at most two weeks dev time, is there a complexity I am missing here? Or do they just not care? I have all but abandoned secure mobile messanging at this point. They either die from lack of adoption or live long enough to become the villain.