5 ms·

Would you mind elaborating on why Signal was sub-par? I use it as my main messenger and find it to be fine. There have been issues where older clients couldn’t

by majjam 5y ago

Would you mind elaborating on why Signal was sub-par? I use it as my main messenger and find it to be fine. There have been issues where older clients couldn’t receive messages and needed to upgrade their phones to fix. And migrating to a new phone is fragile, but everyday messaging seems ok to me. Edit: honestly the challenge is getting other people to install it

Valkhyr 5y ago
Can't speak for the poster you are responding to, but as someone who also uses Signal for a portion of my social circle, here's my big one: Signal is tied to a phone number, so I can't use it from multiple devices/platforms (unless I want to show up as a different entity from each of them). This alone is the reason why I personally would not freely choose Signal, and only use it because some of my friends insist :-\
- scubbo 5y ago
  I have Signal installed on my laptop, and it works perfectly. Do you mean multiple mobile devices? I guess that's probably true, and I'm sorry to hear that that's a limitation for you. That said - isn't that limitation also true of every other major messaging application. I only know of SMS and WhatsApp - what alternative do you prefer?
  - posguy 5y ago
    Signal on paired devices works really poorly if you are a heavy Signal user (eg: 5+ daily active groups that are media heavy, over 5GB database size). The Signal servers rate limit you severely, causing it to take tens of minutes (or sometimes half an hour) to catch up to where your friends are at. Brief losses of connectivity are near-unrecoverable without closing the app on either my laptop or Pinebook, and worst yet the read/unread status of reactions to your messages is not synced across to your phone. Signal also just killed custom emojis for reactions to messages, by refusing to display them. Now my message history shows I have reactions on a message I sent, but I can't even see the darn reaction. Large rooms (50+ members) in Signal will get your client rate limited quickly, preventing you from interacting with anyone on Signal in a timely fashion. Element/Matrix comparatively just works across my laptops, desktop, tablet (somewhere Signal refuses to work) and phone. It uses a nearly identical tech stack for the client (Electron with SQLite) but it never seems to need to sync messages from the server, lag behind, fail to connect to the server or fail to send messages. This is with me being in a ton of active rooms on Mozilla's Matrix, bridged rooms with IRC and Discord, and my friends shitposting at incredible rates. The chat ecosystem is moving, Signal seems to have veered off course :C
    - scubbo 5y ago
      Good to know, thanks! I have a mental disconnect between "1-1/small group chat clients" (for which Signal works perfectly for me) and "group chat clients" (for which Slack works well for work. Discord is some of the buggiest and least-usable software I've ever used, but I appear to be in the minority there). To be clear, I'm not trying to shift the goalposts here - it's very reasonable to expect Signal to be good at both, I've just never done so (which is why I didn't know about those issues, and why I only listed SMS and WhatsApp as competitors). I definitely see that those issues would be irritating! I've never heard of Matrix, I'll give it a look - thanks!
- dmak 5y ago
  You can use it on the desktop and it syncs fine. Have you looked into it recently?
  - nvr219 5y ago
    I have. It doesn't sync message history. I have the desktop client on one computer, and if I set up the desktop client on my other computer (the one I'm on right now) it won't bring over all the past messages - it'll be like I'm starting fresh.
    - ViViDboarder 5y ago
      Yes. Because your desktop has a new private key and can’t access the other messages. This is the same if you log into a new device with iMessage.
- zanny 5y ago
  Matrix / Element should have a comparable feature set to signal for almost all use cases and supports traditional username/password.
  - null0pointer 5y ago
    Unfortunately Matrix still has the issue of key sharing between clients. If you want to read previously sent messages when you log into a new client for the first time you have to do the key sharing dance with one of your existing clients. For me it's a little annoying, but I find it an acceptable tradeoff. However I could easily see how for many people this would be a dealbreaker.
    - andrewaylett 5y ago
      Key backup makes this a lot easier, assuming you've saved the recovery key in your password manager. But it's still one of those frustrating points where it defeats the purpose of the exercise for the provider to be able to recover an account (or at least the content and trust within an account) for someone who's locked out.
js2 5y ago
It's been a while. I should probably re-install it and give it a fresh chance. My recollection is that the UI was sluggish and that the app was poorly integrated with iOS (e.g. I don't think it had a sharing extension).
- posguy 5y ago
  Signal iOS is still underwhelming, on Android it has some really nice features that make it a good SMS client and SMS replacement, but alas no one (outside Apple) is permitted to do that on iOS. Element/Matrix might be of more interest, it syncs history instantly, has good room support (unlike Signal), bridges in Discord and IRC quite well, and has a ton of interesting native rooms from Mozilla Matrix, Pine64, Gitter and such
  - domano 5y ago
    Wow i wanted to switch to iPhone later this year, but i did not know this. I exclusively use signal as my messaging app and this means i will not buy an iPhone i guess! Thanks for preventing a costly mistake :)

by majjam 5y ago

Valkhyr 5y ago

Can't speak for the poster you are responding to, but as someone who also uses Signal for a portion of my social circle, here's my big one: Signal is tied to a phone number, so I can't use it from multiple devices/platforms (unless I want to show up as a different entity from each of them). This alone is the reason why I personally would not freely choose Signal, and only use it because some of my friends insist :-\

scubbo 5y ago
I have Signal installed on my laptop, and it works perfectly. Do you mean multiple mobile devices? I guess that's probably true, and I'm sorry to hear that that's a limitation for you. That said - isn't that limitation also true of every other major messaging application. I only know of SMS and WhatsApp - what alternative do you prefer?
- posguy 5y ago
  Signal on paired devices works really poorly if you are a heavy Signal user (eg: 5+ daily active groups that are media heavy, over 5GB database size). The Signal servers rate limit you severely, causing it to take tens of minutes (or sometimes half an hour) to catch up to where your friends are at. Brief losses of connectivity are near-unrecoverable without closing the app on either my laptop or Pinebook, and worst yet the read/unread status of reactions to your messages is not synced across to your phone. Signal also just killed custom emojis for reactions to messages, by refusing to display them. Now my message history shows I have reactions on a message I sent, but I can't even see the darn reaction. Large rooms (50+ members) in Signal will get your client rate limited quickly, preventing you from interacting with anyone on Signal in a timely fashion. Element/Matrix comparatively just works across my laptops, desktop, tablet (somewhere Signal refuses to work) and phone. It uses a nearly identical tech stack for the client (Electron with SQLite) but it never seems to need to sync messages from the server, lag behind, fail to connect to the server or fail to send messages. This is with me being in a ton of active rooms on Mozilla's Matrix, bridged rooms with IRC and Discord, and my friends shitposting at incredible rates. The chat ecosystem is moving, Signal seems to have veered off course :C
  - scubbo 5y ago
    Good to know, thanks! I have a mental disconnect between "1-1/small group chat clients" (for which Signal works perfectly for me) and "group chat clients" (for which Slack works well for work. Discord is some of the buggiest and least-usable software I've ever used, but I appear to be in the minority there). To be clear, I'm not trying to shift the goalposts here - it's very reasonable to expect Signal to be good at both, I've just never done so (which is why I didn't know about those issues, and why I only listed SMS and WhatsApp as competitors). I definitely see that those issues would be irritating! I've never heard of Matrix, I'll give it a look - thanks!
dmak 5y ago
You can use it on the desktop and it syncs fine. Have you looked into it recently?
- nvr219 5y ago
  I have. It doesn't sync message history. I have the desktop client on one computer, and if I set up the desktop client on my other computer (the one I'm on right now) it won't bring over all the past messages - it'll be like I'm starting fresh.
  - ViViDboarder 5y ago
    Yes. Because your desktop has a new private key and can’t access the other messages. This is the same if you log into a new device with iMessage.
zanny 5y ago
Matrix / Element should have a comparable feature set to signal for almost all use cases and supports traditional username/password.
- null0pointer 5y ago
  Unfortunately Matrix still has the issue of key sharing between clients. If you want to read previously sent messages when you log into a new client for the first time you have to do the key sharing dance with one of your existing clients. For me it's a little annoying, but I find it an acceptable tradeoff. However I could easily see how for many people this would be a dealbreaker.
  - andrewaylett 5y ago
    Key backup makes this a lot easier, assuming you've saved the recovery key in your password manager. But it's still one of those frustrating points where it defeats the purpose of the exercise for the provider to be able to recover an account (or at least the content and trust within an account) for someone who's locked out.

js2 5y ago

It's been a while. I should probably re-install it and give it a fresh chance. My recollection is that the UI was sluggish and that the app was poorly integrated with iOS (e.g. I don't think it had a sharing extension).

posguy 5y ago
Signal iOS is still underwhelming, on Android it has some really nice features that make it a good SMS client and SMS replacement, but alas no one (outside Apple) is permitted to do that on iOS. Element/Matrix might be of more interest, it syncs history instantly, has good room support (unlike Signal), bridges in Discord and IRC quite well, and has a ton of interesting native rooms from Mozilla Matrix, Pine64, Gitter and such
- domano 5y ago
  Wow i wanted to switch to iPhone later this year, but i did not know this. I exclusively use signal as my messaging app and this means i will not buy an iPhone i guess! Thanks for preventing a costly mistake :)