I believe that everyone has a fundamental right to secure, private communication. Some people may hold the same belief for the right to transfer funds. I don't agree and I suspect many others feel the same. That tension alone makes this look like a bad decision to me.
Sadly, now it feels like Signal was just a long game trojan for Marlinspike to onboard users to a cryptocurrency pyramid scheme. This has nothing to do with its core functionality and it makes me question the developers' motives.
I've wasted my influence with my non-technical friends convincing them to adopt Signal, and I don't forsee convincing them to switch yet again to something different.
The state of secure messaging is really bleak. I wish Matrix had an IM-style client that was decent enough for non-technical users to adopt.
Signal for iOS still doesn't support message backup like the Android version.
And Telegram introduced a feature to import old Whatsapp chats into new Telegram conversations, a form of "backup". This was great when I was migrating away from Whatsapp, and made the decision between Signal and Telegram easy for casual conversations where encryption wasn't a priority.
This has bitten me before. Now I'm thinking that every recommendation and suggestion to adopt must come with a "for now this is the best way to do it, but it will probably change again". And somehow try to prepare the non-technical people for that.
What are the arguments?
Don't you think that as data becomes more and more valuable, "freedom of transaction" is a natural evolution of "freedom of communication"?
In an environment where only "legally valueless" data circulates freely, the few entities that are actually able to monetize this data become gigantic monopolies (Google, FB, ...), while most individual parties are either forced to play by their rules (Youtube, Patreon, ...) or filtered out by startup costs.
Is it really that hard to imagine unobtrusive UI that makes this as optional as sending GIFs, stickers or location data? Or did the later features already kill Signal for you?
The whole issue is a real minefield and I don't have a firm stance. And obviously the fiat money system has gaps and flaws there too. I'm sure much of the HN audience would disagree with me here from a libertarian point of view. But I think it's safe to say that the issue of transaction privacy & freedom is not as straightforward as that of speech (which itself is really not that simple).
See Element [1] which uses Matrix [2]. It feels like IM, and is super simple to onboard new users. I'm not involved with it, but I'm a huge fan of the Matrix ecosystem.
If you want group chats to be mixed in with 1-1 chats, try SchildiChat [3], a fork of Element.
[1]: https://element.io/
[2]: https://matrix.org/
At the risk of sounding like a Signal simp: don’t use this feature if you’d don’t like it? I have no idea whether this is a good or bad idea, I figure the proof of the pudding is in the tasting and I haven’t had a chance to try the signal payments feature, but I’m willing to extend the benefit of the doubt here at least as far as “I’ll withhold judgement til I can try it for myself.”
I really don’t get the ire on this. I think it’s good that whisper systems is forward looking and trying to be innovative and dynamic and go where users are rather than just sit around waiting to become irrelevant. Not all experiments or risks will pay off but that doesn’t mean risks and bets are bad.
They are in WhatsApp, too. At least Facebook still claims that after the Snowden leaks :) And: Did you verify this? Did you check the source code at signal's android/ios client repo? Did you also verify that no untrusted third party receives your backed up private keys?
Why do you trust Google more than Facebook? [1]
[1] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/d74e9f74103...
I'm not trying to troll here. I'm trying to point out that babbling about crypto is easy. Verifying it, and actually caring about it is another thing. Most users are probably also the wrong audience for early adoption of TOX.
Have you tried fluffychat on android? Or any of the other clients https://matrix.org/clients-matrix
How do I prove that I didn't use it? And why on earth would I want a messaging app to put a target like that on my back if I'm not even using the feature? With this feature, the likelihood of someone demanding access to the app grows from almost zero to pretty significant.
Fundamentally, Element "feels" more like an IRC client than a typical IM client like Signal. It isn't focused on direct, one-off, or small group communications (this isn't a technical thing and it has nothing to do with federation, it's simply the UX paradigm that Element has adopted).
The SchildiChat fork looks promising, although it's clearly too early to recommend it. It's not even available on the Google Play store, which makes it unsuitable for non-technical users.
How is using Google for domain fronting for the purpose of censorship circumvention "trusting Google"? They don't get to see the message content (just like Facebook doesn't see the content for WhatsApp).
> Did you also verify that no untrusted third party receives your backed up private keys?
Private keys are not backed up in either service, as far as I know.
> Did you check the source code at signal's android/ios client repo?
Given the lack of reproducible builds on iOS/the app store, any source code audit is pointless if the app vendor is included in your threat model.