17 ms·

Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

186 points by YeBanKo 5y ago

YeBanKo 5y ago
I hope they will focus on backend stability, as it seems to be their biggest issue yet, not the lack of built in payment method.
- artificialLimbs 5y ago
  Don't have anything substantive to add, but this is a Big Deal. I donate every month and would definitely subscribe if they offered.
  - YeBanKo 5y ago
    Donated three times until they announced partnership with mobilecoin. It signals strange priorities.
yownie 5y ago
Not much info.
- decrypt 5y ago
  From these links, it seems to be a AWS issue: Unofficial comment: https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-down-for-anyone-else/37185/10 https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-down-for-anyone-e... Official comment which came later: https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1442354759009247232 https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1442354759009247232
LordAtlas 5y ago
It's really annoying that they didn't even acknowledge the problem officially. Till about 15 minutes ago, their status page said everything was fine. Their Twitter account still doesn't mention any technical problems. But the service has been having issues for at least 3 hours. [1] Most people I know that started using Signal a few months ago are now back to using Whatsapp. Privacy is a nice feature to advertise, but when both your UX and your reliability suck, it's not a good combo. EDIT: A tweet has emerged 3 hours after the outage started. [1] https://downdetector.com/status/signal/ https://downdetector.com/status/signal/
- decrypt 5y ago
  They did now: https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1442354759009247232 https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1442354759009247232
- YeBanKo 5y ago
  They also did not acknowledge the previous big outage, that happen at the beginning of the year. Their blog does not mention what steps are being taken to mitigate scalability issues. While the protocol and their effort to make everything secure is amazing, lack of transparency into reliability is concerning and a barrier to adoption. However, I don’t think the UX is bad, so far it has been sufficient for me.
- nothroughroad 5y ago
  who gives a crap about most people you know?
- MihaiSandor 5y ago
  And also it is buggy when running on iOS devices. (crash app, media files not working)
- colordrops 5y ago
  Not sure I'd say that their reliability "sucks". I've been using it for years and this is only the second major outage I can recall, the other being when an Elon tweet dogpiled millions of users onto the service.
  - bogota 5y ago
    I wouldn’t say it sucks but they have had a number of times where it’s clear something is going on for an hour or so but it’s resolved without any notice being issued. Overall i would say its reliable but not communicating out issues is a really fast way to lose user trust.
  - maqp 5y ago
    Tens of millions, 50 million to be more precise. <:
keb_ 5y ago
What's a good alternative to Signal on Android for casual messaging? I don't think Element is a good fit since it's not easy to ask a friend or family member to sign up for Element whereas it's simple to install Signal.
- kome 5y ago
  Telegram?
  - botto 5y ago
    Sorry, no. Although Telegrams has encryption it's by default Client-Server, you have to explicitly start a secret chat with individual people. Additionally group chats are not encrypted except between client and server. I'm not sure of a good alternative as simple as Signal
    - snovv_crash 5y ago
      By default it's not e2ee, but this makes the distributed app model sooo much more user friendly. All your history is instantly available on the web client for example. Try that with Signal. The web client works if your phone is out of battery. Try that with WhatsApp.
      - input_sh 5y ago
        But I don't want my entire history to be available on a website? Who would even want that, what's the use case? Who looks at their months or years old messages? If my message is over two weeks old, I'd prefer it not to be on anyone's server. I can keep a local backup if I wish to do so.
        emptysongglass 5y ago
        Then you're not a person who values their message history. That's OK, you do you but there's many users out there, myself included who deeply value a searchable index of their chats from all time. I use it as a Memex or outboard brain I can tag and search. It's been in invaluable to digging up old quotes, pics, links, ebooks, etc. I wanted to re-surface either to share to someone else than the original recipient or for my own reference. Because you can search by broad types, it's doubly easy to find that archived data.
unclekev 5y ago
It frustrates me to no end that it took them 3 hours to officially acknowledge this outage at all. A single tweet 3 hours AFTER the outage has started is just not acceptable [1] [1] https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1442354759009247232 https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1442354759009247232 Edit: Yes I know signal is free and funded by donations. I've donated multiple times. I still don't think 'free' is a a valid reason for not informing people sooner. It's just unprofessional. This response from MrDresden is on point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28667509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28667509
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- donkeyd 5y ago
  It's a free service with no actual income stream, driven by donations. What do you expect? I don't think we have the right to hold them to high standards because you get what you pay for. Signal has always been a bad choice for messaging in practice. In theory it's really secure and all, in practice, they have security issues that don't get fixed and no real reason to provide a quality service.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    Amongst other things they could take some action to develop an income stream that isn't whatever is going with their cryptocurrency endeavor. Signal could easily start offering named, verified accounts as a paid service for say, businesses, to have secure texting to their customers. Heck, named personal accounts for this would be ideal to. This is a service which has direct value to me (I already pay for an email domain for the same sorts of reasons). Signal's product is the sort of offering which ticks so many security textboxes that it would be a no brainer, and getting even 1 big enterprise pushing it out to their customers would guarantee adoption.
    - circularfoyers 5y ago
      Is it possible that Signal don't want to go down this path as it potentially puts them at the whim of the demands or requirements of paying businesses? Which demands/requirements may not be aligned with the degree of privacy which set them apart from other messenging apps. If not this, could another reason might be that they're still a small team and this, along with the other changes that would presumably need to come along with it (accounts that aren't tied to a phone number), are what are holding them back.
Thorentis 5y ago
At least they now support Moxiecoin /s
pgn674 5y ago
Wonder is it's related to the AWS's Degraded EBS Volume Performance in Northern Virginia? https://status.aws.amazon.com/ https://status.aws.amazon.com/
- hnzix 5y ago
  Atlassian Confluence also just had a multi hour partial outage.
plasma 5y ago
This may be what's affecting HelloSign as well, see https://status.hellosign.com https://status.hellosign.com down for multiple hours
tannhaeuser 5y ago
Anyone using Threema? The app costs 3 bucks but then is free and e2e-encrypted.
- sschueller 5y ago
  Yes and most people I know but that might be because I am in Switzerland.
- mstngl 5y ago
  Yes, I try to keep all the alternatives available. Threema has a fine reputation privacy-wise and has obviously a business concept (which of course builds a hurdle for users not appreciating the difference that means). Main downside for my usecase is the lack of a true cross-platform approach. They offer a cumbersome web-client only by phone connection (similar to that what WhatsApp allows).
- maqp 5y ago
  Bought Threema in Jan 2017. Still 0 contacts so I guess the answer is no. Even Matrix has three contacts. Closer to 100 contacts on Signal though.
  - tannhaeuser 5y ago
    The more I think about it and getting pushed to use messaging, the more I can't wait for RCS/5G to come. After all, what sucks most (for me) is that we've created all those communication standards such as http, html/sgml, XMPP, and GPS/SMS/MMS only for lusers to flock to proprietary systems at the very first occasion. I mean I can do without all the vulgar dating precaria but then what to do if you're horny and your lover only does What's App LOL? Or is there anything wrong with RCS I should know, like rampant data collection or sth?
    - mstngl 5y ago
      Basically I can understand this yearning for a messaging service with the ease of SMS in the good old day - no need for an app and everybody was able to recieve as this is just an infrastructure protocol. Indeed, RCS looks promising to let this principle live further. RCS has a long lasting history but is driven forward mainly by google during the last years. [1] One mayor flaw is that it comes basically without end-to-end encryption which - again - google announced to add an roll-out slowly. [2] Furthermore its unclear in how far Apple will implement RCS [3]. And last-but-not-least there is lack of some feature we are used to by messenger apps, like avatar picture, status message, live location etc. With 473 M users worldwide [4] it seems to be everywhere an nowhere. I'm checking from time to time with my contacts, but I've not seen the lock symbol in the Android Messages App on by up-to-date Pixel phone. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#Hi... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/19/21574451/android-rcs-encryption-message-end-to-end-beta https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/19/21574451/android-rcs-enc... [3] https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/07/20/apple-holds-out-in-adopting-next-generation-rcs-texting-standard https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/07/20/apple-holds-out-i... [4] https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/rcs/ https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/rcs/
beermonster 5y ago
Working fine for me.
lbj 5y ago
Seems to be resolved now
ddevault 5y ago
Bitten again by centralization. There's no excuse for not making Signal an open, federated protocol.
- harry8 5y ago
  >There's no excuse for not making Signal an open, federated protocol. This is just false. You can disagree with moxie all you like and make your case but he has been very clear on the reasons why he hasn't gone that way and the success of his project among non-technical users where so many others have failed suggests he's doing something right. I will applaud and cheer if you show his concerns on federation aren't really a problem by making a federated, e2e encrypted message app work as well for users as moxie has with his. Seriously. I will cheer you like you won't believe. Go do it! Or do you have an excuse?
  - ddevault 5y ago
    Sorry, I was not aware that you were not permitted to criticize anyone unless you invested tens of thousands of hours into building a competing product to demonstrate your point. Something to remember for next time.
    - maqp 5y ago
      You're of course allowed to criticize but, as your "There is no excuse" shows you're not aware of the tradeoffs, especially to security agility centralized platforms do, there isn't too much insight in your categorical dismissal. As someone with tens of thousands of hours of building a secure messaging system, I can say it helps a bit wrt perspective.
    - harry8 5y ago
      > You can disagree with moxie all you like and make your case ... I never made you aware of any such limitation, quite the contrary, in fact.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
kerng 5y ago
Probably related to the AWS outage in Virginia
- blitzar 5y ago
  Genuine question - why not distribute over a) multiple AWS regions and b) distribute over multiple providers so that 'small' outages dont take down apps like this?
  - 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
    I always thought they did distribute among AWS, Azure, Cloudflare and GCP as the output from running their domains on runson.cloud seems to suggest. But after this outage, clearly not.
    - blitzar 5y ago
      Perhaps someone out there with skills could make a cloud of clouds to make implementing such a thing easier.
      - 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
        Hmm. Some sort of distributed or dectraslised kind of architecture might be worth exploring. What a novel idea! :D
avnigo 5y ago
Down due to a hosting outage, but back up currently. This is why I would wanna see user-hosted instances of the Signal server [0] plugging in to the network and supporting traffic. I think a zero-config server app install of Signal server would work great for decentralizing the messaging platform too, but unfortunately it's not set up to handle that yet. [0]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server
- ninchuka 5y ago
  moxie the creator of it is so against decentralizing signal its insane so thats never going to happen sadly, it really would fix the problem just have a few thousand server people start running and it connects to the network and gets sent messages to send to its destination
  - busymom0 5y ago
    Did he give a reason for why he's against decentralization?
    - ninchuka 5y ago
      let me try and find the post about it *edit https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ here is a post from moxie himself about why its centralised not decentralised
    - upofadown 5y ago
      https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ ... is the article in question. Basically the argument is that federation slows down the possible rate of change. If you have but the one server in a system you can change things whenever you want and then push out any client changes. The root concept here is that constant protocol and feature change is the most desirable state. Not all of us accept that.
      - 5y ago
google234123 5y ago
I wonder if they could use blockchain to improve their reliability
- atatatat 5y ago
  Their reliability is absolutely blowing everyone out of the water......
aembleton 5y ago
It is 08:19 UTC and I'm now receiving messages again. Signal status seems to be back up https://status.signal.org/ https://status.signal.org/
johnmato 5y ago
I'd like to know what caused the hosting outage; it probably affected a lot of people.
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Otek 5y ago
I ditched Signal about a month ago. Transferred my last group chat to iMessage. Most of my friends don't care about privacy, I tried to love Signal for 2 year, I recommended it to friends, only to give up and make a fool of myself. But after so long, the fact that I regularly don't get notifications of new messages is inexcusable. So in my inner cirle, Signal has damaged people's willingness to improve privacy. Thanks.
- maqp 5y ago
  iMessage has several problems I have outlined here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21425897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21425897 After reading it, you might want to reconsider Signal again.
  - Otek 5y ago
    Never said iMessage was my choice or it's safe so you are arguing with yourself here. I said that I transfered one of my group chats there. Wasn't really my choice but a group choice. Your comment and knowledge is very impressive but not a single of this helps me convince my family or friends to transfer to yet another chat application. Not so long ago I've read all over HN that I shouldn't use Telegram, because it's Russian. Now people recommend it all the time. What changed? And if iMessage has so many problems, which app does not have them? I can answer for you: none. Messenger & iMessage FTW and we can't really do anything about it.
    - maqp 5y ago
      Well, I can't choose for you or your peers, but you can say to them those who have looked into it, think iMessage is a security nightmare and there are better options that help you all sleep better at night. It's not that Telegram started being good, it's that the experts felt it was so bad they decided it was for the public good to give pro bono advice on the topic and didn't feel too strongly about advocating wrt the matter ever since, aside occasional social media chuckles when more vulnerabilities in Telegram have been revealed. Sure, all messaging apps have problems, bugs, and issues, but with some there's clearly more effort in building a foundation that's not accumulating technical debt like there's no tomorrow. If Telegram suddenly wanted to enable E2EE, they'd have to start from the ground up. You can't glue E2EE on top. So when you look into the software engineering aspect, you're inclined to look into how the product was made, and the design rationale. None of that holds water for Telegram. What you get is something that on paper looks exactly like FB Messenger, and a bunch of promises to never abuse the access to the insane amounts of private data that accumulates. I've been looking to secure messaging for a decade now and Signal's by far the best option right now. Threema is pretty good, and Element's getting there, although it needs more time to mature. You were already using Signal, abandoning it wasn't perhaps the smartest thing to do: Downtime is of course very unfortunate, but I've had more outages with Telegram than with Signal. Also, again, it's easy to fix a broken window, much less easy to rebuild due to rotten foundation.
qwertyuiop_ 5y ago
Session. https://getsession.org/ https://getsession.org/ I doesn’t need phone numbers
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
  I think not being tied to phone numbers is on Signal's roadmap? Isn't that why they're encouraging me to memorize this PIN with spaced repetition? Or something?
- imaginator 5y ago
  I went down the rabbit hole of trying to work out what this is. In involves new coins and ICOs. I'll stick with Matrix and Signal. "Session is enabled by services provided through the Loki blockchain network. The Loki cryptocurrency is a fundamental part of these services, providing an anonymous way to transfer value between people. A lightweight wallet integrated into the Session app, using keys derived from the users existing keypair, could allow users to quickly and privately transfer value inside Session."
NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
Fwiw I've been using Signal as my primary communications channel along with email for the past few years. There's an outage once a year or so, but I can live with that. It just works--for voice calls, video calls, chat, groups, etc. The real question here isn't about which system is technologically superior (though HN gravitates to that question), it's which one is technologically superior taking into account network effects. Briar and Session may be great, and I wish everyone used them, but at present at least where I live it'd be very tough going. Getting people to use Signal isn't all that hard, the network is pretty robust in my communities (university city).
- noja 5y ago
  I'm seeing usage fall off among my network, because it doesn't replace WhatsApp: * it can't save photos to the camera roll * notifications are hit and miss
  - georgyo 5y ago
    I'm guessing your an iPhone user. It's not an excuse, but I've seen other people on iOS have similar problems. Both of these issues do not exist on Android versions of Signal.
    - mike_pol 5y ago
      Yeah I had exactly the same problem myself on iOS, I'm really promoting it to all my friends and family but this is quite a bad bug. Also I've noticed that sometimes that calls don't connect through and the person will only notice the missed call when he relaunches the app.
  - atatatat 5y ago
    I have 47 people I've personally transitioned to the app, and haven't had notification issues — check OS settings, use better phone. Saving pictures also works fine.
  - agilob 5y ago
    >* notifications are hit and miss Blame your Android distribution https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/5085#issuecomment-566749236 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/5085#issu...
neogodless 5y ago
I have very limited experience with Signal, but it has an issue I cannot figure out that massively limits the appeal for me. I very rarely get any sort of notification. If I open the app on my OnePlus 7 Pro running Android 10, it'll flood me with missed notifications. But that's about it. (I think it has notified me in the past without opening the app, but I can't remember for sure.) I'm sure it's not designed to work this way, but I haven't worked out how to fix the broken notification system on my phone. Some online friends use it for coordinating plans, so I'm "forced" to use it (and try to remember to "check" it from time to time), but I do wonder how common my issue is. Presumably quite rare! Does Signal work better on other platforms? (For me, no - I also have it installed on Windows and do not get notifications.)
- vgeek 5y ago
  I had a similar problem that was resolved by changing some obscure Android setting. I think it may have been the restrict background battery usage setting, then another where Signal has to have a persistent tray notification, but it gets hidden from view, so I just enabled all notifications then dialed back from there.
- 7v3x3n3sem9vv 5y ago
  OnePlus is notorious for preventing apps from working as intended in order to increase battery life. Take a look at https://dontkillmyapp.com https://dontkillmyapp.com to see what you need to do to ensure Signal is working as intended.

186 points by YeBanKo 5y ago

I hope they will focus on backend stability, as it seems to be their biggest issue yet, not the lack of built in payment method.

artificialLimbs 5y ago
Don't have anything substantive to add, but this is a Big Deal. I donate every month and would definitely subscribe if they offered.
- YeBanKo 5y ago
  Donated three times until they announced partnership with mobilecoin. It signals strange priorities.

yownie 5y ago

Not much info.

decrypt 5y ago
From these links, it seems to be a AWS issue: Unofficial comment: https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-down-for-anyone-else/37185/10 https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-down-for-anyone-e... Official comment which came later: https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1442354759009247232 https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1442354759009247232

LordAtlas 5y ago

It's really annoying that they didn't even acknowledge the problem officially. Till about 15 minutes ago, their status page said everything was fine. Their Twitter account still doesn't mention any technical problems. But the service has been having issues for at least 3 hours. [1] Most people I know that started using Signal a few months ago are now back to using Whatsapp. Privacy is a nice feature to advertise, but when both your UX and your reliability suck, it's not a good combo. EDIT: A tweet has emerged 3 hours after the outage started. [1] https://downdetector.com/status/signal/ https://downdetector.com/status/signal/

decrypt 5y ago
They did now: https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1442354759009247232 https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1442354759009247232
YeBanKo 5y ago
They also did not acknowledge the previous big outage, that happen at the beginning of the year. Their blog does not mention what steps are being taken to mitigate scalability issues. While the protocol and their effort to make everything secure is amazing, lack of transparency into reliability is concerning and a barrier to adoption. However, I don’t think the UX is bad, so far it has been sufficient for me.
nothroughroad 5y ago
who gives a crap about most people you know?
MihaiSandor 5y ago
And also it is buggy when running on iOS devices. (crash app, media files not working)
colordrops 5y ago
Not sure I'd say that their reliability "sucks". I've been using it for years and this is only the second major outage I can recall, the other being when an Elon tweet dogpiled millions of users onto the service.
- bogota 5y ago
  I wouldn’t say it sucks but they have had a number of times where it’s clear something is going on for an hour or so but it’s resolved without any notice being issued. Overall i would say its reliable but not communicating out issues is a really fast way to lose user trust.
- maqp 5y ago
  Tens of millions, 50 million to be more precise. <:

keb_ 5y ago

What's a good alternative to Signal on Android for casual messaging? I don't think Element is a good fit since it's not easy to ask a friend or family member to sign up for Element whereas it's simple to install Signal.

kome 5y ago
Telegram?
- botto 5y ago
  Sorry, no. Although Telegrams has encryption it's by default Client-Server, you have to explicitly start a secret chat with individual people. Additionally group chats are not encrypted except between client and server. I'm not sure of a good alternative as simple as Signal
  - snovv_crash 5y ago
    By default it's not e2ee, but this makes the distributed app model sooo much more user friendly. All your history is instantly available on the web client for example. Try that with Signal. The web client works if your phone is out of battery. Try that with WhatsApp.
    - input_sh 5y ago
      But I don't want my entire history to be available on a website? Who would even want that, what's the use case? Who looks at their months or years old messages? If my message is over two weeks old, I'd prefer it not to be on anyone's server. I can keep a local backup if I wish to do so.
      - emptysongglass 5y ago
        Then you're not a person who values their message history. That's OK, you do you but there's many users out there, myself included who deeply value a searchable index of their chats from all time. I use it as a Memex or outboard brain I can tag and search. It's been in invaluable to digging up old quotes, pics, links, ebooks, etc. I wanted to re-surface either to share to someone else than the original recipient or for my own reference. Because you can search by broad types, it's doubly easy to find that archived data.

unclekev 5y ago

It frustrates me to no end that it took them 3 hours to officially acknowledge this outage at all. A single tweet 3 hours AFTER the outage has started is just not acceptable [1] [1] https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1442354759009247232 https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1442354759009247232 Edit: Yes I know signal is free and funded by donations. I've donated multiple times. I still don't think 'free' is a a valid reason for not informing people sooner. It's just unprofessional. This response from MrDresden is on point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28667509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28667509

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
donkeyd 5y ago
It's a free service with no actual income stream, driven by donations. What do you expect? I don't think we have the right to hold them to high standards because you get what you pay for. Signal has always been a bad choice for messaging in practice. In theory it's really secure and all, in practice, they have security issues that don't get fixed and no real reason to provide a quality service.
- XorNot 5y ago
  Amongst other things they could take some action to develop an income stream that isn't whatever is going with their cryptocurrency endeavor. Signal could easily start offering named, verified accounts as a paid service for say, businesses, to have secure texting to their customers. Heck, named personal accounts for this would be ideal to. This is a service which has direct value to me (I already pay for an email domain for the same sorts of reasons). Signal's product is the sort of offering which ticks so many security textboxes that it would be a no brainer, and getting even 1 big enterprise pushing it out to their customers would guarantee adoption.
  - circularfoyers 5y ago
    Is it possible that Signal don't want to go down this path as it potentially puts them at the whim of the demands or requirements of paying businesses? Which demands/requirements may not be aligned with the degree of privacy which set them apart from other messenging apps. If not this, could another reason might be that they're still a small team and this, along with the other changes that would presumably need to come along with it (accounts that aren't tied to a phone number), are what are holding them back.

Thorentis 5y ago

At least they now support Moxiecoin /s

pgn674 5y ago

Wonder is it's related to the AWS's Degraded EBS Volume Performance in Northern Virginia? https://status.aws.amazon.com/ https://status.aws.amazon.com/

hnzix 5y ago
Atlassian Confluence also just had a multi hour partial outage.

plasma 5y ago

This may be what's affecting HelloSign as well, see https://status.hellosign.com https://status.hellosign.com down for multiple hours

tannhaeuser 5y ago

Anyone using Threema? The app costs 3 bucks but then is free and e2e-encrypted.

sschueller 5y ago
Yes and most people I know but that might be because I am in Switzerland.
mstngl 5y ago
Yes, I try to keep all the alternatives available. Threema has a fine reputation privacy-wise and has obviously a business concept (which of course builds a hurdle for users not appreciating the difference that means). Main downside for my usecase is the lack of a true cross-platform approach. They offer a cumbersome web-client only by phone connection (similar to that what WhatsApp allows).
maqp 5y ago
Bought Threema in Jan 2017. Still 0 contacts so I guess the answer is no. Even Matrix has three contacts. Closer to 100 contacts on Signal though.
- tannhaeuser 5y ago
  The more I think about it and getting pushed to use messaging, the more I can't wait for RCS/5G to come. After all, what sucks most (for me) is that we've created all those communication standards such as http, html/sgml, XMPP, and GPS/SMS/MMS only for lusers to flock to proprietary systems at the very first occasion. I mean I can do without all the vulgar dating precaria but then what to do if you're horny and your lover only does What's App LOL? Or is there anything wrong with RCS I should know, like rampant data collection or sth?
  - mstngl 5y ago
    Basically I can understand this yearning for a messaging service with the ease of SMS in the good old day - no need for an app and everybody was able to recieve as this is just an infrastructure protocol. Indeed, RCS looks promising to let this principle live further. RCS has a long lasting history but is driven forward mainly by google during the last years. [1] One mayor flaw is that it comes basically without end-to-end encryption which - again - google announced to add an roll-out slowly. [2] Furthermore its unclear in how far Apple will implement RCS [3]. And last-but-not-least there is lack of some feature we are used to by messenger apps, like avatar picture, status message, live location etc. With 473 M users worldwide [4] it seems to be everywhere an nowhere. I'm checking from time to time with my contacts, but I've not seen the lock symbol in the Android Messages App on by up-to-date Pixel phone. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#Hi... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/19/21574451/android-rcs-encryption-message-end-to-end-beta https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/19/21574451/android-rcs-enc... [3] https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/07/20/apple-holds-out-in-adopting-next-generation-rcs-texting-standard https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/07/20/apple-holds-out-i... [4] https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/rcs/ https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/rcs/

beermonster 5y ago

Working fine for me.

lbj 5y ago

Seems to be resolved now

ddevault 5y ago

Bitten again by centralization. There's no excuse for not making Signal an open, federated protocol.

harry8 5y ago
>There's no excuse for not making Signal an open, federated protocol. This is just false. You can disagree with moxie all you like and make your case but he has been very clear on the reasons why he hasn't gone that way and the success of his project among non-technical users where so many others have failed suggests he's doing something right. I will applaud and cheer if you show his concerns on federation aren't really a problem by making a federated, e2e encrypted message app work as well for users as moxie has with his. Seriously. I will cheer you like you won't believe. Go do it! Or do you have an excuse?
- ddevault 5y ago
  Sorry, I was not aware that you were not permitted to criticize anyone unless you invested tens of thousands of hours into building a competing product to demonstrate your point. Something to remember for next time.
  - maqp 5y ago
    You're of course allowed to criticize but, as your "There is no excuse" shows you're not aware of the tradeoffs, especially to security agility centralized platforms do, there isn't too much insight in your categorical dismissal. As someone with tens of thousands of hours of building a secure messaging system, I can say it helps a bit wrt perspective.
  - harry8 5y ago
    > You can disagree with moxie all you like and make your case ... I never made you aware of any such limitation, quite the contrary, in fact.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

kerng 5y ago

Probably related to the AWS outage in Virginia

blitzar 5y ago
Genuine question - why not distribute over a) multiple AWS regions and b) distribute over multiple providers so that 'small' outages dont take down apps like this?
- 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
  I always thought they did distribute among AWS, Azure, Cloudflare and GCP as the output from running their domains on runson.cloud seems to suggest. But after this outage, clearly not.
  - blitzar 5y ago
    Perhaps someone out there with skills could make a cloud of clouds to make implementing such a thing easier.
    - 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
      Hmm. Some sort of distributed or dectraslised kind of architecture might be worth exploring. What a novel idea! :D

avnigo 5y ago

Down due to a hosting outage, but back up currently. This is why I would wanna see user-hosted instances of the Signal server [0] plugging in to the network and supporting traffic. I think a zero-config server app install of Signal server would work great for decentralizing the messaging platform too, but unfortunately it's not set up to handle that yet. [0]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

ninchuka 5y ago
moxie the creator of it is so against decentralizing signal its insane so thats never going to happen sadly, it really would fix the problem just have a few thousand server people start running and it connects to the network and gets sent messages to send to its destination
- busymom0 5y ago
  Did he give a reason for why he's against decentralization?
  - ninchuka 5y ago
    let me try and find the post about it *edit https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ here is a post from moxie himself about why its centralised not decentralised
  - upofadown 5y ago
    https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ ... is the article in question. Basically the argument is that federation slows down the possible rate of change. If you have but the one server in a system you can change things whenever you want and then push out any client changes. The root concept here is that constant protocol and feature change is the most desirable state. Not all of us accept that.
    - 5y ago

google234123 5y ago

I wonder if they could use blockchain to improve their reliability

atatatat 5y ago
Their reliability is absolutely blowing everyone out of the water......

aembleton 5y ago

It is 08:19 UTC and I'm now receiving messages again. Signal status seems to be back up https://status.signal.org/ https://status.signal.org/

johnmato 5y ago

I'd like to know what caused the hosting outage; it probably affected a lot of people.

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Otek 5y ago

I ditched Signal about a month ago. Transferred my last group chat to iMessage. Most of my friends don't care about privacy, I tried to love Signal for 2 year, I recommended it to friends, only to give up and make a fool of myself. But after so long, the fact that I regularly don't get notifications of new messages is inexcusable. So in my inner cirle, Signal has damaged people's willingness to improve privacy. Thanks.

maqp 5y ago
iMessage has several problems I have outlined here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21425897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21425897 After reading it, you might want to reconsider Signal again.
- Otek 5y ago
  Never said iMessage was my choice or it's safe so you are arguing with yourself here. I said that I transfered one of my group chats there. Wasn't really my choice but a group choice. Your comment and knowledge is very impressive but not a single of this helps me convince my family or friends to transfer to yet another chat application. Not so long ago I've read all over HN that I shouldn't use Telegram, because it's Russian. Now people recommend it all the time. What changed? And if iMessage has so many problems, which app does not have them? I can answer for you: none. Messenger & iMessage FTW and we can't really do anything about it.
  - maqp 5y ago
    Well, I can't choose for you or your peers, but you can say to them those who have looked into it, think iMessage is a security nightmare and there are better options that help you all sleep better at night. It's not that Telegram started being good, it's that the experts felt it was so bad they decided it was for the public good to give pro bono advice on the topic and didn't feel too strongly about advocating wrt the matter ever since, aside occasional social media chuckles when more vulnerabilities in Telegram have been revealed. Sure, all messaging apps have problems, bugs, and issues, but with some there's clearly more effort in building a foundation that's not accumulating technical debt like there's no tomorrow. If Telegram suddenly wanted to enable E2EE, they'd have to start from the ground up. You can't glue E2EE on top. So when you look into the software engineering aspect, you're inclined to look into how the product was made, and the design rationale. None of that holds water for Telegram. What you get is something that on paper looks exactly like FB Messenger, and a bunch of promises to never abuse the access to the insane amounts of private data that accumulates. I've been looking to secure messaging for a decade now and Signal's by far the best option right now. Threema is pretty good, and Element's getting there, although it needs more time to mature. You were already using Signal, abandoning it wasn't perhaps the smartest thing to do: Downtime is of course very unfortunate, but I've had more outages with Telegram than with Signal. Also, again, it's easy to fix a broken window, much less easy to rebuild due to rotten foundation.

qwertyuiop_ 5y ago

Session. https://getsession.org/ https://getsession.org/ I doesn’t need phone numbers

NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
I think not being tied to phone numbers is on Signal's roadmap? Isn't that why they're encouraging me to memorize this PIN with spaced repetition? Or something?
imaginator 5y ago
I went down the rabbit hole of trying to work out what this is. In involves new coins and ICOs. I'll stick with Matrix and Signal. "Session is enabled by services provided through the Loki blockchain network. The Loki cryptocurrency is a fundamental part of these services, providing an anonymous way to transfer value between people. A lightweight wallet integrated into the Session app, using keys derived from the users existing keypair, could allow users to quickly and privately transfer value inside Session."

NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago

Fwiw I've been using Signal as my primary communications channel along with email for the past few years. There's an outage once a year or so, but I can live with that. It just works--for voice calls, video calls, chat, groups, etc. The real question here isn't about which system is technologically superior (though HN gravitates to that question), it's which one is technologically superior taking into account network effects. Briar and Session may be great, and I wish everyone used them, but at present at least where I live it'd be very tough going. Getting people to use Signal isn't all that hard, the network is pretty robust in my communities (university city).

noja 5y ago
I'm seeing usage fall off among my network, because it doesn't replace WhatsApp: * it can't save photos to the camera roll * notifications are hit and miss
- georgyo 5y ago
  I'm guessing your an iPhone user. It's not an excuse, but I've seen other people on iOS have similar problems. Both of these issues do not exist on Android versions of Signal.
  - mike_pol 5y ago
    Yeah I had exactly the same problem myself on iOS, I'm really promoting it to all my friends and family but this is quite a bad bug. Also I've noticed that sometimes that calls don't connect through and the person will only notice the missed call when he relaunches the app.
- atatatat 5y ago
  I have 47 people I've personally transitioned to the app, and haven't had notification issues — check OS settings, use better phone. Saving pictures also works fine.
- agilob 5y ago
  >* notifications are hit and miss Blame your Android distribution https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/5085#issuecomment-566749236 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/5085#issu...

neogodless 5y ago

I have very limited experience with Signal, but it has an issue I cannot figure out that massively limits the appeal for me. I very rarely get any sort of notification. If I open the app on my OnePlus 7 Pro running Android 10, it'll flood me with missed notifications. But that's about it. (I think it has notified me in the past without opening the app, but I can't remember for sure.) I'm sure it's not designed to work this way, but I haven't worked out how to fix the broken notification system on my phone. Some online friends use it for coordinating plans, so I'm "forced" to use it (and try to remember to "check" it from time to time), but I do wonder how common my issue is. Presumably quite rare! Does Signal work better on other platforms? (For me, no - I also have it installed on Windows and do not get notifications.)

vgeek 5y ago
I had a similar problem that was resolved by changing some obscure Android setting. I think it may have been the restrict background battery usage setting, then another where Signal has to have a persistent tray notification, but it gets hidden from view, so I just enabled all notifications then dialed back from there.
7v3x3n3sem9vv 5y ago
OnePlus is notorious for preventing apps from working as intended in order to increase battery life. Take a look at https://dontkillmyapp.com https://dontkillmyapp.com to see what you need to do to ensure Signal is working as intended.