Comment by XorNot
4 months ago
Having run some family through the Signal onboarding process lately I'm actually kind of disappointed though: the CAPTCHA requirements are a big turn off, and it was relatively difficult to get them to see "look I'm on Signal!" In their existing contacts.
To wit: phone numbers have to stay. That's how I even get people to use it with me, and that's enormously valuable.
But also: there really needs to be a way I can use my own account to vouch for a new user and skip that CAPTCHA (maybe there is? What happens if I do an in app invite?)
Yeah the onboarding process isn't the best but... is CAPTCHA requirements really that big of a deal? Where on the internet can you go where you don't face these? Maybe my grandma can't handle that, but my already retired parents can (and that's a pretty low bar if you know them). For my grandma, yeah, I'll set it up. For my parents and anyone under 70 I think CAPATCHA is not too high of a bar.
I think your threshold is too high. How high off the floor is a CAPATCHA? Because it looks like a bar rolling on the ground to me. You can trip over it but it is almost trivial to get over.
If I invite someone to use Signal and I'm not physically in the room with them, then what should happen is I get the CAPTCHA challenge and they get the magic link which avoids it.
Except Captcha is to make it harder for spammers, if they just have to do Captcha once and then invite more accounts it kinda defeats the purpose.