It was very unpopular with my girlfriend, who I had just gotten into using Signal a few months prior.
Comment on What's the deal with Signal?
bg10k@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks agoThat was a pretty wild decision
kn33@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Comment on What's the deal with Signal?
bg10k@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks agoThat was a pretty wild decision
It was very unpopular with my girlfriend, who I had just gotten into using Signal a few months prior.
zergtoshi@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Handling SMS and handling secure/encrypted messages could’ve made people think they communicate securely while relying on text messages instead.
Not handling SMS fixes this source of confusion and I applaud their decision.
AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
The problem is that most people don’t want multiple text apps, they just want one. I had gotten a number of people using signal, and it was secure when we talked, but when signal dropped SMS, almost every one of them stopped using it, so then none of their conversations were secure.
zergtoshi@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Yeah, the never-ending weighting between convenience and security.
But are you going to tell me that those people don’t have Whatsapp, Threema, Telegram or any other IM installed and just use plain SMS instead?
AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Yep, just the default messaging app on their phone.
FinnFooted@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Americans do a lot of SMS.
Acamon@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I think the number of people who care deeply about privacy and cannot tell the difference between an sms or signal message is minimal. There were plenty of ways signal could have highlighted DANGER UNSECURE CHANNEL if they had wanted to, or made it an off-by-default option, rather than drop SMS entirely. For myself and many other people it meant that family members dropped Signal rather than have an extra messaging app, and so I’m still stuck with WhatsApp on my phone…
guy@piefed.social 4 weeks ago
If only the was some indicator for unsecure messages, such as a grey send button and an open padlock. 🙄
Landless2029@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I think having an unlocked symbol for standard SMS would’ve helped that…
zergtoshi@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
And you seriously think most people would look at and act on such an icon instead of just ignoring it?
voracitude@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Or just accept that not everyone will be having a secure conservation, but more will be secured as more and more people like me convince our family members to use it and eventually we transition everyone away from SMS?
No, of course not, why would we build a critical mass of users like that?
Since they removed SMS support my entire family and all my friends uninstalled signal, except a few who keep it to talk to me, and my half dozen friends privacy-conscious enough to care. Objectively, removing SMS support harmed Signal’s popularity and made everyone less secure. The argument for why they did it was at best myopic and also, in my opinion, utter bullshit.
bg10k@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
There were ways to make it clear that it was insecure that didn’t alienate an arguable majority of their casual userbase.