• 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    112
    arrow-down
    7
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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.

        • witten@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          24
          arrow-down
          4
          ·
          1 year ago

          Wait. Signal was an SMS client. It wouldn’t cost them anything for a user to send an SMS message. IIRC, they nixed the SMS feature for security reasons, not cost.

          • 🤘🐺🤘@monero.town
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            arrow-down
            7
            ·
            1 year ago

            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.

              • 🤘🐺🤘@monero.town
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                4
                arrow-down
                2
                ·
                1 year 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.

        • PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          9
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • ScreaminOctopus@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            6
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            The sms cost is for account creation and verification on new devices, being an sms client didn’t cost anything aside from maintaining that portion of the app

        • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          1 year ago

          One reason was worry that people accidentally send SMS when they mean to send a secure message

    • InvaderDJ@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        15
        arrow-down
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • teolan@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          1 year 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.

        • fkn@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          1 year 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.

        • jaspersgroove@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          5
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          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.

    • interceder270@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      arrow-down
      6
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      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.

    • Lime66@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago
      • Signal wants to be as secure as possible
      • F droid has security issues
      • It makes perfect sense to me