This is not good. I've moved so many people over in the last week. For purposes of getting them invested, this is a truly inopportune moment for an extended outage.
But it’s par for the course for newly popular services. Some don’t survive the popularity and some thrive in spite of the degraded service. Signal will figure it out. All the best to the engineering team at Signal right now!
>But it’s par for the course for newly popular services.
It is, but most consumers don't care, they just what their stuff to work 100% of the time as frictionless as possible, and, on top of all things, for free. Otherwise they just run back to the usual free surveilanceware.
I've tried and failed to convince some young, highly educated zoomer friends with good incomes to move away from WhatsApp and Facebook and even when I told them "Look, they're basically spying on you" they just brush it off and say "I don't care, it's fun, easy to use and all my friends are already there".
Ironically, it was easier to convince my boomer parents to move to Signal and they also understand and agree with the tradeoffs and extra friction for the sake of free privacy but younger people just want to be where their friends are and not feel left out (remember the blue vs green bubble stigma on iMessage).
Using Telegram is a rational decision if you want a service that's good at fun conversations. Signal's value proposition is _secure conversations_ and it does that much better than other services. "Fun" is not part of Signal's value proposition. More people want/need fun conversations than need secure ones. Regardless of what people "should" want, Telegram serves people's mundane everyday needs materially better than Signal does. "It's fun and the people I care about talking to already use it" is a compelling value proposition, not a frivolous one, given people's everyday needs.
The more someone cares about security and is willing to trade away other good things for security, the better a platform Signal is — but remember, this also flows the other way.
I'm a little confused because you brought up Telegram specifically.
WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger offer the same level of security as Telegram. In fact, I think WhastApp is more secure since it does E2E encryption by default.
It's true that Telegram is about "fun" and not security. I just wasn't sure if you tried to imply Telegram is like Signal with a focus on fun as well, or you just meant most people don't care about security and would rather have fun chats?
Now that you mention it, I _did_ fail to explain why I brought up Telegram. My bad, thank you for calling me on that. I mentioned Telegram particularly because in my social circles, Telegram is number one by a long shot in terms of "people just want to be where their friends are and not feel left out." I should have actually said that, rather than jumping to the next part of the idea.
(I am not here to defend Telegram's portrayal of itself as a secure messaging service — Telegram is grotesquely bad on that axis)
That’s interesting. Do you live in a country where Telegram is particularly popular? Here in the US I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of someone using it. I don’t even know what the app icon looks like. My social circles are on some mix of Messenger, iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, and if you count coworkers as social contacts, Slack.
not op and aware this may not be representive, but i share the preference for telegram as a just-works, "fun" and high-penetration messenger with whatsapp as a first and sms as second compatability fallback. this beeing in germany.
tg is light on resources like phone storage and bandwidth (and hence money) and has excellent multidevice support.
apart from that i don't belive one can have a seriously private conversation involving a device running popular versions of android/ios.
> WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger offer the same level of security as Telegram.
If you look only at encryption, WhatsApp is even better.
Once you factor in the fact that all your metadata is vacuumed into Facebooks data lake and that it might very well end up in Google Cloud if either you or someone you chat with activate cloud backups.
Telegram has optional E2E encryption (as does WhatsApp) which puts it ahead of Facebook Messenger. Unlike FB Messenger and WhatsApp, the company behind Telegram so far doesn't have a history of selling your personal data. I'd say it's fairly competitive, though obviously not ahead of Signal
Thanks for setting the record straight. I actually thought you needed to opt in (was that maybe how it worked when they first added it?) but I'm glad to hear it's always on
Facebook Messenger also has optional E2E encryption in a feature called Secret Conversations which is very similar to Telegram's Secret Chats. A big difference though is that Facebook uses the Signal protocol while Telegram rolled their own.
I don’t believe fun conversations are mutually exclusive with secure communications. You can have fun conversations with them being secure from prying eyes.
(Even if I personally mostly use Telegram and hope for Matrix to "win", Signal is a fantastic piece of software as far as I can see, both as an extremely secure (I think) messaging client in its own right and also as an inspiration for other messaging platforms.)
Telegram is not a secure chat application though. It's more similar to Facebook Messenger. You're better off using WhatsApp over it if you care about security.
Or obviously Signal.
When it comes to Matrix, it's a little trickier. Riot, the most common Matrix client does E2E encryption on DMs and invite only rooms. What I'm not sure is what happens if you send a private message to someone who is using Matrix client that doesn't do E2E. Will it fail to send? Or will it like fallback to not encrypted?
> Telegram is not a secure chat application though.
Fun fact: I didn't even write that.
The rest is not so much for you personally as for a number Signal fans:
I get it, I get it: Signal is best. But seriously: do you Signal fans have to derail every conversation?
Do you have to take a jab at every other messenger at every given opportunity?
Or can we agree that there's room for more than one solution? Because physical mail, email, irc, Telegram etc are probably going to stay around for a long time, at least until Signal solves:
- large groups
- backups
- grows a stable messaging API
- creates a Bot api
- and starts teleporting physical goods
- etc
Until Signal solves all this we are going to have to deal with other mesaging solutions.
Deal with it. Seriously.
Yes: Signal is probably the most secure now IMO.
No: talking down other messengers doesn't make it better.
@dang: apologies in advance. I've tried hard to keep it polite.
> But seriously: do you Signal fans have to derail every conversation?
I don't really have a horse in this race, just a guy who was scrolling through these comments and was struck how rude and ridiculous this remark is.
You're in a discussion thread for an article about Signal. You're the one who brought up Telegram and now you're having a little fit and accusing Signal fans of "derail[ing] every conversation"? This conversation is about Signal. If you didn't want people comparing it to Telegram, why did you bring it up?
> You're in a discussion thread for an article about Signal. You're the one who brought up Telegram
This would be a good point, if it wasn't for the point that the only reason I brought up Telegram was to say I was a Telegram user cheering for the Signal team!
> do you Signal fans have to derail every conversation?
I know this happens a lot in other threads about other messengers, so it's probably a fair comment. But I find there is something ironic about someone commenting on a story about Signal that they use Telegram and then complaining that other users talking about Signal are derailing the conversation.
There is an already ecosystem on Telegram bots, channels and groups that lacks Signal, even if all my contacts move to Signal i would still keep Telegram only for those features and many more.
Thousands of people are joining Signal after hearing about the Whatsapp privacy policy changes, but the irony is that a significant portion of these people (if not the majority) still use Facebook, upload photos and stuff, chat on messenger, with that app, installed on their phones alongside Signal. Most people don't actually realize why should they be worried about corporations collecting their data. I wonder what fraction of these people will stick to Signal. Signal is adding new servers, lets hope they dont need to retire these in the coming days.
Yup, and it's not like Signal should be surprised with it. The influx has been happening for a while now and it seems like they were incapable of handling it. I have no idea how I'm going to defend them against all my family members I somehow managed to convert from WhatsApp to stay on this platform.
I'm not sure a 5x+ growth in under a week is really "for a while now". If anything I'm surprised they've kept it together this long. The growth looks more like an exponential function too, so that's even more difficult.
> We have been adding new servers and extra capacity at a record pace every single day this week nonstop, but today exceeded even our most optimistic projections. Millions upon millions of new users are sending a message that privacy matters. We appreciate your patience.
It's only FOSS by appearance really - it's still a team of well-paid engineers that operate like any other startup, with the difference that you can read the code of their apps and the bug-tracker is public.
They operate on their own schedules and priorities, and it's tricky to get your PR into any of the clients.
Well paid, but not lavishly paid by Silicon Valley standards. Salaries listed in their IRS form 990 have the CEO making ~$200k and other engineers in the ~$120k-$180k range.
I haven't moved any friends in the last week, but I've gotten lots of notifications in Signal of many friends joining this week. Hopefully it just requires some simple modifications of some parts of their infra that they didn't realize were scaling bottlenecks.
Based on my friends, mostly foreigners and English-speaking locals here in Hong Kong, Signal has grown about 20% in the past week.
Signal grew 5x in one day[1]. A week before Musk amplified the WhatsApp story with his "Use Signal"[2] tweet. It then did the rounds on MSM. WhatsApp shoots itself in the foot (though IMO it's a blip in their stats). Parler (thankfully) has been kicked off AWS. All good news for alternative messaging technology.
I'm a new Signal user myself (maybe six weeks or so). In the past week there's been a huge influx of my contacts joining Signal.
I will continue to use iMessages for my iOS contacts. For SMS people I will gently nudge (hey, have you tried Signal? and then let the convo go where it does) and then use Signal as the primary for those people.
Is SMS still popular in your part of the world? I literally haven't gotten an SMS from a human in the past 9 years. Here in Hong Kong, SMS is how your bank sends notifications, and for spam. The chat space is vastly dominated by Weixin/WeChat and WhatsApp.
99.9% of messaging (for me) occurs via iMessages or SMS. FB Messenger is occasionally used for people who are more acquaintances (don't have their phone number).
I don't really have a good reason to not use iMessages (blue bubbles). Reasonably secure and Just Works. SMS on the other hand.... my least favorite part of SMS (besides the complete lack of security) is that media messages are crippled in quality. Photos and videos are compressed and distorted beyond belief.
United States too. Same feeling that most messages are iMessage or SMS. But as one of two extended family members with Android against ~10 with iPhones, for me iMessages are pretty horrible. They mostly work most of the time, but frequently there are glitches on glitches. SMS between Android phones are rock solid. Just a single data point.
I"m not saying this is what happened this time, but I would suspect we'll see a lot more outages of encrypted centralized chat like this as nation states try to prevent general society from moving away from the social media websites almost solely designed for mass surveillance.
> The result was a mass migration that, if it lasts, could weaken the power of Facebook and other big tech companies. On Tuesday, Telegram said it added more than 25 million users over the previous three days, pushing it to over 500 million users. Signal added nearly 1.3 million users on Monday alone, after averaging just 50,000 downloads a day last year, according to estimates from Apptopia, an app-data firm.
> “We’ve had surges of downloads before,” said Pavel Durov, Telegram’s chief executive, in a message on the app on Tuesday. “But this time is different.”
As someone who semi-fondly remembers the Twitter failwhale, I really don't think a more conspiratorial theory than "a few million people suddenly tried to jump on" is required here.
This cannot be what they are running in production though right?
And this is also not open source for my understanding:
* Last commit was on 2020-04-22
* only a single committer (moxie-signal)
* only „bump version to xyz“ commits
* not a single PR is getting merged but all are just closed (one references „pr was created on wrong repository“)
* not a single code comment in what I saw so far
* there are also references to AWS and GCP but I could not find any reference to Microsoft/Azure (where their current IP is pointed to)
Is there some other place where the „real“ open source process is happening? Maybe some sources how their production architecture looks like?
I read the message differently. It looks like there have been so many people wanting to switch, that Signal was overwhelmed by the new demand.
I don't know if it is true, but for your peers it certainly is a different story to tell them about all the people who are switching than just about a service who had an outage. Hopefully, the next days will bring some light to the cause of the outage.
Same here. I moved a lot of my contacts and several groups over to Signal. And this happened. I'm fine with the down time, I don't have any urgent communication needs and if I did, there are other ways to contact people (SMS, email, WhatsApp, etc.). But I feel like I owe these people an explanation about this. An explanation where I say, "Hey look, there are no guarantees this won't happen in the future, but should still stick to this one". I'm not very good at writing and hoping to find something that I can use :)
Last night a friend from India popped up on signal. I told him "Welcome!" and he said "You finally wore me down, I've left WhatsApp and I'm trying to move my family off of it..."
Same here I had a group of about 15 ex colleagues I keep in touch with and managed quite easily to convince all of them to get Signal about 2 weeks ago. They’re all back chatting on Facebook and some are claiming that WhatsApp won’t be sharing data because of some European court case. AKA rationalising their negligent behaviour with regards to their private data.
These are all people who have completely abandoned Facebook for WhatsApp and Instagram.
I agree. This happened with Pokemon GO, at launch, but the reasoning is the same: "we didn't think there'd be that many users." Took almost a month to become stable. Hopefully Open Whisper Systems will get on it faster (I have confidence, for whatever that's worth).
It's great! Everyone I 'converted' is now thinking about the implications - from many different angles. Any outage for a few weeks is a win for humans and a huuuuge kick in the nuts for the twats.
Yeah it kinda pisses me off constantly reading about how decentralised messaging, or ad-hoc wireless mesh networks, or whatever it is, is the way to go.
That shit works on a small scale. Serving the entire planet needs hierarchy and co-ordination.
Doesn’t necessarily mean everything has to be completely centralised, but some of the woolly wishful thinking you come across is not based in the real world.
i have so much fun in public websites seeing americans fight over right and left. its good entertainment. keep it up.
anyways. It will be really difficult to convince my friends to remain on signal. At least they are technically sound. Thinking an excuse to come up with though. i donated money today too.
These users who are coming from these platforms (WhatsApp, Telegram) don't care about that. If Signal is still unable to stay online then the users will leave and they will try the second best option. (Even if it is less secure).
This has now become a usability and reliability issue for Signal.
