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Signals two day outage with zero explanation killed a lot of their momentum at least with my contacts. Few months later 80% are back on whatsapp. Honestly afte

Signals two day outage with zero explanation killed a lot of their momentum at least with my contacts. Few months later 80% are back on whatsapp. Honestly after what Signal pulled with hiding their server code for a year to implement mobilcoin and still not releasing some parts of their code, Im fine with WhatsApp

bosswipe 5y ago
Is WhatsApp's server code available somewhere that I'm not aware of?
- bilal4hmed 5y ago
  Its at the same location where the rest of Signals enclave code is.
lolinder 5y ago
I never understand this reasoning. It's the same kind of thing that people do with Firefox versus Chrome: Mozilla does stupid stuff sometimes, so that makes Chrome okay. Signal does stupid stuff sometimes, so that makes WhatsApp okay. Never mind that Facebook and Google are awful, user-hostile companies and neither Mozilla nor Signal has done anything even close to as bad. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Why does the alternative need to be immaculate in order for you to drop a bad company?
- danuker 5y ago
  > Why does the alternative need to be immaculate in order for you to drop a bad company? Because of network effects. The status quo have your contacts, so an alternative must be that much better to convince anyone to join.
- chii 5y ago
  > Signal does stupid stuff sometimes, so that makes WhatsApp okay no, it makes the people who recommends the switch (to their non-tech friends) look bad. The majority of people don't care about these sorts of issues regarding privacy or open-ness. "Normies" care about the usability, reliability and speed. I had convinced a few (non-tech) friends who used to use whatsapp to switch over to Signal. Then signal went down, and they immediately switched back, and that downtime made it look like i made a bad recommendation. Signal also has a bigger spam problems than whatsapp (you get these fake Amazon people trying to spam/phish you on signal, which never happened with whatsapp). I will no longer be trying to get people onto signal, not because i don't like signal (i use it myself with friends that do remain), but alas, whatsapp is still the "main" messaging app. So in all, the dominance of whatsapp is due to their reliability and momentum - no amount of privacy intrusion is going to change that. So signal needs to up their game, but i fear the opportunity has passed already.
  - lolinder 5y ago
    The downtime I understand being a concern, especially for laypeople. The GP comment specifically identified Signal's secretiveness surrounding their server as the dealbreaker that made them "fine with WhatsApp", which is what I was actually responding to (didn't make that clear). That said, Re: downtime, I've been using Signal for years now with non-techie family, and I've never had any complaints from them outside of that one two-day window. Signal is doing remarkably well even today. It seems like they just failed to adapt to the massive spike in load they had that week.
    - KingOfCoders 5y ago
      The GP wrote "Signals two day outage with zero explanation killed a lot of their momentum at least with my contacts. Few months later 80% are back on whatsapp."
      - DangitBobby 5y ago
        They also wrote this, which is, as HEAD~2 already said, the sentiment being addressed. > Honestly after what Signal pulled with hiding their server code for a year to implement mobilcoin and still not releasing some parts of their code, Im fine with WhatsApp
- arp242 5y ago
  It's such a binary view; it's either "good" or "bad". No in between. No nuance. This is one of my main gripes with the Free Software crowd to be honest (and the part of HN that overlaps with it). Is Signal perfect? No. But overall, it's not bad, and if we compare them to the average mobile phone app filled to the brim with dark patterns and tracking to the point where Apple felt the desire to build an entire feature to prevent this, they're almost mother Theresa.
  - glogla 5y ago
    Mother Theresa was not really a good person, she probably did more harm than good with her "suffering takes you close to god" approach to helping people. [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa
    - arp242 5y ago
      Christopher Hitchens was great; one of the few public people whom I never met where I was genuinely sad when he died. But in this, I'm not so sure he was right. He let his penchant for being contrarian and dislike of religion get the better of him. Not the only time this happened.
      - pessimizer 5y ago
        > I'm not so sure he was right. Any more reason for this other than a psychological evaluation of Hitchens? He made an argument, you can speak to it. Is it a complicated objection that can't be summarized?
        arp242 5y ago
        There have been loads of refutations of many parts; I don't have a full review at the ready and can't be bothered to research it again in-depth for just this comment to be honest :-) Hitchens not infrequently exaggerated some alleged crimes or misconduct from religious figures unfortunately. He usually had it by the right end of the stick in the general view IMHO, but could be sloppy on details. Classic case of "say something with enough confidence and people will believe you, especially if it confirms their preconceived notion" (in this case, religion=bad).
- greshario 5y ago
  Mozilla has never made Firefox completely stop working for 2 days. Even if they did, it's still a false equivalence: if FF stops working for a few hours you'd just use Chrome pretty much seamlessly. With Signal you have to switch to a different messaging service (easy) AND persuade all your contacts to switch too (hard).
  - lolinder 5y ago
    I wasn't talking about the downtime. The GP comment said that the thing that drove them away from Signal was the Mobilecoin debacle. I was drawing a parallel between that and Mozilla pushing Pocket (or any of their other missteps). I totally get why the downtime turned a lot of people off, but that's not what GP identified as what drove them to be "fine with WhatsApp".
    - bilal4hmed 5y ago
      The downtime is what drove a lot of my contacts away. That was the most significant factor in the move back to Signal. I have been using Signal for a long long time, right after they dropped their dual messenger approach. My trust was high in them where I used to bug my contacts to move to Signal. For me hiding the server code ( parts are still hidden ), adding in mobilcoin, promising an AMA on reddit to explain and then cancelling it has broken trust, 2 day outage with zero explanation and more so I wasted so much tech influence to get people over, only to have them move back has made me meh about Signal. Facebook might have taken a few years to abuse its power, Signal took far less time while pretending to be high n mighty. Oh and those recent 'facebook ads' scheme. At least be truthful that your account has not blocked because of the ads. If they are so shady about basic things, cant trust em with the big things.
- manigandham 5y ago
  It doesn't matter if the network effects (due to the downtime) make it unusable anyway. Who are you going to talk to if your contacts are using something else?
- herbst 5y ago
  That's American sentiment isn't it? Let's vote for X because Y sucks. I buy Samsung because apple sucks. Google sucks I buy apple. Left Vs right. ... Nowhere else in the world is the elusion of only two choices bigger than there
fartcannon 5y ago
Also, apparently they include Goolge play services and wont permit an F-Droid maintained version from federating. Correct me if I'm wrong, I saw this on the Signal github re F-Droid packages. This along with the parent post, are red flags.
- windthrown 5y ago
  You are unhappy and disagree with the decision but are they really "red flags"? In the GitHub issues you mention Signal does provide what seems to me to be good-faith reasoning behind their decisions.
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    Yes, I definitely see those as red flags. And I'm not unhappy, just being helpful for those who maybe aren't paying close attention. Would hate for them to end up in another WhatsApp situation!
- Vinnl 5y ago
  It can run without Play services (it does for me). I'm sure the code is there somewhere in the APK, but since it doesn't actually execute if you're not using Play services, I don't see a problem with that. They've also not categorically dismissed F-Droid; just given a list of things they need it to do first. Some of those have been resolved by now, some are unlikely to be any time soon.
KingOfCoders 5y ago
Yes, have been evangelizing people to Signal for some years, no I can't do that anymore, people laugh when I argue for Signal.
- ojosilva 5y ago
  That's a key difference between Signal and Whatsapp. The first now comes with a lot of evangelization from current users, and people in general are just sick and tired or just deaf to any kind of "activism" trying to determine their lives. We live in a very loud world. To be successful, Whatsapp's replacement, whatever that is, should be perceived as not a huge leap but have the right ingredients for people to naturally switch (think Unix worse-is-better philosophy), or just come with lots of positive, not negative, associations. "X is evil" is just not doing it for a lot of people.
  - KingOfCoders 5y ago
    Yes. The most resistance I get is "I already use A,B,C".
herbst 5y ago
> as long as they don't serve fish sticks in that US prison I rather stay in that Philippine one. That's the logic I am reading here

bosswipe 5y ago

Is WhatsApp's server code available somewhere that I'm not aware of?

bilal4hmed 5y ago
Its at the same location where the rest of Signals enclave code is.

lolinder 5y ago

I never understand this reasoning. It's the same kind of thing that people do with Firefox versus Chrome: Mozilla does stupid stuff sometimes, so that makes Chrome okay. Signal does stupid stuff sometimes, so that makes WhatsApp okay. Never mind that Facebook and Google are awful, user-hostile companies and neither Mozilla nor Signal has done anything even close to as bad. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Why does the alternative need to be immaculate in order for you to drop a bad company?

danuker 5y ago
> Why does the alternative need to be immaculate in order for you to drop a bad company? Because of network effects. The status quo have your contacts, so an alternative must be that much better to convince anyone to join.
chii 5y ago
> Signal does stupid stuff sometimes, so that makes WhatsApp okay no, it makes the people who recommends the switch (to their non-tech friends) look bad. The majority of people don't care about these sorts of issues regarding privacy or open-ness. "Normies" care about the usability, reliability and speed. I had convinced a few (non-tech) friends who used to use whatsapp to switch over to Signal. Then signal went down, and they immediately switched back, and that downtime made it look like i made a bad recommendation. Signal also has a bigger spam problems than whatsapp (you get these fake Amazon people trying to spam/phish you on signal, which never happened with whatsapp). I will no longer be trying to get people onto signal, not because i don't like signal (i use it myself with friends that do remain), but alas, whatsapp is still the "main" messaging app. So in all, the dominance of whatsapp is due to their reliability and momentum - no amount of privacy intrusion is going to change that. So signal needs to up their game, but i fear the opportunity has passed already.
- lolinder 5y ago
  The downtime I understand being a concern, especially for laypeople. The GP comment specifically identified Signal's secretiveness surrounding their server as the dealbreaker that made them "fine with WhatsApp", which is what I was actually responding to (didn't make that clear). That said, Re: downtime, I've been using Signal for years now with non-techie family, and I've never had any complaints from them outside of that one two-day window. Signal is doing remarkably well even today. It seems like they just failed to adapt to the massive spike in load they had that week.
  - KingOfCoders 5y ago
    The GP wrote "Signals two day outage with zero explanation killed a lot of their momentum at least with my contacts. Few months later 80% are back on whatsapp."
    - DangitBobby 5y ago
      They also wrote this, which is, as HEAD~2 already said, the sentiment being addressed. > Honestly after what Signal pulled with hiding their server code for a year to implement mobilcoin and still not releasing some parts of their code, Im fine with WhatsApp
arp242 5y ago
It's such a binary view; it's either "good" or "bad". No in between. No nuance. This is one of my main gripes with the Free Software crowd to be honest (and the part of HN that overlaps with it). Is Signal perfect? No. But overall, it's not bad, and if we compare them to the average mobile phone app filled to the brim with dark patterns and tracking to the point where Apple felt the desire to build an entire feature to prevent this, they're almost mother Theresa.
- glogla 5y ago
  Mother Theresa was not really a good person, she probably did more harm than good with her "suffering takes you close to god" approach to helping people. [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa
  - arp242 5y ago
    Christopher Hitchens was great; one of the few public people whom I never met where I was genuinely sad when he died. But in this, I'm not so sure he was right. He let his penchant for being contrarian and dislike of religion get the better of him. Not the only time this happened.
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      > I'm not so sure he was right. Any more reason for this other than a psychological evaluation of Hitchens? He made an argument, you can speak to it. Is it a complicated objection that can't be summarized?
      - arp242 5y ago
        There have been loads of refutations of many parts; I don't have a full review at the ready and can't be bothered to research it again in-depth for just this comment to be honest :-) Hitchens not infrequently exaggerated some alleged crimes or misconduct from religious figures unfortunately. He usually had it by the right end of the stick in the general view IMHO, but could be sloppy on details. Classic case of "say something with enough confidence and people will believe you, especially if it confirms their preconceived notion" (in this case, religion=bad).
greshario 5y ago
Mozilla has never made Firefox completely stop working for 2 days. Even if they did, it's still a false equivalence: if FF stops working for a few hours you'd just use Chrome pretty much seamlessly. With Signal you have to switch to a different messaging service (easy) AND persuade all your contacts to switch too (hard).
- lolinder 5y ago
  I wasn't talking about the downtime. The GP comment said that the thing that drove them away from Signal was the Mobilecoin debacle. I was drawing a parallel between that and Mozilla pushing Pocket (or any of their other missteps). I totally get why the downtime turned a lot of people off, but that's not what GP identified as what drove them to be "fine with WhatsApp".
  - bilal4hmed 5y ago
    The downtime is what drove a lot of my contacts away. That was the most significant factor in the move back to Signal. I have been using Signal for a long long time, right after they dropped their dual messenger approach. My trust was high in them where I used to bug my contacts to move to Signal. For me hiding the server code ( parts are still hidden ), adding in mobilcoin, promising an AMA on reddit to explain and then cancelling it has broken trust, 2 day outage with zero explanation and more so I wasted so much tech influence to get people over, only to have them move back has made me meh about Signal. Facebook might have taken a few years to abuse its power, Signal took far less time while pretending to be high n mighty. Oh and those recent 'facebook ads' scheme. At least be truthful that your account has not blocked because of the ads. If they are so shady about basic things, cant trust em with the big things.
manigandham 5y ago
It doesn't matter if the network effects (due to the downtime) make it unusable anyway. Who are you going to talk to if your contacts are using something else?
herbst 5y ago
That's American sentiment isn't it? Let's vote for X because Y sucks. I buy Samsung because apple sucks. Google sucks I buy apple. Left Vs right. ... Nowhere else in the world is the elusion of only two choices bigger than there

fartcannon 5y ago

Also, apparently they include Goolge play services and wont permit an F-Droid maintained version from federating. Correct me if I'm wrong, I saw this on the Signal github re F-Droid packages. This along with the parent post, are red flags.

windthrown 5y ago
You are unhappy and disagree with the decision but are they really "red flags"? In the GitHub issues you mention Signal does provide what seems to me to be good-faith reasoning behind their decisions.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  Yes, I definitely see those as red flags. And I'm not unhappy, just being helpful for those who maybe aren't paying close attention. Would hate for them to end up in another WhatsApp situation!
Vinnl 5y ago
It can run without Play services (it does for me). I'm sure the code is there somewhere in the APK, but since it doesn't actually execute if you're not using Play services, I don't see a problem with that. They've also not categorically dismissed F-Droid; just given a list of things they need it to do first. Some of those have been resolved by now, some are unlikely to be any time soon.

KingOfCoders 5y ago

Yes, have been evangelizing people to Signal for some years, no I can't do that anymore, people laugh when I argue for Signal.

ojosilva 5y ago
That's a key difference between Signal and Whatsapp. The first now comes with a lot of evangelization from current users, and people in general are just sick and tired or just deaf to any kind of "activism" trying to determine their lives. We live in a very loud world. To be successful, Whatsapp's replacement, whatever that is, should be perceived as not a huge leap but have the right ingredients for people to naturally switch (think Unix worse-is-better philosophy), or just come with lots of positive, not negative, associations. "X is evil" is just not doing it for a lot of people.
- KingOfCoders 5y ago
  Yes. The most resistance I get is "I already use A,B,C".

herbst 5y ago

> as long as they don't serve fish sticks in that US prison I rather stay in that Philippine one. That's the logic I am reading here