EDIT: Interesting geographic usage data in the tweet replies. Most replies by far coming from Indian Signal users, many comparing Signal's reliability to WhatsApp. Also strong showing in the comments from Africa (esp. Nigeria) and the Middle East. I wonder how many joined Signal just recently in response to Facebook's changes to WhatsApp [0].
As a long time signal and telegram user, I can say about 50 percent of my signal contacts joined after elon musk mentioned it. Not that there is any correlation to Elon.
My telegram feed has been abuzz the last couple of days with 'your friend has joined Telegram!'. Great to see and it's a nice chance to reconnect with friends I haven't talked with in a while.
Ockham alternative: the number of users exceeded the capacity of the system.
This has nothing to do with being shut down like Parler if that is what you're asking. That'd be a leap of logic based on very little evidence. Were it happening, there would be statements in the news. We have precedent.
You're telling me that Parler's 8M nowhere-to-go users have nothing to do with Signal's recent influx of 40M users?
Here's a hint: The entire 8M from Parler are using Signal. They're still plotting all the same violence, but instead of being protected by a promise from the founder, they're protected by the design of the app itself. There's no argument to use against Parler that can't be used against Signal. They need to be shut down now, before people die again.
Signal is a threat to our core tenets of freedom, security and democracy. Parler could change its moderation policy tomorrow but Signal can't change how it works.
Isn’t Signal just groups and direct messages? Parler was a giant echo chamber where you can tumble down the rabbit hole, signal has no suggested groups or other broadcast to the word. Only broadcast to a channel opting into a conversation. Sure you can use it to coordinate and spread disinformation but it’s got a much lower viral spread.
What happens when they move from Signal to some other form of encrypted communication? Won't you need to ban that too? Have you considered the difficulty or the implications of what you are proposing?
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political battle, as well as posting a ton of unsubstantive comments. We ban accounts that do those things (regardless of which politics they support or oppose). I don't want to ban you, but we have to protect this place, and political battle and unsubstantive comments are the two biggest problems.
Worth mentioning here that the reply in question is dishonest, bad faith argument.
All that this person did was tell me I was wrong, then restate my exact point that the service went down due to hitting a capacity limit. Really the only difference between what they said and what I said was the lack of civility, and the additional assertion that Signal needed to be shutdown.
The "downage" is intermittent; sending messages for me (middle of the US on Google Fiber) alternates between taking forever to send and straight-up failing. Desktop app keeps showing the yellow "Disconnected" banner. At first I thought Google Fiber was down again (it's snowing right now...) but checking #Signal on Twitter and DownDetector.com clued me in pretty quick that this was a Signal issue. I was wondering if a massive influx of users might lead to growth pains.
The Element sign-on workflows have been getting better and better, do note.
But, I think the current exodus will be good for Matrix too in the long term. The big steps is getting people off the megacorps for communication. After that, things will work out.
As I understand it, that's part of what makes Session an interesting fork of Signal: not only distributed/federated message relay backbone, but implements elements of Tor to hide your IP from receivers (of course if you click on a beacon link that destroys the IP hiding, but I digress).
This is the only kind of downtime that makes your competitor way more furious than you are. I hope Elon Musk's tweet was the beginning of the end for Faceook, Inc.
I'm not sure if this is because of all the new users, so maybe someone that has been using Signal for a while longer can pitch in: Is the Desktop experience really as bad as it has been over the past few days?
It took 4 minutes for me this morning to replay a chat of maybe 200 messages, and that's with one person. I can't even imagine how bad it must be with multiple big groups. Sending takes ages, often being out of sync with the phone app, and I get notifications for messages I replied to half an hour ago on my Desktop when unlocking my phone.
Not sure if I'd wanna stay on Signal at the moment if it stays like this, maybe Matrix is really the better choice - at least Element on the web is by far superior to signal.
The desktop experience, at least for me, has been amazing. Very fast and clean.
The download times for messages / etc have been MUCH slower recently. I’m thinking it’s because of the load they are experiencing. As more people donate and as they scale for the load I imagine (and hope) it might even be faster than it was before.
I've been using Signal for years. Normally things are good. I'm not surprised by the hiccups since their userbase went up by >5x in the past week. I imagine it is very difficult to deal with that kind of scaling in such a short period of time.
I've never really had any issues with it over the last year or so, but the last week has been a bit spotty - but then my contact list has tripled in length since the whatsapp privacy update and news coverage - so I think its likely that it is demand.
I've setup a matrix homeserver yesterday, and in the process of setting up bridges to Signal/IRC etc so I get a single app with all the chats.
I'm not sure what you need from a web/desktop experience, for me it is a chat app, that I can send an image or txt , I don't really need anything else. YMMV
I would suggest to let it settle down for a few days, then see how it is. I would think that all whatsapp replacements are going to be peaking in use for the next week or so as people try out different things.
i didnt know you could set up bridges for signal. what does your server look like in terms of users? i want to test it out but dont know what i need to get started (besides the guides and all), just with the server
At the moment, it is me and a handful of other tech friends who are setting up servers of their own.
We've been installing things manually to test out different parts, but I think I'll be switching to a docker setup this weekend (purely for ease of setup)
I use Signal every day for 1:1 messages and a 1:2 group. There's basically no noticeable lag normally, i have very few complaints about the raw message functionality of Signal.
My complaints (if you can call them that) would be the general app quality on various platforms, and how much better Telegram feels. I'm a user that also enjoys all the stupid features that non-encrypted platforms have easier times adding. Gifs, stickers, drawing, reactions, /shrug - nothing necessary, but still.
So yea, functionally Signal works for me and my small group without much issue. It just doesn't have many Bells/Whistles.
I have to use Whatsapp to talk to people in a certain group. I use an old Android 6 phone with a prepaid SIM bought just for this single purpose, setup with a burner Google account. I only turn this phone on when I need to catch up or talk to them. It's really REALLY cheap and it works.
just signed up with hosted element. still gonna do p2p homeservers eventually but my group chats are currently disrupted so better to go here than hangouts telegram etc
We tried it out yesterday and it's ridiculous how convoluted it is and how difficult to do simple direct messages and groups. Groups couldn't be joined, I either couldn't find people or they couldn't find me. I really found the system intriguing but I can't imagine less tech savvy people to join as is.
75 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 32.3 ms ] threadEdit: Downdetector says its down https://downdetector.com/status/signal/, Twitter also has issues.
@ 2021-01-15T16:28:58.611Z
https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1350118809860886528
EDIT: Interesting geographic usage data in the tweet replies. Most replies by far coming from Indian Signal users, many comparing Signal's reliability to WhatsApp. Also strong showing in the comments from Africa (esp. Nigeria) and the Middle East. I wonder how many joined Signal just recently in response to Facebook's changes to WhatsApp [0].
[0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-pr...
> Use Signal[0]
[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1347165127036977153
https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1349577579091566592?s=2...
This has nothing to do with being shut down like Parler if that is what you're asking. That'd be a leap of logic based on very little evidence. Were it happening, there would be statements in the news. We have precedent.
Here's a hint: The entire 8M from Parler are using Signal. They're still plotting all the same violence, but instead of being protected by a promise from the founder, they're protected by the design of the app itself. There's no argument to use against Parler that can't be used against Signal. They need to be shut down now, before people die again.
Signal is a threat to our core tenets of freedom, security and democracy. Parler could change its moderation policy tomorrow but Signal can't change how it works.
Good call.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this, we'd appreciate it.
All that this person did was tell me I was wrong, then restate my exact point that the service went down due to hitting a capacity limit. Really the only difference between what they said and what I said was the lack of civility, and the additional assertion that Signal needed to be shutdown.
But, I think the current exodus will be good for Matrix too in the long term. The big steps is getting people off the megacorps for communication. After that, things will work out.
Difference being like email. Gmail (or your own matrix server) might go down, but the overall email ecosystem wouldn't.
And yes, it's down here in Toronto-Hamilton metro, Canada as well.
Good luck to the engineers at Signal! <3
Just donated to the Signal non-profit to help them out buying better infrastructure: https://signal.org/donate/
It took 4 minutes for me this morning to replay a chat of maybe 200 messages, and that's with one person. I can't even imagine how bad it must be with multiple big groups. Sending takes ages, often being out of sync with the phone app, and I get notifications for messages I replied to half an hour ago on my Desktop when unlocking my phone.
Not sure if I'd wanna stay on Signal at the moment if it stays like this, maybe Matrix is really the better choice - at least Element on the web is by far superior to signal.
The download times for messages / etc have been MUCH slower recently. I’m thinking it’s because of the load they are experiencing. As more people donate and as they scale for the load I imagine (and hope) it might even be faster than it was before.
I've setup a matrix homeserver yesterday, and in the process of setting up bridges to Signal/IRC etc so I get a single app with all the chats.
I'm not sure what you need from a web/desktop experience, for me it is a chat app, that I can send an image or txt , I don't really need anything else. YMMV
I would suggest to let it settle down for a few days, then see how it is. I would think that all whatsapp replacements are going to be peaking in use for the next week or so as people try out different things.
We've been installing things manually to test out different parts, but I think I'll be switching to a docker setup this weekend (purely for ease of setup)
https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
There are all sorts of bridges and bots:
https://matrix.org/bridges/ https://matrix.org/bots/
Once I have it roughly figured out, I'll look at paying to get some redundancy sorted, and then stick to this as my communications going forward.
My complaints (if you can call them that) would be the general app quality on various platforms, and how much better Telegram feels. I'm a user that also enjoys all the stupid features that non-encrypted platforms have easier times adding. Gifs, stickers, drawing, reactions, /shrug - nothing necessary, but still.
So yea, functionally Signal works for me and my small group without much issue. It just doesn't have many Bells/Whistles.
Signal the organization, the app, etc are all worthy of support and I for one thank Facebook for pushing millions of users into Signal.
Donate to them so they can buy more servers https://signal.org/donate/
* If you work in the US, many corporations will match your donation. Easy double of your donation
* Set https://smile.amazon.com to Signal, so your purchases on Amazon go to Signal
* Use services like Paypal to donate, that sends 100% of the money to the foundation
You can do the same for Signal.
> https://element.io/
You see why the matrix proto and apps around it are really complicated to the end user?