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Without it, you wouldn’t be able to see which of your contacts are on signal. And then nobody would use Signal. It’s very unfashionable today, but they decide
by konschubert 4y ago
Without it, you wouldn’t be able to see which of your contacts are on signal.
And then nobody would use Signal.
It’s very unfashionable today, but they decided to not let perfect be the enemy of good.
- panick21_ 4y agoWhile that is nice, I see no reason to require that. Some people just don't care about that feature.
- dcow 4y agoWhat is this future UX you're imagining? How does the future solve the contacts book/short identifiers problem?
- fezfight 4y agoJust like this website. Usernames. Easy peasy.
- dcow 4y agoAnd how do you claim a username?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoBy knowing the password?
- dcow 4y agoWhere do you put the passwords DB?
- panick21_ 4y agoI'm not saying its an amazing experience or solves the problem systematically. Again, some people simply don't need these features. You can literally just take part of the public key and that's it. That is totally fine for some use-cases.
- dcow 4y agoThen use urbit. It already exists.
- panick21_ 4y agoYeah but the whole point of Signal is to allow secure very secure communication. With little effort they could allow this usecase. It would address a major criticism and they already have the underlying infrastructure. But I guess you can just keep moving the goal post.
- dcow 4y agoI don't understand how that's moving the goal post. Urbit developed a novel way to phonetically encode larger amounts of entropy than people are used to dealing with in order to build a network where your cryptographic identifier is your namespace and prime identity. You can spin up an urbit ship/planet and securely message anybody on the network using that short identifier. You suggested just using part of somebody's public key as an identifier directly. Urbit basically does that and a whole lot more. I suspect it would be rather trivial to cut out the phone parts of Signal and have a UI where you paste in the first 8 characters of pubkeys and it matches those. Why not try building it?
- panick21_ 4y agoI know nothing of Urbit. My point was just that there is a simple technical solution that Signal could apply if they wanted to make people happy who have no phone number and its moving the goal post to say 'use some other app'.