Ehhhh
Signal lost a lot of my love when they removed SMS support
Especially when your identity on Signal is STILL only tied to a phone number, instead of a username, and there is nothing less private than actually giving out your real phone number.
Absolutely baffling.
Giving out a phone number harms anonymity, which is something they never claimed to give you.
I'd like not having to use my number as much as you, but lets be angry about it for the right reasons, at least
sms is useless tho?
it's basically a confirmation code delivery system, with some ads and spam
It's not useless in western countries. We don't all have our entire country communicating via Metas WhatsApp lol
WDYM SMS support?
Support for SMS
Lol, that was the worst feature ever. If you forgot disabling it at install, it was nearly impossible to see it's going to be a sms or signal message. (Especially for people who aren't tech savvy)
That is dumb that they'd remove a feature, but I tried it and switched back to a dedicated texting app. The feature wasn't full featured enough for me to want to use it.
What is a better alternative than signal?
XMPP
As I wrote elsewhere in this thread, XMPP would be my preference. It just works. In fact that's what the other messengers (at facebook, Google, …) already use, but chose to put behind a walled-garden.
What matters is that whatever comes next (or, from the past in the case of XMPP) is federated, so no single organization has a single-handed control/monopoly over the network. Matrix and SimpleX are federated alternatives to XMPP, but I don't see Matrix stabilizing any time soon, and SimpleX just isn't ready yet. XMPP can offer you today an experience that's comparable to WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram/…
What's the issue with Matrix? I've tried both Matrix and XMPP but stuck with Matrix because it just works. XMPP is also good but it lacks a good Android client (The available clients look very outdated, and honestly, pretty ugly). It's also kinda hard to know if your client or server even supports all the extensions that are needed.
Ended my donations to Signal after discovering they choose Google Hosting Services over open source and privacy respecting alternatives.
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