1y ago

Signal usage survey, what versions do you use? Wanted for potential Flatpak adoption

community.signalusers.org Signal on Desktop survey?

On this forum there is open discussion about Taking ownership of Signal Flatpak, but in my humble opinion, we need to have some measurements, before we can be taken more seriously by Signal desktop team. Can you please answer to bellow questions. Thank you. Which Signal on phone are you using: p...

There are big wishes for Signal to adopt the perfectly working Flatpak.

This will make Signal show up in the verified subsection of Flathub, it will improve trust, allow a central place for bug reports and support and ease maintenance.

Flatpak works on pretty much all Distros, including the ones covered by their current "Linux = Ubuntu" .deb repo.

To make a good decision, we need to have some statistics about who uses which package.

116 comments

How about putting it on F-droid? That won't happen as they ship to much proprietary software.
- Signal wants to provide updates themselfs to make sure they are fast in case of big security bug. F-Droid can lag behind to provide new version of app.
  But they should at least provide F-Droid repo.
  
  F-droid is only a few days behind at most. They are arguing against F-droid with evidence that's out of date. I think it has more to do with laziness than anything.
  The good news is that Molly exists.
- Its so strange that you need to use Twinhelix' random project or Molly, as Signal doesnt care
- I don't think Signal is interested in doing that.

It sucks that they don't allow a survey without logging in first. Had to create an account extra for taking part...
- The worst part about signing up somewhere is the amount of email spam that will land in you inbox. I don't know about their specific configuration, but by default Discourse (the forum software they use) sends weekly "digest emails" if you haven't visited the site for a week. So make sure to turn them off.
  
  Use SimpleLogin and Bitwarden for everything. I never use the same email or password anywhere and can turn off receiving emails from the source for each account.
- Its not a Signal survey, this is by a random user.
  You can register anonymously.
  
  The way you posted this made it seem it was an official signal survey

Not being able to run Signal on my Android tablet feels really inconvenient. That would be no. 1 on my wish list
- Try Molly on both devices but yeah Signal should fix this.
- That's the biggest pain point with Signal and WhatsApp in my opinion. Telegram does it, but then of course it's much easier for them to support. Sharing content from my tablet is such a hassle.
  
  I use warpinator to share between my phone, laptop and desktop at home. It uses the local network.
  But yea, I use signal to share often, when I am out.

I quit using signal after they stopped supporting text messaging on Android. I had my whole family using it and that just evaporated overnight 😭
- Same. I just didn't have any use for signal after SMS removal. Yes I know SMS is insecure but I was stuck. Either you use a separate secure app and magically convince everyone else to use it whilst falling back onto a separate SMS app anyway (for those who don't use the encrypted app). Or alternatively you just have to use a mainstream app like Google Messenger with SMS plus RCS.
  At least when signal supported it I could migrate family to signal and then our communication would be encrypted and they could still message everyone else over SMS. It meant a large portion of my messages were encrypted. After SMS removal everyone I had on signal just quit so there was no one to communicate with. Trying to get people to use multiple apps was like herding cats.
- So your family used SMS? Sms is horrible, you should just not use it.
  If signal supported encrypted SMS that would be useful. DekuSMS is the only alternative here, as Silence is abandoned.
  But it makes sense that they dont want to pretend SMS was a good standard.
  Meanwhile, they use a phone number for anything, ironic
  
  My parents are approaching 60. I told them that the signal text message app would work a lot like iMessage if we both used it. And it did. It was great. For the other people that used signal, the experience was generally better. For other people that didn't, SMS was fine because that's how I was going to talk to them anyway.
  The thing is, My parents are not going to go to more than one app to communicate with other people. Since it no longer sends and receives text messages, it doesn't work with 99% of the other people in their lives.
  They own and run a pretty large business. There's no way that they're staying on more than one messaging platform. You can talk all day about what they "should" do, but at the end of the day just getting them to switch to another app was a huge lift for me. Not only did they switch back to regular SMS, I burned a lot of credibility with them on tech related stuff through no fault of my own.
  Repeat this story for the 90 or so people I had converted. There was no critical mass, so adoption evaporated overnight because my social graph is not enough to provide any sort of critical mass and adoption.
  
  They went from doing some communication secure with signal, to doing no secure communication, because of a rug pull of a genuinely convenient feature. The problem with communication apps is that it is almost impossible to convince anyone to use anything they haven't heard about, if it is not very convenient. They're not going to use a separate app just for communicating with a single person/a few people.
  Looks like RCS might be viable in the future when it works on both iphones and androids though. I just hope that it doesn't all go through googles servers.
  
  You do realise that mobile data is non-existent or limited in some counties right? Even here in New Zealand mobile data is still limited or expensive and the main communication, especially between people who don't know each other, is SMS. Some encryption is still better than nothing.

Native desktop version.
- What does that mean?
  
  First being able to use the service first-class on the desktop without registering with phone app first. Second is using native desktop technologies for the app, as Signal currently uses Electron so it is basically a website running in separate Chromium web browser without tabs.

This is just a random user doing a very unrepresentative poll back in June last year - I don't think it'll influence Flatpak adoption in any way.

I don’t care about the packaging format so much as about either having a Qt or GTK version or even just being able to open it in my browser.
- There is Flare. I haven't used it myself because it's not official and I don't know what it will do to e.g. my backups, but just sharing in case you're interested.
  
  I'll try it out and see how it works.
- Same, trying to use and a lot of javascript errors, reopening 3 times to show up
- Well, the .deb only works on Ubuntu and derivates so that doesnt really matter
  
  What do you mean?

The heck are you all talking about? The post says Linux and Flatpack, while everyone somehow is discussing why signal is not on f-driod.
How the heck is this related?
- Hahaha, any comment here makes no sense. This is just to help that guy have an actually somewhat useful survey, because Signal devs have very strange priorities

I prefer the deb that works. I get a signal.update almost every other day. I don't remember to update my flatpaks anywhere near that often. I also appreciate that it doesn't force me to include dependencies that are already met.
- You can update flatpaks automatically using systemd. Automatic updates are a thing and should be everywhere.
  https://discuss.kde.org/t/improving-metered-network-detection-and-usage/9287
  
  Automatic updates are a thing and should be everywhere.
  Absolutely not...most especially prior to production deployment. How else would someone see the change logs before hand or see/test if it would hurt their environment?

I'm thinking about abandoning Signal given the fact that they use AWS servers, still insist on requiring a phone number to use the APP and haven't yet implemented nicknames like Telegram
If you want absolute control over your communications, the only way is to self-host an XMPP server
- Your data is always encrypted before it reaches the AWS servers though, so it's not like Amazon has access to them. The phone number/nicknames is still in progress, but it's hard to do that securely, and given that their user base is really big now, they also need to make sure it works well for everybody.
  
  The concerns about AWS servers are around metadata. If metadata were not a concern, why not just use Whatsapp? They use the Signal protocol so messages are end-to-end encrypted by default, and most people already have it or are willing to download it as compared to Signal.
- Why not matrix?
  
  Matrix, the protocol, is quite nice.
  Element, the Matrix reference client, is too complicated IMO. If everyone were to only use FluffyChat, it would be great but then FluffyChat afaik doesn't implement every protocol feature and and you could end up in compatibility issues with Element users.
  Purely as a client I find Telegram the most convenient. I think more should copy their homework from there, heck perhaps post the client to Matrix.
  
  Both are great for chat! End of debate.
- Yeah Signal sucks a lot. It is poorly very convenient to use.
  XMPP had too little funding. But it could totally replace Signal, no question.
  SimpleX is also cool and truly privacy first

USERNAMES
- I'd love this but also temp sub users, I have it linked to my phone but I'd like to keep my real username and phone number private if using the app outside of my circle.

Personally I install it with pacman and generally avoid Flatpaks due to annoying problems I've had with it limiting filesystem access in the past. My biggest problem is that it seems to "forget" that I'm logged in if I don't use it regularly, meaning I have to regularly re-auth it on my desktop since I use it infrequently there.
- Flatpaks are generally made way to loosely. Always "not breaking" > "being secure".
  So this should not really be the case, drag&drop doesnt work yet, maybe copy-pasting files doesnt if the app cannot access that directory statically (you need to add an attachment from within the app, your file picker will open which is a "portal" which links that file into the apps container and thus allows the app to see it.)
  Everything else works normally, screensharing too
  
  That's an understandable goal, but as a user, breaking the user experience when I go to send a file to someone only to find that I can't even see it in some apps is a deal breaker. If the app can't be trusted to do that, I won't use it.
  
  Last time I installed slack through flatpack I couldn't send any files. Not through drag-and-drop, neither through the filepicker. The latter was just empty.
  Downloading files from slack also had awfully weird side-effects.
  Slack doesn't have an apt repo, so I download debs and updat manually. Maybe once half-a-year.
  If that's the experience I'd get on my signal through flatpack, I'd also rather be downloading manually. And I'd even compile from source rather than deal with that flatpack stuff.
- This is just so bad. I can't use anything snap/flatpack cuz it simply won't let me send a file. As it runs on it's on file subsystem and doesn't have access to anything else.
  On the other hand, an app that has access to my entire hard-drive is awfully insecure, right? So, what's the solution?
  in the meantime they could include an option "I allow this app to acess my whole $HOME, thanks, I need it cuz I am a user not a security researcher". Until then I'm not touching flatpack
  
  You can use Flatseat to config the permissions (including files) that Flatpaks have. It has a nice GUI

The post here is a link to an online survey being done by the Signal Community. Users need to follow the link to answer the survey if they wish (but it means creating yet another new account which I'm getting pretty tired of as I'm now passing over 900 different logins all with unique passwords etc ;-)
- Understandable, if you dont care just use a temporary email like altadress

https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/why_not_signal.md
- Oh look an essay full of fearmongering that adds nothing to the discussion. Thanks for contributing!
  
  Tbf it does suggest several alternatives.
  
  It's by one of the Lemmy founders btw
- those were some bullshit bullet points lmao
  
  They're actually very good points.
  The problem is that all the suggested alternatives are unworkable for adoption by the general public (they require stuff like Tor, self-hosting etc.)
- The appeal of signal is it is a good option (may have flaws but it is better than say discord) and it's pretty easy to get normies using it, all the other alternatives you mentioned are obscure and convincing normies such as friends and family to use them is much harder, and while signal isn't perfect, it's certainly better than whatsapp or other proprietary solutions
- So... not using Signal because it's based off a conspiracy theory that it's secretly funded by CIA?
  Well, let's stop using RSA and encryption because the most used secure crypto algorithms today were created by none other than the NSA!
  EDIT: None of the alternatives provided are good alternatives for Signal. Matrix is an extremely complicated protocol that lacks some features compared to normal IM apps (I use Matrix and the experience is quite close to a standard messaging app). XMPP is dead and has a very niche userbase. The others are not suitable for being a daily messaging app.
  Signal is a good alternative and while I do agree with some points, they are not bad enough to prevent you from using it (e.g. not having usernames).
- How do you read this without JS?
  
  Git clone
  Cd [the clone]
  [Text editor of choice] why_not_signal.md
  [Exit text editor]
  Cd ..
  Rm -rf [the clone]

I just use discord or WhatsApp on chromium in my Linux install xd

I generally use the latest available.
I tend not to use flatpack. I lost a few nights trying to get OBS plugins to work in flat pack. It would probably be fine for something as simple and straightforward as signal. But it's more or less nothing but disadvantage to end users. That said I'm sure it's a great savings for you guys.

I don't use signal because I care about anonymity. I dont use flat pak because I care about security
- Flatpak is generally very good for security. Especially considerino you can override some defaults, you can have fairly tight isolation.
  
  No, it doesn't even cryptographicly check signatures on packages when it downloads them lol
- Hahaha wtf?
  Its flatpak btw.

Luckily for me, I'm on an Ubuntu derivative. So apt upgrade just does it. Sorry, OP, works for me in my preferred way, I don't need any flatpacks. Let's hope once they do one they keep building .debs nonetheless.
- Flatpaks work just as well. It is an electron app, that causes all the bloat. Signal is modern and everything apart drag&drop and maybe a tray icon (havent tried that) works.

116 comments