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Signal offers nothing new to users right now. "Privacy" is too abstract. E2EE? The few users who know what that is tend to know that Whatsapp already has it. In fact, those shitty crypto payments might be the only thing Signal does offer to users. But you also lose out on chat syncing for example.

Surprisingly though, Signal is gaining a bit of traction, so I think "Privacy" is still something people do want. But it has to be better defined.

And to be completely honest I don't believe in Signal. The current messenger wars kind of feel like a parallel universe's email wars "yahoo vs gmail vs hotmail vs live" or something. Coming up with a new messenger is easy. Most of them have the same featuresets. The underlying protocols should be compatible instead of this sorry state of affairs.

Matrix will probably win out in the end but it's going to be long-drawn and unnecessarily annoying for users in the mean time. It shouldn't matter if you're using instagram's UI, or messenger's, or signal's, …. You should get access to the contacts you want, and be able to cross-talk.




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