Comment by newscracker
7 years ago
> Signal does a great job of supporting activists.
I don’t think it practically achieves this. Even now, Signal is an unreliable platform to communicate with. One can’t be sure if the message will reach in a timely manner (like a few seconds or several seconds) or even reach at all. The UX and feature set are also far behind something like Wire.
I’ll accept that Signal has a strong and reputed protocol, and has take some strong measures on security and privacy. But everything else about is truly meh, to put it mildly.
Please don’t dismiss these points about reliability saying it has never failed for you or someone you know. It routinely fails for people I know, and that’s all that matters when recommending a messenger platform to others.
Signal has made it seem like security is easy to focus on (though a lot of thought and work has gone into it), but has shown that UX or pretty hard and that running a platform is even harder (even at Signal’s scale, which I presume is a fraction of other platforms).
Signal is beholden to the whims of Google due to their reliance upon the google cloud messaging stack. All messages are delivered based upon something outside of their control (whether Google decides they have enough priority to wake the modem). If you are on your phone all the time and have signal open it is usually instantaneous but say your phone is usually dormant it can be hours before a notification pops up. I'm not sure how different the situation is on iOS or if this is even avoidable with the current mobile duopoly. I find that the unreliability of signal precludes exclusive use of it so I tend to route a lot of communication through SMS via signal or double send. This is not high security stuff. It does seem like a relic of our age that chat is considered the preeminent form of communication. I think long form and long lasting texts like e-mail are valuable but maybe I'm just long-winded.