kinda joking, but it seems like many Signal users have a tough time convincing friends and family to use Signal. I personally have found it fairly easy in my social circles. Generally, I don’t even mention the privacy element. I simply describe it as a cross-platform messaging app that works on my PC, Macbook, and Android devices. It truly is a great productivity tool. It’s way easier to setup than What’sApp.
Since purchasing the MK (woefully without iMessage/RCS support), I’ve been more motivated to increase my Signal contacts. I’m actually surprised how many people are open to using it, but have never had anyone ask them! As a freelancer, most of my work is acquired through labor coordinators and clients text messages. I politely mentioned that Signal makes it easier for me to work between my mobile device and my laptops, and asked whether they happened to have it installed. One client immediately reached out on Signal, and another (roughly 50 years old) was eager for a cross platform solution but found What’sApp frustrating!
The fact is that many people in urban USA are already familiar with it as a safer way to buy certain medication, and a smaller number are attracted to it for ideological reasons (myself included). Those people don’t need convincing, they just need someone to open the door. Everyone else just wants an easier way to send media and text from their various devices.
Have you found any good ways of inviting people to Signal?
I am also a regular user of the Signal app, especially for communicating with my close circle. I discovered it when I was in the military, before moving to Canada. We were asked to install it so we could communicate about military operations abroad.
I tried to encourage some people around me to use it as well. They gave it a try, but most of them eventually stopped using it once they realized that Signal is not really a mainstream social network. They naturally went back to Messenger or WhatsApp.
That being said, I believe that for people who are specifically looking for privacy, this is a very strong argument in convincing people to Signal. Signal is end-to-end encrypted by defaults for both messages and calls meaning only the participants can read or hear them.. Otherwise beside privacy I believe people will naturally go into something more common like Messenger, telegram, I-message etc .. By the way I tried the app on the Mudita Kompakt in the beginning and it works well.
Moving to Signal while using Whatsapp or a similar App besides it makes a lot of sense in the beginning. But I found that the only way to make sure is to commit to the switch and delete the other Apps after a while. If Signal is the only way to contact you (apart from email maybe) then people that want to talk to you will find a way. You will miss out on some things, but I found it surprisingly easy to move most of my social circle to Signal. This has created some problems, but I would say they are minor ones compared to using a Meta App
Isn’t Matrix the way to go in the long run ? (open source protocol, decentralized, anyone can implement it on his/her server, instances can be federated… etc.)
Is switching to Signal the same as switching to Bluesky instead of getting directly to Mastodon ?
The French governement (although they spend hundreds / thousands times more in proprietary stuff, grrrrr) has been pushing an alternative open source suite including a matrix based messenger for instance.
Oh well, been advocating free software for almost 3 decades, I’m getting a bit tired.
BTW, when installing Signal, does it also duplicate all contacts in the contact list of the Kompakt (hidden contacts with additional information but they are sometimes visible and it slows down the system too) the same way Whatsapp does ? It is annoying !
I would tend to agree, but getting family and friends to adopt it is a tough sell, most people are totally oblivious to the data capture and privacy intrusion of mainstream messaging platforms, so can’t be bothered to to adopt anything new, unless it’s easy.
signal is a relatively simple transition for non technically minded people.
Anyone who wants to maintain their privacy should be looking at Matrix also though
Hilariously, my texting becoming unreliable for 30 days when I first got the Kompakt pushed a fair number of my friends to adopt Signal just to have a reliable way to text me, lol. Other than that several people were convinced by the argument “the more people who use these encrypted services for casual use, the more normalized they become, and therefore people who have to use them for important work (like activists) are less likely to be targeted by the law, because simply using an encrypted platform is no longer an oddity worth investigating.”
I’ve also found it surprisingly easy to convince my immediate family, close friends, and girlfriend to install it. My friends’ group chats happen there now (at least those I’m involved in !). I have to say I never understood the “I don’t want another app on my phone” argument, coming from people who have loads of Meta/Google/Apple apps already.
Absolutely my experience too. It also works as a filter, the only contacts I have on Signal are those who really want to talk to me. I prefer this rather than hundreds of randoms in my contact list !
Absolutely disgusting, the Meta invasion of our lives. I don’t think your diagram includes the boatloads of data that Meta gets from the “Log in with Facebook” feature that so many websites use. The fact that people have no problem with this blows my mind.
I say this as a software engineer and data freedom enthusiast, but I feel like this (family of) solution(s) is way way too complicated. It’s kind of the same problem that GNU/Linux has … too much choice creates user confusion AND fragmentation/dilution of development efforts.
Of course Signal is not perfect and they represent a single point of failure.
I’m experiencing that right this moment : my local Signal database got corrupted, and my years of messages and photos have become inaccessible ! No way to export the database, to fix it, nothing. All my messages, lost. I’m beyond pissed. Especially considering the cause of the corruption : my phone running out of storage. That’s right, if your phone runs out of space, Signal with corrupt its own DB and goodbye all your messages ! A known issue (to them) for several years. (Sorry for the rant, as I said, I’m pissed !)
Seldomly I have needed to look up a message that was older than a few weeks. if it is important information like Birthdays or adresses, I write them down or ask the person again. I do not see the need to have all your messages anywhere. Who cares about that data?
Yep, I get your point and agree mostly. But Matrix would just require a couple of correctly funded / supported implementations and it could be made easy I guess (there are interesting initiatives on this side…). Like Linux distros, in many areas, Linux can be easier (I installed Linux to disabled people and to some extent they had fewer issues). But indeed, fragmentation is a PITA ! Some Arch based distros under KDE gain much traction ATM thanks to Steam…
A well know KDE deveveloper, Nate Graham wrote something interesting about this :
As for the risk of data loss, I stuck to the old fashioned “all organized on my local harddrive + a couple of synced external hard drives” and wipe everything from my phones regularly… Actually, the older I get, fewer pictures, messages, collections etc. I want to keep..
Yes, a well funded initiative (private or public), based on open protocols, that would be the ideal solution.
I agree on Linux being easier to use. But it’s a hard sell to non-technical people.
Same here. I’m starting to think that I should just let go of the idea of somehow getting my Signal messages back. Nicolas Niegsch who commented above would agree
From sheer laziness, I’ve been rocking the default 4-week expiration and feel pretty happy. Once it sank in that it Signal is temporary, I slowly developed the habit of saving things that truly matter.
Wow that diagram is truly eye opening….. I made the decision some time ago, to tell everyone, I am only contactable through signal, and won’t use any other means of messaging.
you tend to discover who genuinely cares and wants to be in your life, when you do this. It also makes it easy to stay out of workplace groups and dramas, which is an added benefit.
Molly is a Signal-fork, compatible with Signal, which allows to be used on multiple devices and remove all the Google code (Google maps integration is replaced by Openstreetmaps).
I used Molly for a while, but found I had difficulty adding client devices, and it didn’t play well with Kompakt when sending pictures, due to it not having a front facing camera, so I installed Signal again
