by wkat4242 | 2025-06-19 05:35:07+00:00
> Well moving from WhatsApp to Signal was one move in the last 10 years. I wouldn't call that "constantly moving"

No but the last year I've been asked to go to:

- Telegram for a group chat

- Discord for a support community

- Snapchat by someone who wanted to share pics with me

- Instagram chat by a tattoo artist

- RCS / Google Messages by a friend in America who wants to use iMessage with me (I don't use Apple)

- Signal by a family member

- One person keeps chatting to me on LinkedIn and is annoyed I only reply once a month or so when I happen to log in to it (I have all notifications off and don't use the app of course)

All by different people. I keep saying no more more keep cropping up. Signal isn't the only one. I'm honestly very tired of all that crap. If I promote something new it should not be the same thing, slightly less flawed. It should be a real way forward.

I bridge to matrix now and if a network is not supported there then I won't use it. But I don't actually care about those chat networks. The bridges are just a way to forget they exist. Also, I'm not rolling out a bridge just for one person who wants to talk to me on a new network.

> ... you say you're in cybersec, so I would expect you to do better than that. What does WhatsApp track? Metadata. Who writes to whom, when. If you move half of your conversations away from WhatsApp, they lost the metadata from half those conversations. So they effectively track you less. It's not "all or nothing".

I am but privacy and security issues are very different things. The metadata is not really something I care about. My phone provider knows who I call and what I say, my mail provider knows who I email and what I say. Whatsapp was an improvement over those. It's not ideal but metadata is not a dealbreaker for me. And the thing is, I can't do without Whatsapp. I don't like it, but I'm stuck with it. I do shield it from my phone by using matrix so there is little the app itself can collect.

By the way at work the situation is much worse. My employer uses Microsoft 365 where all our data is on Microsoft servers (sharepoint et al) and they can access literally everything. Every document, every email, every chat, even the ones I deleted. It's all there and not end to end encrypted so Microsoft can see it too. Of course they sign legalese that they won't look at it but we all know how much that means post-Snowden. My employer is a company that's supposedly cybersecurity-aware. Clearly not enough. I don't have input in such strategic decisions. Still, a whole team of cybersec specialists is OK with this situation. I'm not, which is one of the reasons I don't like my job :) We spend time on stupid little things while freely giving up our entire data.

> Matrix is inferior to Signal in many ways, though.

I don't agree, it is superior for me. I can use whatever client I want, I can use it on any PC or web or mobile device, 20 of them if I want, I can set up my own home server, I can run my own integrations and bots (like a transcription bot running on a local whisper instance, nothing leaked to the cloud). I don't need a phone number to sign up so I can make different accounts for different purposes, just like email addresses on my domain. It is this flexibility I need. I don't want my chats to be locked up in someone else's server. My chats are my data and I should be able to do with it what I want.

Signal doesn't let me sign up without a phone number. It doesn't even have a web version, I have to install their desktop client (which isn't available on BSD). Also Signal misses so much functionality especially for group chats and integrations/bots.

Anyway, we're not going to agree here. I'm not going to help promote Signal and I don't think it's a train worth riding. That's my opinion. It's not the direction I want to move into, I'm truly sick of these walled gardens.

> Are you sure they've been running on 50M in the last 10 years? They take donations, I would expect this helps quite a bit. 50M doesn't really sound like a lot of money when you have 70 millions active users.

No but it is by far the biggest donation they've had. Most people are not going to pay for it, and if they grow the "normies" will rapidly outgrow the evangelists who would be inclined to donate. They'll end up having to get capital, which will come with strings attached, and the enshittification will start.

The thing is that with something federated that can't really happen. If the main matrix instances enshittify, I'll just run my own (and in my case this is exactly what I do anyway). Or someone else might start one. Having an open network is the only way I see out of the enshittification spiral.