Everyday that passes, I get more and more confident that #Signal is just another bad solution. While trying to get rid of a terrible solution (WhatsApp), we fell for another bad alternative.
- It is super slow in development (despite of all increase in hype and donations and etc.)
- There is no tangible effort to bypass censorship (the TLS docker is a joke as there is no support and development !)
- It is not centralized
- Users don't adopt it because it lacks mainstream features.
The fact that they use specific phone numbers to send SMS, made it easy for certain countries to simply block those phone numbers and lock people out of their #Signal account even when they use proper proxy or VPN. This has been communicated with Signal support and they just followed up the case for couple of days and they never responded ever after.
There are of course alternatives and guess what, there is ALWAYS A BUT (usually with single T):
- Telegram: it is feature rich, cross-platform, cross-platform desktop app, public rooms, stickers, .... (but still there are concerns about its security/privacy. For example the conversations are not E2EE by default and it should be activated manually.
- Briar: it is secure, it can work even without internet connection. [I haven't used it recently] but perhaps it lacks many whistles and bells telegram has that can attract common people. Another downside is that it does not work on iOS! Any solution that is not cross-platform is practically useless and its adoption by good majority will never happen!
This article touches upon some basic thoughts on what the “next” chat platform should be like:
https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/07/The-next-chat-app.html
There are some minor details that I disagree, but as a general structure, it is well inline with what the real next messenger platform should be like.