The enshittification marches on – use Signal [WhatsApp]

If Signal didn't alienate a large number of users by removing SMS maybe switching would be more viable.

This. I hate Whatsapp, but I have to use it because that's what everybody else (where I live) uses, so either I cave, or be Incommunicable by everyone and get used to explaining why while sounding like a dork.

I used Signal because, although a very small set of friends used it, I had an excuse to keep it because it handled SMS, and so I could keep it in the hopes that eventually WA would shoot itself in the foot and people would finally migrate, but since they removed SMS, why the hell would I hold on to it if I'd have no reason to other that I like it?

alienate a large number of users by removing SMS

Would you mind elaborating on this?

SMS in Signal was never secure (it's SMS), and so it was removed. Now I have private messaging in Signal, and if some one sends me an SMS, it shows up in my stock texting app. No false sense of security and it's very easy to use 2 apps.

Yes I dropped signal when it stopped supporting sms. That was a really dumb choice and I honestly don’t know why they did it

Turning a messaging app for myself and friends into a data farming social media app full of paid promotions is absolutely the definition of enshittification.

This is the beginning of monetizing the app after they started collecting user data a few months back. The more aggressively they decide to monetize, the more aggressive they'll be about pushing promoted content. Remember when Instagram had no ads?

That's how this works. And they're certainly not going to choose to make less money off of their app over time with the market dominance that they have. Why would they when users will continue to use it?

Signal doesn't have a marketing department worth billions or synergy with any popular platforms

I only text people I know IRL and none of them are tech literate enough to use something other than the default messenger app, let alone hack anything to obtain sensitive info. And if a 3rd party wants to hack my messages, they're gonna see a LOTTA penis and not anything important, so fuck it.

I still get the occasional message that takes hours to deliver. I don't trust it to always be reliable.

Nothing, OP just wanted an excuse to use the buzzword of current year

Monetizing the app

I also find it crazy that people don't understand the value of privacy. Telling people that Nissan wants to sell information about your sexual activity seemed to wake some of my social circle up. But only in the context of Nissan, which almost certainly doesn't have that data. Meta almost certainly does.

What sort of roadmap are you looking for in Signal? It does everything I need it to do, personally.

Signal the anonymous messenger asking for your phone # to register... I didn't check if they changed that but it was such a good joke

What am I supposed to do?

Decide if your privacy is more important than their convenience and your feelings of FOMO.

And while it will always be controversial, I'll say it over and over again: you MUST support some kind of adversarial interoperability for a messaging client, at least if you want me on your service. In the US, that means having some degree of SMS support since that's what most people can use by default. In many parts of the world (at least pending the new EU directive), you don't even have that since the primary means of messaging most people is proprietary services.

Signal walked back from even bare-bones SMS support in their app. If they had supported it, including forwarding messages to desktop/tablet clients , I am sure it could've given them a high degree of user retention. Maybe even some opportunities to conversion, e.g.,, a user getting a prompt when starting a new SMS that the sender is on Signal. They instead focused on maintaining the walled garden and that creates an INTENSELY high up-front cost. For someone like me, who puts a high priority on juggling as few of these apps as possible to communicate with people, it's an unreasonably high one. I have no more desire to try and fight to convert all my parents to Signal as getting them onto a Discord server or any other random, narrow-field service that they will not be able to ding strangers on.

It's absolutely unintelligible to me that no competitor has seen plainly what makes iMessage so strong: that it works by default with pretty much everyone with nearly zero friction to the user by supporting a nearly universal fallback.

It also is why it makes so much damn sense to me that the EU passed the adversarial interoperability rule. Because the had very close to nothing for a universal fallback.

Signal is great!

I remember when it was trash in like 2013, but it's been something I recommend to family and friends since at least 2020. UI is clean, modern, and uncluttered IMO.

Not sure I've ever seen Signal push anything crypto related.

Telegram is "pinky promise" secure with a closed source encryption mechanism. I love that it was created by the guy who created VK and fled Russia when the oligarchy wanted control, but that was years ago. Signal is fully open source, including its encryption.

They store no information on users, not even metadata like phone numbers, and this is documented in the blog posts they make when governments get mad about it after their requests for user data can't be filled.

The fact that you need a phone number to sign up bothered me early on, but over time I've realized how helpful it is from a UX perspective. Friends and family want to be able to connect to their contacts directly – not ask for a username.

I have a lot of gripes with it, but since I only use it with a few people (if I try to switch someone to an unfamiliar platform anyway, I'd rather go with XMPP), my biggest one is not allowing desktop registration officially. I had to use signal-cli to register, and then it kept giving errors for trying to bind the official client. Maybe it's for the best since the client is Electron... But still, very disrespectful to people who refuse to use smartphones. Such an arbitrary requirement, they have phone numbers already...

image quality has 2 options. if you choose high quality, there's no "extreme quality loss"

"All I did was misrepresent something harmless, done by a company that's doing so much more horrible things that I shouldn't be using their product in the first place, and now people are calling me out on it. Clearly, they are wrong."

What you posted isn’t enshittification.