The privacy-focused messaging app arose from a fringe culture that emphasized individual autonomy and skepticism of authority. As it tries to go mainstream, can it escape its roots?
I haven’t done any Signal app recruiting in my circle of contacts (in fact, I don’t think I’ve talked to anyone about it) and I have 14 contacts that have it installed at the very least. I don’t think it would be a huge push to make Signal more prevalent.
The uphill battle is making a dent in iMessage adoption, which seems to be deeper and deeper entrenched every day.
Signal is by far much easier to get family/friends to use than Matrix or Session. Downloaded it to my parents’ phones and told them this is how you contact me.
They dropped the native sms integration. IMO, that was the best tool for adoption. Make it seamless for people to move over from their native SMS messenger and people will use it. Going full closed, only signal to signal, meant I needed to use multiple messaging apps for different people. And I had to remember who is on which. It’s been a headache.
A bunch of Matrix bridges on one platform, with some extra funding. It looks cool, but isn’t lifechanging. It is designed to (hopefully) make it easier to use, but if you don’t care, you can set up the bridges yourself on your own matrix server.
I’m surprised it’s possible to talk to most of those services without having access to trade secrets. I guess you can get that info from reverse engineering the clients, but I’d expect that approach to be very brittle and possibly subject to legal action.
Well this is interesting. I hadn’t heard of Beeper before. Many years ago I used Trillion (I think it was) as a chat aggregator. It fell apart pretty quickly, but Beeper looks promising. I signed up for their wait-list. We’ll see what happens.
I haven’t done any Signal app recruiting in my circle of contacts (in fact, I don’t think I’ve talked to anyone about it) and I have 14 contacts that have it installed at the very least. I don’t think it would be a huge push to make Signal more prevalent.
The uphill battle is making a dent in iMessage adoption, which seems to be deeper and deeper entrenched every day.
Signal is by far much easier to get family/friends to use than Matrix or Session. Downloaded it to my parents’ phones and told them this is how you contact me.
this is exactly what I did to my mother
(this sentence sounds so scary out of context)
They dropped the native sms integration. IMO, that was the best tool for adoption. Make it seamless for people to move over from their native SMS messenger and people will use it. Going full closed, only signal to signal, meant I needed to use multiple messaging apps for different people. And I had to remember who is on which. It’s been a headache.
Beeper is a lifesaver: https://www.beeper.com/
You can self-host if you prefer: https://github.com/beeper/self-host
What sorcery is this?
A bunch of Matrix bridges on one platform, with some extra funding. It looks cool, but isn’t lifechanging. It is designed to (hopefully) make it easier to use, but if you don’t care, you can set up the bridges yourself on your own matrix server.
I’m surprised it’s possible to talk to most of those services without having access to trade secrets. I guess you can get that info from reverse engineering the clients, but I’d expect that approach to be very brittle and possibly subject to legal action.
Well this is interesting. I hadn’t heard of Beeper before. Many years ago I used Trillion (I think it was) as a chat aggregator. It fell apart pretty quickly, but Beeper looks promising. I signed up for their wait-list. We’ll see what happens.
Trillian. It’s named after a character in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.