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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

by scubbo 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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!

by scubbo 6y ago

posguy 6y 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 6y 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!