Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

We seem to have lost one of the "2" decorations, but thanks to a bit of quick thinking, I don't think anyone will notice.

Anyone have other examples of "Here's a common thing that most people are doing wrong, along the lines of https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2019/11/utcnow.html and https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2018/03/pytz-fastest-footgun.html ?

@gpshead Well I'm not that interested in boosting Signal anymore anyway. The main selling point is gone and and non-technical types I have convinced to use Signal now have to deal with two apps plus a migration of their SMS history.

This plus the general vendor lock-in model Signal has going don't make me enthusiastic to spend what limited influence I have over my contacts' technical choices on promoting Signal.

@lucifargundam Yeah. I understand where they are coming from — ironically, I'm complaining about this in between drafts of a blog post about how sometimes you should deliberately choose to *not* implement features that people want if a sufficiently high percentage of people will use those features wrong. That's basically the whole justification for removing SMS, so you'd think I'd be in support of it, except:

1. I think SMS support was actually a core feature of Signal and they should probably lean in to UX design to minimize any potential harm rather than give up on it

2. In the same blog post I suggest that when you have a feature that some people might use correctly but a larger fraction of people might use incorrectly, you should probably still include the feature, but just make it *more difficult*. In this case adding a setting like, "Enable SMS even though it's insecure" would really help.

@gpshead I think the main reason Signal has taken off so much is that it was effortless. It was a better SMS client than the default one *plus* it did opportunistic encryption.

Anecdotally, it seems to me that Signal adoption is lower among iOS users, and I've always attributed that to the fact that they have a basically degraded experience, since they can't set Signal as their SMS app.

@gpshead I don't really understand this. It sounds like you are saying that I should disdain SMS so much that I don't care about my client, but it's not like I can stop using SMS.

I'm almost certainly going to need to start using SMS *more* now, because a good chunk of the people I talk to on Signal are people where I went to send them a text message through Signal and I got a "blue send button". Now I'm just going to go straight for the SMS app, and all those communications will be unencrypted.

OK, I upgraded to the latest Signal and it still works as an SMS client.

Kind of a twist of the knife that they are also prominently pushing "stories" in this update, which.... does not seem like it was any sort of user-requested feature.

@jerub I don't know, I think I used Google Voice before Signal, and I actually really like Signal as an SMS client. I assume Messages is not good because I'm not sure I've ever liked a default app, but maybe it's OK?

@obi What does direct APK mean? If I upgrade today through the play store is that the same thing? I'd be happy to delay this decision a while.

#Signal users on #Android, anyone have a suggestion for a decent replacement SMS client? Looks like I am going to have to upgrade the app soon. 🙁

@offby1 I've got some vague hopes for this: https://arewep2pyet.com/

I'm thinking 5% chance it will happen, but it would be cool if it did.

I kinda thought Amazon was just completely neglecting Goodreads, but they've recently been doing a bunch of messing around with the front-end in a very "likes are now florps / timeline goes sideways" way.

Possibly this is related to the fact that Goodreads is the *slowest website I use regularly*, and has been for many, many years?

Goodreads, I've regularly used your website for *13 years*, and reviewed over 1000 books. I've got librarian privileges and I'm not even using a bunch of weird IP addresses.

Why do I need to complete a captcha every time I submit a review?

#goodreads

@tonwood Qoto also has a bunch of nice to have features like **markdown** and quote tweets, plus the very roomy 65k character limit.

@brianpm https://dynomight.net/aspartame/