I had my whats app status set to encourage people to contact me on signal and no one swapped over 2 years. I don’t think it was at all effective. Having said that, now there is a wave of migration so it may be enough to tip someone over the edge (although I expect a short a sweet bit of text is what would win).
I love this collective blitzkrieg against Whatsapp & Facebook.
90s called and we want our internet back. Now I hope that we will see a revival of the simplicity of the 90s, where the power is handed back to the people, where you could write desktop apps using Visual Basic and write a webpage in HTML with frames.
A bit of an aside but I had no idea you could set your status to a series of twenty images in whatsapp and I have no idea why this feature exists - granted I don't tend to non-professionally use messengers for communication so I'm a bit out of the loop.
Why did Jan Koum and Brian Acton sell Whatsapp? They should have tried to monetize it with their $1 a year (or whatever) fee and see how many paid.
The truth is that they became big in geographies like India (population 1.3 billion) because they didn't actually enforce the fee for most users, and because Whatsapp worked very well with low data usage across all platforms including Symbian and offered free messaging at a time when Indians were used to having to pay per SMS.
It's convenient for the founders to grandstand now that Whatsapp is someone else's responsibility, but it was their responsibility once, and they never converted it into a profitable company, and when they got a offer too big to refuse, sold.
It’s very difficult my to influence Signal for a very long time because of the way they are structured. If that’s your concern, we can talk about making Signal a public utility rather than a “Rinse, Lather Repeat” scenario.
Bleh. It was hard enough to convince my family and friends to swap to Whatsapp many years ago. Remember also when Whatsapp promised complete end to end encryption and privacy?
I feel like it's the curse of popularity. As soon as one of these companies get big enough, it will get bought it, and this nonsense will happen again.
I think only decentralized systems are the answer, but they have their own challenges. I don't think there is a lot of value in switching to yet another centralized service.
Signal is a non-profit organisation. The way they are structured means they literally have no incentive to try and profit off their user base, no matter the size. I'm not saying it's not impossible that could change at some point in the future but right now they're clearly providing a net good for the world for private communication and there is no clear reason why that should change in the future as long they can continue to support themselves through donations.
N=1, maybe people aren't experiencing the same thing, but I was hoping to move all my whatsapp chats over to Signal and never expected anyone to care because I've watched the internet do it's thing for the last 10 years. Much to my surprise someone else suggested it and within 30 minutes all of my groups had moved over and with very little loss of membership. I was shocked at how quickly things moved, including my parents in my family groups, and how willing non-tech people were to move. YMMV, but it may not. Give it a shot.
I liked the slides, but at this point I think that the whole "Try to take Telegram down with Whatsapp" is misguided.
There is VERY SERIOUS security flaw associated with any "non-paranoid" use of Signal, which Telegram addresses superbly. This is the "I don't want to lose my wedding photos because I dropped my phone in the toilet" scenario.
Telegram addresses this in the following manner: "Anything you want backed up and aren't too worried about existing in the cloud, goes on our cloud, encrypted, enabling you to access it from a new untoileted phone if necessary. Anything you don't want going in our cloud, you can be in control of, either by chatting in secret, or by backing up and deleting bilaterally.". Telegram has been audited frequently enough to be trustworthy that this in fact is true.
Signal addresses this by .. well, they don't. They hope that you will have the good sense of transferring the backup from your phone to an external disk before dropping your phone in the toilet. Which means the only reliable way to back things up automatically if you're an average use is? You guessed it. Dropbox / Google. So effectively exactly back to the Whatsapp leaky backup model.
I'd rather we convince people jump the Whatsapp ship first, before we start dividing into factions that will hurt that message. You can have your civil war later if you really want to.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 52.9 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1349236175773462532?s=2...
90s called and we want our internet back. Now I hope that we will see a revival of the simplicity of the 90s, where the power is handed back to the people, where you could write desktop apps using Visual Basic and write a webpage in HTML with frames.
The truth is that they became big in geographies like India (population 1.3 billion) because they didn't actually enforce the fee for most users, and because Whatsapp worked very well with low data usage across all platforms including Symbian and offered free messaging at a time when Indians were used to having to pay per SMS.
It's convenient for the founders to grandstand now that Whatsapp is someone else's responsibility, but it was their responsibility once, and they never converted it into a profitable company, and when they got a offer too big to refuse, sold.
https://twitter.com/snowden/status/1350130193789296645?s=21
I feel like it's the curse of popularity. As soon as one of these companies get big enough, it will get bought it, and this nonsense will happen again.
I think only decentralized systems are the answer, but they have their own challenges. I don't think there is a lot of value in switching to yet another centralized service.
https://twitter.com/snowden/status/1350130193789296645?s=21
Also, when will it be possible to use Signal on the desktop without having it on a phone first?
There is VERY SERIOUS security flaw associated with any "non-paranoid" use of Signal, which Telegram addresses superbly. This is the "I don't want to lose my wedding photos because I dropped my phone in the toilet" scenario.
Telegram addresses this in the following manner: "Anything you want backed up and aren't too worried about existing in the cloud, goes on our cloud, encrypted, enabling you to access it from a new untoileted phone if necessary. Anything you don't want going in our cloud, you can be in control of, either by chatting in secret, or by backing up and deleting bilaterally.". Telegram has been audited frequently enough to be trustworthy that this in fact is true.
Signal addresses this by .. well, they don't. They hope that you will have the good sense of transferring the backup from your phone to an external disk before dropping your phone in the toilet. Which means the only reliable way to back things up automatically if you're an average use is? You guessed it. Dropbox / Google. So effectively exactly back to the Whatsapp leaky backup model.
I'd rather we convince people jump the Whatsapp ship first, before we start dividing into factions that will hurt that message. You can have your civil war later if you really want to.