Update: Pushing for messenger interoperability (part of EU Digital Markets Act)might be more tractable and more helpful.
Forwarding private comment from a friend: Interoperability was part of Digital Markets Act, so EVP Ribera will be main enforcer, and was asked about her stance in her EU parliament confirmation hearing yesterday. You could watch that / write her team abt the underrated cybersecurity benefits of interoperability esp. given it would upgrade WhatsApp’s encryption
TLDR: Improving Signal (messenger) seems important, [edit: maybe] neglected and tractable. Thoughts? Can we help?
Signal (similar to Whatsapp) is the only truly privacy-friendly popular messenger I know. Whatsapp and Telegram also offer end-to-end encryption (Telegram only in “secret chats”) but they still collect metadata like your contacts, and many people I meet strongly prefer Signal for various reasons: Some people work in cybersecurity and have strong privacy preferences, others dislike Telegram (bad rep, popular among conspiratists, spam) and Meta (Whatsapp owner). For some vulnerable people such activists in authoritarian regimes or whistleblowers in powerful organizations, secure messaging seems essential, and Signal seems to be the best tool we have.
While Signal is improving, I still often find it annoying to use compared to Telegram. Here just some examples:
1) it’s easily overwhelming: No sorting chats in folders, archiving group chats doesn’t really work (they keep popping back to ‘unarchived’ whenever someone writes a new message), lots of notifications I don’t care about like “user xyz changed their security number” and no way to turn them off
2) no option to make chat history visible to new group members, which is really annoying for some use cases
3) no poll feature, no live location sharing
4) no “community”/supergroup feature, people need to find and manually join all different groups in a community
5) no threads (in Telegram that’s possible in announcement channels)
I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re collectively losing thousands or even millions of productive hours and valuable attention on Signal (I would strongly recommend Slack over Signal, but for some use cases or some users Slack doesn’t work). This seems high in scope, neglected and tractable to me.
Curious to get your thoughts on: a) Disagree with my argument? Am I missing anything? b) What’s the bottleneck of Signal? Is it a matter of prioritization, funding/talent (edit: probably not, see harfe’s comment), or something else? Does anyone have insights? c) Can we help? How?
In my opinion you have not really argued why it is neglected. As a starting point, they seem to spend roughly $35 million per year: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840. $14 million of those are for salaries, so I would be surprised if new features are strongly bottlenecked by money and talent.
I am just guessing on these issues, but my suspicion as for why some features such as “live location sharing” and “display past encrypted messages from the group chat you were not a member of but only just now joined” are not (yet) implemented because they do not fit well into Signal’s approach to security/privacy.
Thanks for looking up their funding situations, appreciate it!
I meant neglected as in “they don’t seem to prioritize it for whichever reason”, not necessarily funding- or capacity-constraints.
I see how they might not want to implement some of these features, though even in the case of “show message history” to new members, there could be more elegant solutions like giving members the option to opt-in to sharing their messages with new people in the group.
Other features like “enabling community chats / supergroup” or “better chat archiving & sorting chats in folders” seem not in conflict with privacy, at least not obviously. Generally they do seem to copy many features from other messengers (they recently launched stories, similar to Whatsapp status), they just seem a lot slower than Whatsapp and Telegram to adopt these things and far behind.
Update: Pushing for messenger interoperability (part of EU Digital Markets Act)might be more tractable and more helpful.
Forwarding private comment from a friend: Interoperability was part of Digital Markets Act, so EVP Ribera will be main enforcer, and was asked about her stance in her EU parliament confirmation hearing yesterday. You could watch that / write her team abt the underrated cybersecurity benefits of interoperability esp. given it would upgrade WhatsApp’s encryption.
Update: Pushing for messenger interoperability (part of EU Digital Markets Act) might be more tractable and more helpful.
Forwarding private comment from a friend: Interoperability was part of Digital Markets Act, so EVP Ribera will be main enforcer, and was asked about her stance in her EU parliament confirmation hearing yesterday. You could watch that / write her team abt the underrated cybersecurity benefits of interoperability esp. given it would upgrade WhatsApp’s encryption
TLDR: Improving Signal (messenger) seems important, [edit: maybe] neglected and tractable. Thoughts? Can we help?
Signal (similar to Whatsapp) is the only truly privacy-friendly popular messenger I know. Whatsapp and Telegram also offer end-to-end encryption (Telegram only in “secret chats”) but they still collect metadata like your contacts, and many people I meet strongly prefer Signal for various reasons: Some people work in cybersecurity and have strong privacy preferences, others dislike Telegram (bad rep, popular among conspiratists, spam) and Meta (Whatsapp owner). For some vulnerable people such activists in authoritarian regimes or whistleblowers in powerful organizations, secure messaging seems essential, and Signal seems to be the best tool we have.
While Signal is improving, I still often find it annoying to use compared to Telegram. Here just some examples:
1) it’s easily overwhelming: No sorting chats in folders, archiving group chats doesn’t really work (they keep popping back to ‘unarchived’ whenever someone writes a new message), lots of notifications I don’t care about like “user xyz changed their security number” and no way to turn them off
2) no option to make chat history visible to new group members, which is really annoying for some use cases
3) no poll feature, no live location sharing
4) no “community”/supergroup feature, people need to find and manually join all different groups in a community
5) no threads (in Telegram that’s possible in announcement channels)
I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re collectively losing thousands or even millions of productive hours and valuable attention on Signal (I would strongly recommend Slack over Signal, but for some use cases or some users Slack doesn’t work). This seems high in scope, neglected and tractable to me.
Curious to get your thoughts on:
a) Disagree with my argument? Am I missing anything?
b) What’s the bottleneck of Signal? Is it a matter of prioritization, funding/talent (edit: probably not, see harfe’s comment), or something else? Does anyone have insights?
c) Can we help? How?
In my opinion you have not really argued why it is neglected. As a starting point, they seem to spend roughly $35 million per year: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840. $14 million of those are for salaries, so I would be surprised if new features are strongly bottlenecked by money and talent.
I am just guessing on these issues, but my suspicion as for why some features such as “live location sharing” and “display past encrypted messages from the group chat you were not a member of but only just now joined” are not (yet) implemented because they do not fit well into Signal’s approach to security/privacy.
Thanks for looking up their funding situations, appreciate it!
I meant neglected as in “they don’t seem to prioritize it for whichever reason”, not necessarily funding- or capacity-constraints.
I see how they might not want to implement some of these features, though even in the case of “show message history” to new members, there could be more elegant solutions like giving members the option to opt-in to sharing their messages with new people in the group.
Other features like “enabling community chats / supergroup” or “better chat archiving & sorting chats in folders” seem not in conflict with privacy, at least not obviously. Generally they do seem to copy many features from other messengers (they recently launched stories, similar to Whatsapp status), they just seem a lot slower than Whatsapp and Telegram to adopt these things and far behind.
Update: Pushing for messenger interoperability (part of EU Digital Markets Act) might be more tractable and more helpful.
Forwarding private comment from a friend: Interoperability was part of Digital Markets Act, so EVP Ribera will be main enforcer, and was asked about her stance in her EU parliament confirmation hearing yesterday. You could watch that / write her team abt the underrated cybersecurity benefits of interoperability esp. given it would upgrade WhatsApp’s encryption.
Curious to get your thoughts on this too!