i will continue to use telegram to talk to friends
the people who run it are indefensible but there's no real alternative that fits my requirements for a messenger
requirements:
- do not fucking gaslight me (this happens all the time with Matrix and nearly cost me friendships a few times)
- do not lose my fucking messages (i think this happened something like five times with Signal)
- end to end encrypted or something i guess
@whitequark I’m curious about the signal message losses, did you pick up any kind of commonality in cause? I’ve picked up some half-failure modes[0] in the mobile app at times but I never touch the desktop/cli options so I haven’t gotten to compare those
[0] the most common one is some kind of send desync, where it stalls on API comms then never gets to sending the message unless you manually intervene
@froztbyte historically the big problem was that i moved countries a lot due to reasons such as war, which comes with changing phone numbers a lot. i think i went through close to 8 or 10 phone numbers in my life already
signal is written with the assumption that you have one (1) phone number that never changes and that everyone knows
@whitequark @froztbyte Signal is definitely biased towards it being better to lose your messages than there being any risk of someone else accessing them via any recovery mechanism.
You made me remember to try and setup the backup functionality, so I stumbled upon this page: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007062012-Change-Number
So, technically possible to change your number without losing messages, but only in ideal /orderly settings where you have access to the (old) phone Signal is installed on.
@spoltier @froztbyte I have basically never had it because it was either due to phone failure or the SIM no longer being accessible
so I just don't trust Signal with anything that's actually important for me, because _I need that to remain accessible_