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Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive (signal.org)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 105 points 2 years ago* (5 children)

Crazy how decentralization improves both, but they are vehemently against that. I trust them in terms of privacy, but their insistence on centralization, blocking third party apps, removing SMS, and refusal to support fdroid, I'm not a fan of the direction they've gone recently.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Fr. Fuck signal for removing SMS support

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I assume that is exactly for one of the reasons they mentioned in the article: increasing costs for sms

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  • [+] 20 points 2 years ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] -5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    That's what they told me when gave then feedback through their website.

    There's no free lunch and corporations aren't the most trustworthy source of information though so maybe it was about cost.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    isnt signal a nonprofit? not a corporation

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Some nonprofit organizations are corporations and have pretty shitty practices:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_Wish_Network

    The Morman church is another US 'non-profit organization' yet somehow hordes billions.

    Trusting blindly without doing research because something is presented as a non-profit is a good way to be taken for a fool and separated from your money.

    When signal made their own cryptocurrency which they entirely premined was a huge red flag. Dropping SMS support was an annoyance that broke the camels back.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Yeah I think you are right. I too was really mad at Signal for ditching sms, and THEN having the audacity to ask for donations! This article shines a light on the reasons, wow.

    Still, I would only donate if they kept sms in there. Not without sms because now it's just one more isolated platform and no longer a one-stop solution at it used to be.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Removing SMS support makes sense. The potential for a user sending something through SMS that they thought was going over Signal is high. Even for the savvier users who would install Signal in the first place.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    It killed adoption, since now it's just another messaging app. Most of my contacts still use SMS, and will stay on it, so being able to use Signal was a smooth all-in-one experience. Now I have no point in keeping it installed because like 3 of my contacts use it, so it has no use to me, thus killing potential adoption.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    They've never had more users.

    And if you had spent 3 minutes looking at r/Signal or the support forum before they disabled SMS you would have seen how many people were confused by the feature.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Exactly the opposite. Removing sms was the thing that finally made me recommend it to my friends and family. People understand sms replacements. People understand alternate messaging apps. People don't understand encrypted sms.

    If you have people who love whatsapp, it's super easy to get them to use signal instead.

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  • [–] -3 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Perfect, that keeps you off signal and lowers their operating costs.

    Because if you actually needed signal, you’d still be using it. Security and privacy is not about convenience or a “smooth all-in-one experience”. It’s about actual security and privacy. And that is what signal provides.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    I mean, of course the company is against what will lose the company money.

    They're not doing this because they care about privacy, lol.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    ...they're a non-profit

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