+bonifartius 𒂼𒄄
haha, webshit weekly is glorious again:
> Signal is having technical difficulties
> Signal (business model: "Uber for texting") falls over. Most communications protocols are federated, and would survive one company's servers eating dirt, but Signal's owner/operator has decided this would degrade the user experience, presumably worse than the entire service shitting the bed out loud. Hackernews assumes that Signal is incapable of paying its hosting fees, and comes to the rescue by sending their money to a company that can't spin up cloud nodes fast enough to serve text messages. Other Hackernews bemoan the fact that once again they look like idiots, since they just conned half their friends and family into signing up for this mess.
@bonifartius It baffles me that Signal is still going. I used it from 2014 (as TextSecure) to 2019 and the experience was one of constantly having to work around the developers' decisions that everyone should use the app according to a certain paradigm, which never seemed to line up with my habits.
They had this weird double view of who uses the app. On the one hand they imagined that everyone was using the app for top secret dissident activity - it had no functionality to export a plaintext backup, only encrypted; it nagged you every time you saved an image because other apps could now read it; it blanked the screen when shown in the overview, and so on. But in other areas they slavishly followed the latest UX "best practices" - it enforced everyone using Apple emoji for uniformity; it kept up with trends involving "sticker packs"; it had a mercifully short-lived phase in which *your* messages changed colour on a per-conversation basis, but your interlocutor's were always grey.
Eventually a bug overwrote the encryption keys, causing me to lose all my messages and rendering my backups useless. I do miss some features of the app (it unified my SMS and encrypted messages in a single view nicely) but I'm so glad to be free of that ecosystem.
@khird idk, i have many friends which like it, but i always have hated nearly everything about it. it's a mixture of "ui made for granny" (i really hate it), "tinfoil hat security" (security is bullshit with a mobile os where spooks sit on plethoras of 0days) and "fuck you, love moxie".
i know that matrix may have it's own shortcomings, but they have proven that e2e crypto works in a federated setting. and: don't trust element? build your own client with the reviewed libolm!