I seriously think Signal missed the boat with this one. I was one of those folks who used the WA privacy policy change to attract folks around me to use Signal. It worked and they all started using Signal as well. It would have been an easy thing for Signal to prioritise Stories. That was the only thing that differentiated WA with Signal at the moment. Only thing we needed back then to make folks stick to Signal. Instead Signal was building some irrelevant cryptocurrency feature and split their own userbase in half. That feature was already going to be used by only a minority anyway.
Everybody went back to WA after FB's stunt on retracting the privacy policy. I am back to square one on who all are using Signal around me. I don't think there is going to be a better chance than what we got with WA policy change.
Signal had the funding, they had the tech and folks. The momentum, people, media and even people like Snowden, Jack and Elon Musk were with us. They chose something completely different and irrelevant to what would've helped make Signal a standard. What is the point in having this now? Majority of the users who were going to use it are already back in WA. This feature will be used only by a minority.
Another fascinating learning from the whole journey was that a lot of "loud" privacy folks use privacy through obscurity (like security through obscurity) to keep themselves private. They jump ship when their tool gets popular. And these were the loud ones during the whole discussion in Signal forum with respect to Stories. With AI advancements and big corps, we need more folks in the privacy space using private tech. If we don't accommodate non-privacy folks as well, this will be a harder fight than it has to be.
Everybody went back to WA after FB's stunt on retracting the privacy policy. I am back to square one on who all are using Signal around me. I don't think there is going to be a better chance than what we got with WA policy change.
Signal had the funding, they had the tech and folks. The momentum, people, media and even people like Snowden, Jack and Elon Musk were with us. They chose something completely different and irrelevant to what would've helped make Signal a standard. What is the point in having this now? Majority of the users who were going to use it are already back in WA. This feature will be used only by a minority.
Another fascinating learning from the whole journey was that a lot of "loud" privacy folks use privacy through obscurity (like security through obscurity) to keep themselves private. They jump ship when their tool gets popular. And these were the loud ones during the whole discussion in Signal forum with respect to Stories. With AI advancements and big corps, we need more folks in the privacy space using private tech. If we don't accommodate non-privacy folks as well, this will be a harder fight than it has to be.