this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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[–] [email protected] 152 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Same with Signal. That was a headscratcher. Of all the features they could add to possibly compete better with Telegram and WhatsApp, they really did Stories first.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Possibly it was low hanging fruit. Easy to implement, and it gives people a feature pretty much everything else has.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 1 year ago

So low it’s fermenting on the floor with nobody touching it.

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

And here I was waiting for simultaneous phone and tablet sync as well as notifications for Signal. Nope, I can only use one device at a time. I noped out and went with Telegram. Priorities.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Look for Matrix/Element, it's the Lemmy to Signal/Discord/Teams/Slack's Reddit. 👍

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd compare it to Mastodon more. Like Mastodon, it has an actual competent non-profit behind it and is very transparent and open up community engagement with a ton of clients. Lemmy developers are... just doing their own thing I guess. Lemmy needs a rewrite tbh, it's still a mess.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Maybe. I just assumed people on Lemmy would be familiar with Lemmy when I'm not sure they'd be familiar with Mastodon. But, yeah, maybe they are.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I'll check it out, thanks. :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Matrix is neat but incredibly slow, lacks many functions of Discord/Teams/Slack, etc, and lastly is not private at all unless you run your own server and use it only to converse with people on your server.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Matrix supports e2e chats with other users, even over federation.

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

That's all well and good but your server collects pretty much all metadata.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I know signal claims they have little/no metadata, but is that a protocol guarantee or are we just trusting them that they aren’t logging anything? I personally have no trust in signal given they are against federation and custom clients.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I mean they have provided court documents from when they have been subpoenaed and they didn't give any metadata. I'm not sure what more you can ask for.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not even that... They don't even have desktop registration in the official client, which is just outrageous.

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

I can’t get enough of my contacts using signal for stories to be useful

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Literally everyone I talk to uses Telegram and not a single one of us uses their Stories feature. It's fucking useless in a chat app.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Stories are useless everywhere, be good if we just got rid of them

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

There is no head-scratcher.

  1. It was one of the top requested features on the Signal forum for a long time. These things aren't being implemented all over every service for no reason. People want them, even if you don't .

  2. It brings more people onto the platform, which is handy if you ever want to use it to actually converse with other people.

  3. They created the first and only form of private social media in existence.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I actually liked having it, even though I don't use it much. Makes it easier to get other people to switch if this is a feature they were using already. It now pretty much does everything Snapchat does, only better

Snapchat was a privacy/security/performance nightmare

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

yeah, I actually like using stories on Signal. I used to post to them much more back when I was still using Snapchat, but it's still a fun way of sharing some throwaway, unimportant photos with friends.

and besides, if you don't want them, Signal lets you disable them and they disappear from the UI completely.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They killed sms for bullshit reasons but they gave us stories

Stories, on an app for secure communication. All the sudden all my family that I set up with it who know nothing about encryption stopped using it because they don't want two texting apps. It's border on useless for me now because I only know like 2 people who still have it

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Yeah Signal is completely irrelevant to me now after they dropped SMS integration. The centralized servers and closed source servers don't help either. Matrix/Element is much closer to what I hoped Signal would become. Matrix has its own issues, but I at least agree more with their direction.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

encrypted stories on an app for secure communication make more sense than unencrypted SMS.

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

Except that the whole selling point was you could replace your SMS app so you got secure communication without having yet another app. I dropped it when they dropped SMS.