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Same. One included an unstable individual who I was happy had forgotten me. Suddenly he messages me out of nowhere -- "Oh hey, you still exist! And you just ins

Same. One included an unstable individual who I was happy had forgotten me. Suddenly he messages me out of nowhere -- "Oh hey, you still exist! And you just installed Signal.... hmm, given what day it is, I'm guessing you're at such-and-such event?" Absolutely unacceptable.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
I think the Signal devs hadn't thought this through at all and just blindly copied what Telegram was already doing thinking it must be cool and trendy with the masses, without understanding their core user base at all. Same with prioritizing stories, stickers and crypto payments as core features of Signal when that's not what most of their users care for. Meanwhile there's still no official way to port your existing chat history on PC and iOS to your new device, or support for Android tablets. Obviously, stickers are more important.
- tptacek 3y ago
  Signal (and Signal's phone number model) predates Telegram. It was designed as an SMS and WhatsApp replacement; that is, it was originally designed to replace insecure phone-number-addressed systems. Obviously, the cryptographic guarantees of the two systems aren't even close to comparable.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    May be. But that feature wasn't there since 2014. Signal has adopted a lot of "social media" feature from WhatsApp and Telegram over the years.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      They're messengers. They have messenger features. The details of how those features are implemented is what matter. Last I checked, Telegram doesn't even have encrypted group messaging, and it has a serverside database of who's talking to who. I don't know what "feature" you're talking about not existing until 2014, but before Open Whisper Systems, the thing we call Signal was "TextSecure", a literal SMS replacement.
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        >They're messengers. They have messenger features. And some are better at being messengers than others.
        tptacek 3y ago
        This is true. At every point where Telegram and Signal had the choice between being a pleasant messenger experience or being secure and private, each made decisions consistent with all their previous decisions.
        tjoff 3y ago
        For some definition of secure and private. Forcing you to use your phone number and then the same second you created your account go behind your back and spam everyone you just did so is neither private nor something many would associate with secure. I guess something doesn't have to be secure if you can pretend it is public. Of course Signal has carefully designed their goals to allow them to do that but in doing so that is a straight up asshole move in a context where they should be seeking trust? Absolutely mind bending. This is a great improvement, but they have already proven they can't be trusted with anyone's phone number so it is a damn shame they still won't allow you to create an account without one. It is a decent service otherwise, but my fricking god I hope they at some point realize the harm they've done. Up until today I've been ashamed of suggesting signal. Hopefully that will change with this feature.
        tptacek 3y ago
        My general experience in discussing this over the last 10 years is that nerds like us generally find it absolutely mindbending when privacy services make decisions in the interests of ordinary people, such as using the phone-number-based addressing ordinary people already use in order to minimize serverside metadata. But I think it mostly just speaks to how carefully people aren't thinking about the project's goals, and the fixation they have on their own goals. A lot of people are just super angry they can't write their own TUI for Signal.
  - slim 3y ago
    TextSecure and Redphone did not upload your contacts to the cloud. No need to be a security expert to know that it's unwise to leak user state to contacts. In fact textsecure (now Silence) is the first SMS app to have a different colors for each contact to help the user avoid mistakingly messaging the wrong person.
- ipqk 3y ago
  [flagged]
- metalliqaz 3y ago
  Stickers are more important because just like every other tech company, growth is the only way to stay in business. You can just run a business on delivering a good product to your customers anymore. You have to grow constantly, which means bringing in new customers which, by definition, aren't part of the core user base. It's gross and depressing and it enshitifies everything
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >You can just run a business on delivering a good product to your customers anymore. Who said Signal was a good product to begin with? And who though adding sticker would improve market share? Casual users value UX and porting their chat history and VoIP calling vastly more than they value E-2-E encryption. You can't talk about growth when you fail to deliver on these fronts first. That's how Telegram and WhatsApps rule the market. Adding stickers won't move the userbase needle when you already lost your potential users at the lack of chat history and UX.
    - baq 3y ago
      > And who though adding sticker would improve market share? My daughter loves stickers.
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        That's not the point. The point is if stickers make people love Signal. Sticker are popular on other platforms as well but because those platforms are popular not because they have stickers.
    - WolfeReader 3y ago
      What fantasy land are you posting from? Signal has 40 million users as of 2022 (this was the first stat I found on a quick DDG search, which is all the effort your post deserves). Also: "Who said Signal was a good product to begin with?" LOL. Just read the comments on this link bro.
- elevation 3y ago
  Nothing about Signal is haphazardly borrowed from Telegram. The feature we're discussing was chosen to help Signal to grow from a few thousand users to 50M+ without needing to build a social graph on Signal servers. This mechanism may not be ideal for all users, and it's possible that Signal has now outgrown it, but without it, there would be no Signal as we know it today.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >The feature we're discussing was chosen to help Signal to grow from a few thousand users to 50M+ without needing to build a social graph on Signal servers. How did THAT feature help Signal grow? You only receive that spammy message if you already have Signal installed and your contact already has it too. Signal grew a lot in 2021 (in Europe) because of the pandemonium created by Meta when they announced a change in WhatsApp Privacy Policy so everyone rushed to install Signal but the initial surge, was short lived. Moving the clocks forward to today, looking at my extended network of family, friends and acquaintances, almost everyone has Signal installed, but most don't use it anymore as it's too frustrating and feels dead, so everything is still on WhatsApp, especially groups. All the Signal groups I have, originally meant to replace the WhatsApp groups, slowly died out and people stopped posting on them or following them, defaulting instead back to the WhatsApp groups. You don't fix this lack of retention with stickers and spammy messenges.
    - shafyy 3y ago
      Let's see if and how Signal will become interoperable with WhatsApp later this year...
      - baq 3y ago
        Tell me more?
dylan604 3y ago
I was all excited about Signal, but rarely use it because of this very feature. Once it started sending me notices about other users, I was extremely not happy. I was very hesitant since one of the first things it did was ask for access to contacts. I'm still pissed at myself for allowing it.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

I think the Signal devs hadn't thought this through at all and just blindly copied what Telegram was already doing thinking it must be cool and trendy with the masses, without understanding their core user base at all. Same with prioritizing stories, stickers and crypto payments as core features of Signal when that's not what most of their users care for. Meanwhile there's still no official way to port your existing chat history on PC and iOS to your new device, or support for Android tablets. Obviously, stickers are more important.

tptacek 3y ago
Signal (and Signal's phone number model) predates Telegram. It was designed as an SMS and WhatsApp replacement; that is, it was originally designed to replace insecure phone-number-addressed systems. Obviously, the cryptographic guarantees of the two systems aren't even close to comparable.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  May be. But that feature wasn't there since 2014. Signal has adopted a lot of "social media" feature from WhatsApp and Telegram over the years.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    They're messengers. They have messenger features. The details of how those features are implemented is what matter. Last I checked, Telegram doesn't even have encrypted group messaging, and it has a serverside database of who's talking to who. I don't know what "feature" you're talking about not existing until 2014, but before Open Whisper Systems, the thing we call Signal was "TextSecure", a literal SMS replacement.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      >They're messengers. They have messenger features. And some are better at being messengers than others.
      - tptacek 3y ago
        This is true. At every point where Telegram and Signal had the choice between being a pleasant messenger experience or being secure and private, each made decisions consistent with all their previous decisions.
        tjoff 3y ago
        For some definition of secure and private. Forcing you to use your phone number and then the same second you created your account go behind your back and spam everyone you just did so is neither private nor something many would associate with secure. I guess something doesn't have to be secure if you can pretend it is public. Of course Signal has carefully designed their goals to allow them to do that but in doing so that is a straight up asshole move in a context where they should be seeking trust? Absolutely mind bending. This is a great improvement, but they have already proven they can't be trusted with anyone's phone number so it is a damn shame they still won't allow you to create an account without one. It is a decent service otherwise, but my fricking god I hope they at some point realize the harm they've done. Up until today I've been ashamed of suggesting signal. Hopefully that will change with this feature.
        tptacek 3y ago
        My general experience in discussing this over the last 10 years is that nerds like us generally find it absolutely mindbending when privacy services make decisions in the interests of ordinary people, such as using the phone-number-based addressing ordinary people already use in order to minimize serverside metadata. But I think it mostly just speaks to how carefully people aren't thinking about the project's goals, and the fixation they have on their own goals. A lot of people are just super angry they can't write their own TUI for Signal.
- slim 3y ago
  TextSecure and Redphone did not upload your contacts to the cloud. No need to be a security expert to know that it's unwise to leak user state to contacts. In fact textsecure (now Silence) is the first SMS app to have a different colors for each contact to help the user avoid mistakingly messaging the wrong person.
ipqk 3y ago
[flagged]
metalliqaz 3y ago
Stickers are more important because just like every other tech company, growth is the only way to stay in business. You can just run a business on delivering a good product to your customers anymore. You have to grow constantly, which means bringing in new customers which, by definition, aren't part of the core user base. It's gross and depressing and it enshitifies everything
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >You can just run a business on delivering a good product to your customers anymore. Who said Signal was a good product to begin with? And who though adding sticker would improve market share? Casual users value UX and porting their chat history and VoIP calling vastly more than they value E-2-E encryption. You can't talk about growth when you fail to deliver on these fronts first. That's how Telegram and WhatsApps rule the market. Adding stickers won't move the userbase needle when you already lost your potential users at the lack of chat history and UX.
  - baq 3y ago
    > And who though adding sticker would improve market share? My daughter loves stickers.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      That's not the point. The point is if stickers make people love Signal. Sticker are popular on other platforms as well but because those platforms are popular not because they have stickers.
  - WolfeReader 3y ago
    What fantasy land are you posting from? Signal has 40 million users as of 2022 (this was the first stat I found on a quick DDG search, which is all the effort your post deserves). Also: "Who said Signal was a good product to begin with?" LOL. Just read the comments on this link bro.
elevation 3y ago
Nothing about Signal is haphazardly borrowed from Telegram. The feature we're discussing was chosen to help Signal to grow from a few thousand users to 50M+ without needing to build a social graph on Signal servers. This mechanism may not be ideal for all users, and it's possible that Signal has now outgrown it, but without it, there would be no Signal as we know it today.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >The feature we're discussing was chosen to help Signal to grow from a few thousand users to 50M+ without needing to build a social graph on Signal servers. How did THAT feature help Signal grow? You only receive that spammy message if you already have Signal installed and your contact already has it too. Signal grew a lot in 2021 (in Europe) because of the pandemonium created by Meta when they announced a change in WhatsApp Privacy Policy so everyone rushed to install Signal but the initial surge, was short lived. Moving the clocks forward to today, looking at my extended network of family, friends and acquaintances, almost everyone has Signal installed, but most don't use it anymore as it's too frustrating and feels dead, so everything is still on WhatsApp, especially groups. All the Signal groups I have, originally meant to replace the WhatsApp groups, slowly died out and people stopped posting on them or following them, defaulting instead back to the WhatsApp groups. You don't fix this lack of retention with stickers and spammy messenges.
  - shafyy 3y ago
    Let's see if and how Signal will become interoperable with WhatsApp later this year...
    - baq 3y ago
      Tell me more?

dylan604 3y ago

I was all excited about Signal, but rarely use it because of this very feature. Once it started sending me notices about other users, I was extremely not happy. I was very hesitant since one of the first things it did was ask for access to contacts. I'm still pissed at myself for allowing it.