this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
202 points (97.2% liked)

Privacy

32442 readers
629 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

And then there is the kinds of people who cry about Signal dropping support for SMS.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Yeah, I'm one of em. I'm well aware it's not secure, but as a frontend, signal certainly was more customizable and pleasant to use even for just the few people I had to sms till I could convince to use signal.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It was so much easier to convince people to use Signal when it had SMS support. I think while Signal needed to drop it, it wasn't the time yet.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm not convinced it ever should've. Make it obvious sms mode is in use, etc etc. But it was great to have everything in one place. One blocklist, great photo editing etc

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

Maybe. For me the worst change they made was removing custom colours for my contacts.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I agree that it helped with adoption. In a way I wish they still had it so I could get my text messaging family to use a messaging app instead.

The flip side was, if somebody tried signal and didn't like it and uninstalled it, then any SMS message to them from signal went to their signal account that they no longer had installed so they didn't get it. You had no way of knowing so it really sucked.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Ah yeah, I'd forgotten about that.

I'm certain the engineering team considered it, but I wonder why they didn't pursue having accounts that haven't signed in for a while issue a notice to the sender, or even have the account deactivate itself.

Make an opt-out default, you could disable that behaviour if your threat model needed to account for that 🤷

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I am one of those. I ditched Signal and went back to the stock sms app and adopted matrix. Haven't looked back since. The reality is that Signal dropping support for sms wasn't going to stop me from using SMS. For that, other people need to be convinced to stop using it at the same time. Signal didn't have nearly the market size needed to make that happen. And now that card is played, and nothing has changed. Signal is just another messaging app among hundreds. At least matrix offers a real paradigm shift.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

How are you going to grow the user base without including the normies?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

That’s kind of like if iMessage dropped SMS support. Yeah, I know if it’s a green bubble it’s not encrypted. But I wouldn’t want them to just not allow it.