alt Hacker NewsOne of the most frustrating decisions from them was to stop allowing signal to be a catch-all messenger for encrypted and non-encrypted messages. I was able to onboard so many people, including very non techy relatives, because switching to a secure app for a small subset of people was never something they really wanted to do.
For security and privacy to really win out and raise the bar, it has to be able to happen in the background without the user even realizing it.
Making an app for enthusiasts is fine but Signal is going to remain niche if they can't make it more of an open ecosystem.
Replies
throwaway902984 • today at 3:22 PM
Where once it was a messaging app for everybody, now it is a mailbox they forget to check.
Yeah this resulted in a mass exodus of my contacts from Signal. The worst part is some of them never deactivated their Signal accounts, they simply uninstalled it from their devices. For a good while, I was sending messages to the void because Signal thought they were still active users.
I only have 2 people in my contacts that use it now. Every now and then somebody will install it for a couple weeks and ditch it again.