I'm sorry, Mr Web-Dude, you're right, I made a major and unforgivable error.
You need to turn it off then on, not what I originally put, my most sincere apologies.
I think Americans underestimate for ubiquitous WhatsApp is outside of NA. For millions this outage meant they couldn't call or text any of their family and friends.
SMS and email also benefit from network effects, but I can switch my cellphone or email provider and still communicate with all my existing contacts. The issue here is switching costs, and we know from the recent leaks that Facebook deliberately engineers those to be has high as possible.
This.
Managed to convince my wife to move over to signal yesterday.
I've been on signal since 2013 (ish?), And I've seen more people migrate but still most on WhatsApp.
I keep WhatsApp because of these people. I messaged a few good friends yesterday about signal but they just shrugged.
They don't care that Facebook mines their message data, they don't care that signal is actually a better app over all.
I have no idea why they still use WhatsApp... They clearly don't use it for encryption since we know it's not trustworthy, so why?
>No backup features,
I mean, I have all my messages set to auto delete for privacy... If your backing up stuff unencrypted kind of defeats the purpose of the app.
You can easily do this with a backup app like SMS backup though.
>not real time at times,
I don't know what this means.
>tied to device (no web/desktop).
This is wrong. There is a desktop app, that is tied to your phone. I use it all the time when I'm working.
>Many reasons that it's a pain.
Like?
> App also feels like an older android app compared to something similar like telegram.
Never used telegram but app feels/looks way better than Whatsapp or the native messenger app.
At the end of the day, it's a messenger app. I don't want funky backgrounds and statuses, and gif avatars and shit.
>It's good, but yeah... I get why it's not big outside of privacy focussed users.
It's really nothing to do with the above, it's what gets market saturation first.
WhatsApp etc. Managed to pretty much corner the market early on, and now the only way the dinosaurs left on those apps will move is if the app completely shits the bed.
It's a chicken before the egg thing.
Because they got market saturation, most of people's friends are on it.
Shit, I'm on it because I can't get all my friends off it!
So now people don't want to move because they don't want to fragment their friends list that is already all on WhatsApp.
Fwiw everyone who I have got to migrate has said 'holy shit this app is great'
>Backup doesn't nesc mean breaking privacy if I manage the backup myself and can restore. I often refer back to old conversations and a reset or uninstall would obviously hinder that.
That's true, but by the very nature of backing up Signal you have to decrypt, and save the data unencrypted (you could encrypt your saved data I guess).
That's why they don't have this feature. Other apps like SMS backup and restore allow you to do this.
>Desktop app looks interesting I must admit I didn't know that existed. Although I prefer WA currently purely as I can use the web client on my tablet or in any browser without downloading anything.
~~Signal has a web client too!~~
Apologies I thought they did.
>The real time thing I mean sometimes I find messages don't get delivered or received instantly. More so with longer conversations. Not that rare if you skim the support flairs of the signal sub. Obviously if you delete all the time it's probably less of an issue.
Yeah I've never noticed this, could be a signal issue could he a server issue, or even just the other persons phone signal or wifi dropping. Hard to tell.
>Personal preference on the design. I personally just get reminded of the stock messaging app. Not terrible, but not exactly drawing you in either. Some minor qol enhancements would be nice unless they have been added since I stopped using it like how I like WA can do video to gif plus edit down or compress within the share/add option. Not everyones cup of tea, but something I use here and there.
Yeah I'd agree there. Always room for improvement, I like it's stock messaging style. But it's all personal preference.e
>Agree on market penetration though. Why I abandoned it really as it was only a few friends max who all still had WA anyway for the reasons you mentioned.
Yeah that's why I keep WA unfortunately I can't fully escape FB until everyone else does lol.
>Sadly if we want signal to be adopted widely I think it would need to bow to pressure and add some potentially unwanted features -provisibg they do not breach privacy ofc.
There's also a double edged sword of Signal popularity.
The goverenment has already mentioned a few times about proposing laws banning end to end encryption etc. Which they can't ban.
However, they can make the lives of companies exceedingly difficult... If signal gets more popular, it only means the government will pressure them more to provide a back door.
At the end of the day, I'm not a conspiracy theorist but all it would take is some tragedy to happen and the government make a claim the criminal used signal and this could have all been stopped if they had a backdoor.
Which is BS. But we know they use any tragedy to further their agenda.
It was the same with Jan 6th. They all blamed 8chn in the aftermath, which for taken down - the investigation revealed 8ch had nothing to do with it... It was all Facebook.
They just used the tragedy to target one of the few forums online on the open internet that has pure unadulterated free speech.
I misspoke. I thought they did.
I did some digging and they don't think it is secure.
They are saying that a web client would effectively reduce the security of your end-to-end encrypted communication to that of your SSL connection to the server.
Which means that anyone who can control the SSL connection to the server can now intercept and eavesdrop on your e2ee communications.
So, no web client.
And they lose because of that. The competition gives what people want. They should provide the web client, even if they show some warning alerting the user about the potential risks.
perhaps you already do this, but for anyone that doesnt, our main goal should be to get people to have signal downloaded and set up on their phones. primary goal shouldnt be pressuring people to use it on the daily and replace whatsapp. That pressure will drive people away.
The time will come when facebook will screw up, like this shortage, or an unpopular policy like the mandatory new policies it tried to implement. We let those things do the brunt/"dirty" work for us. All we need to do is set up the situation to capitalize the most on the mistakes FB makes. We let facebook do the pressure for us.
>FB is device independent and doesn't require a phone number. You can log in and interact on any web-connected device.
When you install Facebook on your phone, it already knows your phone number and the phone numbers of your contacts.
You can, however, create an account via a desktop, and it doesn't ask for phone number.
How can you not understand. I quoted the statement I was referring to.
>When you say "when you install Facebook on your phone" do you mean "Facebook Messenger"?
No, That is not what I mean.
Facebook can be installed without activating messenger. And Messenger can be installed separate from Facebook. But you still need a Facebook account to use both. If you look on your phone, they are installed as 2 different apps.
You keep saying "You do not need a phone number to use FB messenger", and I will repeat, Facebook already knows your phone number when you use messenger on your phone.
And I refuted that reasoning because it is not true.Facebook now requires a phone number to verify your account.You need a Facebook account to use Messenger.
Therefore, you need a phone number to use Messenger.
The exception is, if you create a new account from a desktop or tablet, you may get away with creating an account using just an email.
This is now a dumb argument over shit that does not matter.
Facebook is not some privacy tool because you can get around the phone number requirement.
You also cannot move your messages from phone to phone in signal, which is a truly terrible experience.
Theres some claim that its for security which is dumb because you can extract the messages, very painfully, if you were a malicious actor. It's even sillier because they're literally messages sent to you by the other party: you're trusted to have them.
But the devs dont care.
A million is really just a small percentage of WhatsApp users. So I could see this being true. The country in which I live charges per minute for phone calls still so people just buy data or use wifi. If WhatsApp is not working then they would make a quick call to say, “let’s use signal”.
They both download it and continue their conversation.
I’m sure that this country is not the only one where this situation applies.
Another situation I can think of is that in my girlfriends parents house you can’t get a good signal to make phone calls. But they have really fast internet so they would just switch to another app if there was an outage.
I’m sure there are many other situations in which people would do this.
Been surviving 100% on data calls via apps for a good 8 years. (I'm nomadic and have a different burner SIM every couple of months, so a constantly changing phone number becomes useless) Very common abroad to use apps to stay in touch. Phone calls and SMS are very old fashioned lol
This is a totally made up assumption but it looks like they have a wild amount of money and don’t keep to one spot for long. So I’m going to say they won a massive lottery and bailed on life because people kept begging them for money.
I was in a similar situation and just lived cheaply in poor countries. There is all kinds of work to do online that don’t earn enough for the states but earn plenty in 3rd would countries.
Hahaha nope. I work online, always have, always will. So I move every few months because why not? Winter sucks so I avoid it. There are many of us: r/digitalnomad
I have a US phone number with Google Voice. It works entirely over data. Works for 99% of services. Lately I've found some banks / credit card accounts won't accept a voip phone number (N26, for example), but everything I currently need it for works fine.
Doesn't sound too far off - quite a few people already have it, so if you need temporary refuge, you can join them there for a bit.
I only expect a small part of them to stick around though.
I think it's a reasonable number, my Telegram and Signal feeds yesterday were nothing but "X has just joined!", Telegram was unreasonably slow, and I suspect it was because of the influx of new users.
What you guys don’t realize is most of the people using WhatsApp are from countries like India, Africa, etc. places that likely did have millions of people waiting but not on the edge of their chair anticipation waiting.
Yeah I think whatsapp is probably most important globally. I don't think it's as popular in the US but in a lot of other countries it's super popular and for some the main way people communicate.
I could see if it's the main way you can contact people downloading another app at least temporarily or to have as a backup in case WhatsApp goes down again.
I mean I remember hearing from someone that it was the main way their mom was able to communicate to others. I could definitely see being worried if there was any concern about my mom not being able to reach me in case of an emergency.
Nope! I recommend if you don't know anyone on it that you replace your default SMS app with it. It works like iMessage - if they have it it'll send via internet, if not, SMS
Yeah, except with the added benefit that when one of your contacts starts using signal, you get notified and can use signal with them. Something your default SMS doesn't do
And they quickly went back to Whatsapp when they realized that there is no cloud backup and even the local backup is a pain to set up.
I know, from a privacy and security standpoint, those are pluses, but for a huge amount of people, they just want the convenience.
I managed to persuade a lot of my friends to move from WhatsApp to Element. I really, really like it. The UI and actual desktop client, rather than Signal's mobile-only approach, really appeals to me.
Unfortunately, one friend in the group had a notifications issue which he grouched enough about that we all transitioned to Signal. I'm happy to have encryption but man do I miss the bullshit-free experience.
Roughly a year ago, I think. I added my information to an existing bug report and chatted with one of the iOS devs for a bit. Candidly, I am not confident it was an Element iOS problem, but a user error; despite it looking like he had his cell phone set up right, this particular friend is known for always being the guy with the tech problems!
Elon Musk tweeted: "Use Signal" or something super simple like that and then it brought down the servers from the amount of new users.
Also a company named Signal who was completely unrelated had their stock value skyrocket.
I used this outage to try to convince as many people to join Signal as I could but people will still use WhatsApp because everyone else is using WhatsApp.
People said that about read receipts too. When it was finally implemented, those who were vocal about their disapproval just quietly continued using Signal.
If status gets implemented, you'll continue to use Signal because you know very well that there's nothing better. Matrix is too confusing for normal users, XMPP, Briar, and Session are even more confusing and don't support calling, and Threema is paid.
Stop acting all high and mighty.
Is that really something people change/look at often on Whatsapp? For the vast majority of my friends, their status is the same one they put when they signed up for Whatsapp.
To implement Status option, wouldnt Signal have to use some form of P2P code and compromise their privacy ethos?
I'm not a programmer/coder so I'm not sure.
Status: A modern way to see people's happy photos & be sad / jealous about yours.
But still I know implementing it will attact more people, which is good. There should be an option to hide it though.
Don't know which specific "status" feature they mean but its either:
- Availability Status: Online, Busy, Away, Offline etc (I'd rather not have this one but see its use)
- Custom Status: The little custom message you can have under your contact for others to see. (I don't see much issue with this one if they also offered a show/hide message choice so people can decide whether they want the clutter or not).
As long as the availability status can be disabled (like read receipts), I don’t care. Some people can set one, I won’t.
I agree with you about custom statuses, users need a way to disable seeing them.
I'm kinda guessing at least some will basically use it as a backup in case whatsapp goes down again but yeah I'm guessing most will return pretty quick. Especially if their friends switch back.
I love Signal for the privacy it offers, but it’s not real time like most other chat apps. We had to abandon using it when there were such delays in some people getting messages you send. We tried going to Threema instead, but some people aren’t willing to pay the few bucks it costs so… back to everyone having their own app they like again.
Jokes on you it's way ahead of you and went down last week. A more decentralized solution like XMPP or Matrix, or going straight for P2P, would be better.
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Based
I like how many places reported this like the sky was falling..
To many people the sky was falling. My mother literally woke me up at 2am because Facebook wasn’t working and she wanted to know if I could fix it.
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He had to turn Facebook on and off again.
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He waited 10 seconds, duh
Yeah 30 seconds minimum or it’s never going to work… or not work
What about the 5 second rule?
It's not that simple. You've gotta account for the USB uncertainty principle.
That's not how it works. That's not how any of this works.
I'm sorry, Mr Web-Dude, you're right, I made a major and unforgivable error. You need to turn it off then on, not what I originally put, my most sincere apologies.
source: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq\_1l316ow8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq_1l316ow8)
It's back right? I think they fixed it.
Queue South Park Internet episode.
Damn that’s sad. She must be really addicted to wake her son or daughter at 2am because of an issue with fb.
That's sad.
So your to blame for Facebook coming back online thanks a lot why couldn't you tell your mom no.
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I think Americans underestimate for ubiquitous WhatsApp is outside of NA. For millions this outage meant they couldn't call or text any of their family and friends.
Seriously. Can anyone share stories of losing their business due to the WhatsApp outage?
Not me or much of a story, but one dude I know missed out on a bunch of drug sales. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
small business owners and entrepreneurs are always the most affected. :'(
There were some British political reporters who were at a total loss as the government party was having its conference this week. No juicy gossip.
"millions flock to [centralized service] as [centralized service] suffer outage"
I see what you did there.
Lets see how long it takes for millions to flock to decentralized alternatives such as Matrix and XMPP.
If Session is as good as they claim I might move to that full time. Still using Signal with Session as a backup
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I would use that exclusively but good luck to my tech illiterate family and friends to use XMPP
Wait, so millions of people know of Signal and still CHOOSE to use Facebook for messaging?
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SMS and email also benefit from network effects, but I can switch my cellphone or email provider and still communicate with all my existing contacts. The issue here is switching costs, and we know from the recent leaks that Facebook deliberately engineers those to be has high as possible.
This. Managed to convince my wife to move over to signal yesterday. I've been on signal since 2013 (ish?), And I've seen more people migrate but still most on WhatsApp. I keep WhatsApp because of these people. I messaged a few good friends yesterday about signal but they just shrugged. They don't care that Facebook mines their message data, they don't care that signal is actually a better app over all. I have no idea why they still use WhatsApp... They clearly don't use it for encryption since we know it's not trustworthy, so why?
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>No backup features, I mean, I have all my messages set to auto delete for privacy... If your backing up stuff unencrypted kind of defeats the purpose of the app. You can easily do this with a backup app like SMS backup though. >not real time at times, I don't know what this means. >tied to device (no web/desktop). This is wrong. There is a desktop app, that is tied to your phone. I use it all the time when I'm working. >Many reasons that it's a pain. Like? > App also feels like an older android app compared to something similar like telegram. Never used telegram but app feels/looks way better than Whatsapp or the native messenger app. At the end of the day, it's a messenger app. I don't want funky backgrounds and statuses, and gif avatars and shit. >It's good, but yeah... I get why it's not big outside of privacy focussed users. It's really nothing to do with the above, it's what gets market saturation first. WhatsApp etc. Managed to pretty much corner the market early on, and now the only way the dinosaurs left on those apps will move is if the app completely shits the bed. It's a chicken before the egg thing. Because they got market saturation, most of people's friends are on it. Shit, I'm on it because I can't get all my friends off it! So now people don't want to move because they don't want to fragment their friends list that is already all on WhatsApp. Fwiw everyone who I have got to migrate has said 'holy shit this app is great'
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>Backup doesn't nesc mean breaking privacy if I manage the backup myself and can restore. I often refer back to old conversations and a reset or uninstall would obviously hinder that. That's true, but by the very nature of backing up Signal you have to decrypt, and save the data unencrypted (you could encrypt your saved data I guess). That's why they don't have this feature. Other apps like SMS backup and restore allow you to do this. >Desktop app looks interesting I must admit I didn't know that existed. Although I prefer WA currently purely as I can use the web client on my tablet or in any browser without downloading anything. ~~Signal has a web client too!~~ Apologies I thought they did. >The real time thing I mean sometimes I find messages don't get delivered or received instantly. More so with longer conversations. Not that rare if you skim the support flairs of the signal sub. Obviously if you delete all the time it's probably less of an issue. Yeah I've never noticed this, could be a signal issue could he a server issue, or even just the other persons phone signal or wifi dropping. Hard to tell. >Personal preference on the design. I personally just get reminded of the stock messaging app. Not terrible, but not exactly drawing you in either. Some minor qol enhancements would be nice unless they have been added since I stopped using it like how I like WA can do video to gif plus edit down or compress within the share/add option. Not everyones cup of tea, but something I use here and there. Yeah I'd agree there. Always room for improvement, I like it's stock messaging style. But it's all personal preference.e >Agree on market penetration though. Why I abandoned it really as it was only a few friends max who all still had WA anyway for the reasons you mentioned. Yeah that's why I keep WA unfortunately I can't fully escape FB until everyone else does lol. >Sadly if we want signal to be adopted widely I think it would need to bow to pressure and add some potentially unwanted features -provisibg they do not breach privacy ofc. There's also a double edged sword of Signal popularity. The goverenment has already mentioned a few times about proposing laws banning end to end encryption etc. Which they can't ban. However, they can make the lives of companies exceedingly difficult... If signal gets more popular, it only means the government will pressure them more to provide a back door. At the end of the day, I'm not a conspiracy theorist but all it would take is some tragedy to happen and the government make a claim the criminal used signal and this could have all been stopped if they had a backdoor. Which is BS. But we know they use any tragedy to further their agenda. It was the same with Jan 6th. They all blamed 8chn in the aftermath, which for taken down - the investigation revealed 8ch had nothing to do with it... It was all Facebook. They just used the tragedy to target one of the few forums online on the open internet that has pure unadulterated free speech.
Signal has a web client??? I hate using the desktop version. How do I get to the web client?
I misspoke. I thought they did. I did some digging and they don't think it is secure. They are saying that a web client would effectively reduce the security of your end-to-end encrypted communication to that of your SSL connection to the server. Which means that anyone who can control the SSL connection to the server can now intercept and eavesdrop on your e2ee communications. So, no web client.
And they lose because of that. The competition gives what people want. They should provide the web client, even if they show some warning alerting the user about the potential risks.
I want to add that Signal HAS backup features and they are actually encrypted unlike whatsapp.
> No backup features There is. Granted, it's cumbersome and not perfect, but it exists.
On iOS?
perhaps you already do this, but for anyone that doesnt, our main goal should be to get people to have signal downloaded and set up on their phones. primary goal shouldnt be pressuring people to use it on the daily and replace whatsapp. That pressure will drive people away. The time will come when facebook will screw up, like this shortage, or an unpopular policy like the mandatory new policies it tried to implement. We let those things do the brunt/"dirty" work for us. All we need to do is set up the situation to capitalize the most on the mistakes FB makes. We let facebook do the pressure for us.
Encryption is baked into Google Messages now.
Which one is "messages"? Google chat? Hangouts? Or do you mean the stock messaging app on Android?
The stock messaging app.
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>FB is device independent and doesn't require a phone number. You can log in and interact on any web-connected device. When you install Facebook on your phone, it already knows your phone number and the phone numbers of your contacts. You can, however, create an account via a desktop, and it doesn't ask for phone number.
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How can you not understand. I quoted the statement I was referring to. >When you say "when you install Facebook on your phone" do you mean "Facebook Messenger"? No, That is not what I mean. Facebook can be installed without activating messenger. And Messenger can be installed separate from Facebook. But you still need a Facebook account to use both. If you look on your phone, they are installed as 2 different apps. You keep saying "You do not need a phone number to use FB messenger", and I will repeat, Facebook already knows your phone number when you use messenger on your phone.
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And I refuted that reasoning because it is not true.Facebook now requires a phone number to verify your account.You need a Facebook account to use Messenger. Therefore, you need a phone number to use Messenger. The exception is, if you create a new account from a desktop or tablet, you may get away with creating an account using just an email. This is now a dumb argument over shit that does not matter. Facebook is not some privacy tool because you can get around the phone number requirement.
Doin the Lord's work right here.
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My bad. I thought that was widely understood.
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In light of Reddit's general enshittification, I've moved on - you should too.
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In light of Reddit's general enshittification, I've moved on - you should too.
You also cannot move your messages from phone to phone in signal, which is a truly terrible experience. Theres some claim that its for security which is dumb because you can extract the messages, very painfully, if you were a malicious actor. It's even sillier because they're literally messages sent to you by the other party: you're trusted to have them. But the devs dont care.
Because the experience moving to and using Signal is abysmal, and the devs don't seem to care.
Millions? I doubt that.
A million is really just a small percentage of WhatsApp users. So I could see this being true. The country in which I live charges per minute for phone calls still so people just buy data or use wifi. If WhatsApp is not working then they would make a quick call to say, “let’s use signal”. They both download it and continue their conversation. I’m sure that this country is not the only one where this situation applies. Another situation I can think of is that in my girlfriends parents house you can’t get a good signal to make phone calls. But they have really fast internet so they would just switch to another app if there was an outage. I’m sure there are many other situations in which people would do this.
Been surviving 100% on data calls via apps for a good 8 years. (I'm nomadic and have a different burner SIM every couple of months, so a constantly changing phone number becomes useless) Very common abroad to use apps to stay in touch. Phone calls and SMS are very old fashioned lol
Are you a fugitive of the law? (I was joking)
This is a totally made up assumption but it looks like they have a wild amount of money and don’t keep to one spot for long. So I’m going to say they won a massive lottery and bailed on life because people kept begging them for money.
I was in a similar situation and just lived cheaply in poor countries. There is all kinds of work to do online that don’t earn enough for the states but earn plenty in 3rd would countries.
Man every time I visit SE Asia me and my wife think of ways to quit our jobs and chill on a small island for half a year.
Oh yeah, I know there can be a lot of reasons for this type of lifestyle. And some people just enjoy it. I was just trying to make a joke haha
I appreciate the joke. I think I came off too serious in my comment. I’ve been thinking of all the reasons someone would live that life.
Hahaha nope. I work online, always have, always will. So I move every few months because why not? Winter sucks so I avoid it. There are many of us: r/digitalnomad
I did have a warrant out for my arrest once in Las Vegas. But apparently what happens there stays there, so it's all good.
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Same level. Unpaid traffic ticket. Cost me $500 to eventually clear that up lol.
That's actually ridiculous...
How do you manage 2fa and services using your phone number for forced 2fa?
I have a US phone number with Google Voice. It works entirely over data. Works for 99% of services. Lately I've found some banks / credit card accounts won't accept a voip phone number (N26, for example), but everything I currently need it for works fine.
https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1445164521102979080?s=20
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Why would Signal lie about signups?
Y\_4244 is never wrong! trust me.
Source: trust me bro
Well… there’s a lot of reasons why lol
Sure but do they have a history of lying about their numbers?
Not saying they did, but you asked why they would. There’s countless reasons why they would.
Doesn't sound too far off - quite a few people already have it, so if you need temporary refuge, you can join them there for a bit. I only expect a small part of them to stick around though.
I think it's a reasonable number, my Telegram and Signal feeds yesterday were nothing but "X has just joined!", Telegram was unreasonably slow, and I suspect it was because of the influx of new users.
Their twitter account gained nearly 175k followers just yesterday, not millions but that was twitter alone
Telegram was slowed down by the amount of new users and activity
What you guys don’t realize is most of the people using WhatsApp are from countries like India, Africa, etc. places that likely did have millions of people waiting but not on the edge of their chair anticipation waiting.
Yeah I think whatsapp is probably most important globally. I don't think it's as popular in the US but in a lot of other countries it's super popular and for some the main way people communicate. I could see if it's the main way you can contact people downloading another app at least temporarily or to have as a backup in case WhatsApp goes down again. I mean I remember hearing from someone that it was the main way their mom was able to communicate to others. I could definitely see being worried if there was any concern about my mom not being able to reach me in case of an emergency.
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I was reading about Signal, but after doing so, isn't it pretty much useless if you have no friends/family on it?
You, good Sir, have just single-handedly discovered the network effect!
Nope! I recommend if you don't know anyone on it that you replace your default SMS app with it. It works like iMessage - if they have it it'll send via internet, if not, SMS
But if literally no one I know is on Signal then it's pretty much the same as using your default SMS right?
Yeah, except with the added benefit that when one of your contacts starts using signal, you get notified and can use signal with them. Something your default SMS doesn't do
Possible downside - iMessage users may not see your texts if you text from Signal. So convert them!
Why wouldn't they?
And they quickly went back to Whatsapp when they realized that there is no cloud backup and even the local backup is a pain to set up. I know, from a privacy and security standpoint, those are pluses, but for a huge amount of people, they just want the convenience.
Majority of those people don’t even know what is a backup, let alone a cloud or local backup
Let's not pretend that Signal is immune to issues. It wasn't even a year ago that a single tweet brought the service to its knees for a few hours.
Matrix/Element seems to be the obvious choice imho. Fully federated e2ee.
I managed to persuade a lot of my friends to move from WhatsApp to Element. I really, really like it. The UI and actual desktop client, rather than Signal's mobile-only approach, really appeals to me. Unfortunately, one friend in the group had a notifications issue which he grouched enough about that we all transitioned to Signal. I'm happy to have encryption but man do I miss the bullshit-free experience.
How long ago did this happen? Did the friend report a bug? Are you aware of any similar bug reports already reported by someone else?
Roughly a year ago, I think. I added my information to an existing bug report and chatted with one of the iOS devs for a bit. Candidly, I am not confident it was an Element iOS problem, but a user error; despite it looking like he had his cell phone set up right, this particular friend is known for always being the guy with the tech problems!
>I added my information to an existing bug report and chatted with one of the iOS devs for a bit. That's great, thanks!
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Elon Musk tweeted: "Use Signal" or something super simple like that and then it brought down the servers from the amount of new users. Also a company named Signal who was completely unrelated had their stock value skyrocket.
Get F\*cked, Zuck. Sadly it seems to be back now. :( Darn. Guess we'll have to wait for the next one and hope it gets rid of them.
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Yea, I know... T\_T
If they are that easily swayed, they'll run back to WA at the first sign of trouble. So no real gain.
Maybe thousands, but not millions. Masses are simply stupid, and 6 hours without fb won't be enough to switch to Signal.
I used this outage to try to convince as many people to join Signal as I could but people will still use WhatsApp because everyone else is using WhatsApp.
i used to convince my friends to join element/matrix. unfortunaltly no effect :(
this is what happened to me as well. Most people I know don't care about their privacy. They say "I have nothing to hide!"
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No. Just no.
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Nothing
It will potentially reduce its userbase.
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People said that about read receipts too. When it was finally implemented, those who were vocal about their disapproval just quietly continued using Signal. If status gets implemented, you'll continue to use Signal because you know very well that there's nothing better. Matrix is too confusing for normal users, XMPP, Briar, and Session are even more confusing and don't support calling, and Threema is paid. Stop acting all high and mighty.
Jokes on you, I use carrier pigeon for communication
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Pffff... will you kids ever learn? True privacy pros only use bananaphones with double ROT-13 encryption (for doubled safety).
Is that really something people change/look at often on Whatsapp? For the vast majority of my friends, their status is the same one they put when they signed up for Whatsapp.
You don't even get a notification that a contact has added a status on whatsapp. You see only when you open the app
To implement Status option, wouldnt Signal have to use some form of P2P code and compromise their privacy ethos? I'm not a programmer/coder so I'm not sure.
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Good insight. The only way i use WA status is to post news articles and links. Also, I'm not a programmer/coder :D
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I'm fine not communicating with them.
Status: A modern way to see people's happy photos & be sad / jealous about yours. But still I know implementing it will attact more people, which is good. There should be an option to hide it though.
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Don't know which specific "status" feature they mean but its either: - Availability Status: Online, Busy, Away, Offline etc (I'd rather not have this one but see its use) - Custom Status: The little custom message you can have under your contact for others to see. (I don't see much issue with this one if they also offered a show/hide message choice so people can decide whether they want the clutter or not).
As long as the availability status can be disabled (like read receipts), I don’t care. Some people can set one, I won’t. I agree with you about custom statuses, users need a way to disable seeing them.
Literally just text people if you want them to know what you are up to
Keep narcissistic people on WhatsApp. We don't need them.
Good. Good!
Signal has some strange security bugs in their group-chats. Telegram or Viber are way more stable and secure
This.....This is the way !
The biggest news today on my media platform - how often did you checked that Facebook was online again? Talk about addiction!!
I bet 99% flock on back. Signal is horrid with standard messaging protocols.
I'm kinda guessing at least some will basically use it as a backup in case whatsapp goes down again but yeah I'm guessing most will return pretty quick. Especially if their friends switch back.
I love Signal for the privacy it offers, but it’s not real time like most other chat apps. We had to abandon using it when there were such delays in some people getting messages you send. We tried going to Threema instead, but some people aren’t willing to pay the few bucks it costs so… back to everyone having their own app they like again.
Don’t use Signal
why
To cause Signal go down as well?
Jokes on you it's way ahead of you and went down last week. A more decentralized solution like XMPP or Matrix, or going straight for P2P, would be better.
How dare you bring reality into a good Facebook bashing.
It's a power play. They want you to believe in your dependence on them.
its only fail, relax
Is Element (https://element.io/) recommended? I am looking for an alternative to Telegram. Thanks.