<story><title>Losing Signal</title><url>https://ploum.net/2023-03-09-losing-signal.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rolisz</author><text>But then who is Signal for? Yes, it has E2EE encryption, but who cares about that other than us orangey types?&lt;p&gt;And Signal makes plenty of user hostile moves: making backups is not supported. If your Android phone dies, you can kiss your previous conversations goodbye. That&amp;#x27;s working as intended according to the team.&lt;p&gt;If I receive a large number of photos via Signal, i have to long tap each of them and save them individually (several taps to do that).&lt;p&gt;So really, who is Signal for then? It&amp;#x27;s not for anonymity fans. It&amp;#x27;s not for people who care about long term discussions.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>People keep writing posts and comments like this that seem premised on the thought that nobody at Signal considered the downsides to centralization, and that they just rejected federation out of spite.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re reading HN, Signal&amp;#x27;s design goals are almost certainly not your design goals. Signal was designed to replace SMS and WhatsApp, the most widely-used messaging systems on the planet, with something end-to-end secure. Signal is not Telegram, Slack, Wire, or Matrix. They make decisions that are certain to upset orangey-types like us (phone numbers, no federation, tethering to phones, and so on) because HN people aren&amp;#x27;t their core user base.&lt;p&gt;If you want to understand why Signal went this way, look at Matrix. Matrix was designed for federation from the beginning; that&amp;#x27;s part of the point. Federation delayed the rollout of default E2EE on Matrix by over a year. It will probably delay the resolution of the Nebuchadnezzar vulnerabilities --- which are very bad --- by some material amount of time as well. You can&amp;#x27;t have Signal&amp;#x27;s use cases and accept those downsides, but you can with Matrix&amp;#x27;s use cases.&lt;p&gt;By all means: use Matrix. But the constant psychologizing and theorizing about Signal&amp;#x27;s federation decision is tiresome. &amp;quot;The Ecosystem Is Moving&amp;quot; post, where Moxie Marlinspike laid out his case, was received approximately as well at Steve Jobs open letter on Adobe Flash. And, like the Flash letter, it has been pretty conclusively vindicated. That doesn&amp;#x27;t mean everything, or even most things, should be centralized. But it does make clear why Signal needed to be.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>soiler</author><text>&amp;gt; But then who is Signal for? Yes, it has E2EE encryption, but who cares about that other than us orangey types?&lt;p&gt;Although I think people like us (?) were some of the original proponents of Signal, and it could never have spread without us, I believe Signal&amp;#x27;s intention is more about capturing the wider market while simultaneously &lt;i&gt;changing&lt;/i&gt; that market to be more privacy-aware. I think that they believe they can make private, encrypted messaging to be a household idea, and I hope they&amp;#x27;re right.</text></comment>
<story><title>Losing Signal</title><url>https://ploum.net/2023-03-09-losing-signal.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rolisz</author><text>But then who is Signal for? Yes, it has E2EE encryption, but who cares about that other than us orangey types?&lt;p&gt;And Signal makes plenty of user hostile moves: making backups is not supported. If your Android phone dies, you can kiss your previous conversations goodbye. That&amp;#x27;s working as intended according to the team.&lt;p&gt;If I receive a large number of photos via Signal, i have to long tap each of them and save them individually (several taps to do that).&lt;p&gt;So really, who is Signal for then? It&amp;#x27;s not for anonymity fans. It&amp;#x27;s not for people who care about long term discussions.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>People keep writing posts and comments like this that seem premised on the thought that nobody at Signal considered the downsides to centralization, and that they just rejected federation out of spite.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re reading HN, Signal&amp;#x27;s design goals are almost certainly not your design goals. Signal was designed to replace SMS and WhatsApp, the most widely-used messaging systems on the planet, with something end-to-end secure. Signal is not Telegram, Slack, Wire, or Matrix. They make decisions that are certain to upset orangey-types like us (phone numbers, no federation, tethering to phones, and so on) because HN people aren&amp;#x27;t their core user base.&lt;p&gt;If you want to understand why Signal went this way, look at Matrix. Matrix was designed for federation from the beginning; that&amp;#x27;s part of the point. Federation delayed the rollout of default E2EE on Matrix by over a year. It will probably delay the resolution of the Nebuchadnezzar vulnerabilities --- which are very bad --- by some material amount of time as well. You can&amp;#x27;t have Signal&amp;#x27;s use cases and accept those downsides, but you can with Matrix&amp;#x27;s use cases.&lt;p&gt;By all means: use Matrix. But the constant psychologizing and theorizing about Signal&amp;#x27;s federation decision is tiresome. &amp;quot;The Ecosystem Is Moving&amp;quot; post, where Moxie Marlinspike laid out his case, was received approximately as well at Steve Jobs open letter on Adobe Flash. And, like the Flash letter, it has been pretty conclusively vindicated. That doesn&amp;#x27;t mean everything, or even most things, should be centralized. But it does make clear why Signal needed to be.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>oneshtein</author><text>&amp;gt; Yes, it has E2EE encryption, but who cares about that other than us orangey types?&lt;p&gt;Signal is vulnerable to MITM attack. Our government has no problems with reading of my messages in Signal. I forced either to accept new certificate and be OK with wiretaping, or to lost communication channel with a friend.</text></comment>