Anyone have thoughts on Signal messaging?

[BarkingGhostar]

Afternoon All,

I was wondering if anyone had any feedback and or experience-related opinions on using the Signal messaging application. I am considering it for use across my many personal operating environments like Linux Mint, windows 10, and iOS. Anyways, appreciate any feedback.

 

[lxskllr]

Haven't used it. One thing to keep in mind, is there isn't much point in talking to yourself. If you don't get people onboard with you, there won't be anyone to talk to. I like what I see, and I won't use proprietary communication software, so if I wanted to talk to someone, they'd probably have to use Signal, or something like email. There's zero chance I'd install something like whatsapp. I'll just do without.

 

[Shmee]

I like use it, and I like it pretty well. Signal generally works better than SMS text, as it can work over wifi and has larger attachment limits. As mentioned, you can also send over the internet from your computer.

And the encryption/security is nice, though I miss the option to use it with SMS as well, they used to support that for people without signal, but the feature was discontinued. It was nice not having to use other SMS messaging apps and only using signal, but alas now I have to use both, but I prefer to use signal.

Also group chats are much better managed compared to SMS.

 

[Hail The Brain Slug]

As far as direct end to end encrypted messaging platforms go, Signal is the best. Other platforms who offer the same thing dont do it as well (secret chats in telegram, I'm looking at you).

That being said, the approach does come with downsides. Since messages arent kept on and routed through an intermediate server, if you send a message to me but my device is unavailable (dead zone), you are unable to send it. You'll close signal, and once I get in a service area again, your client wont try to re-send until you explicitly open it again.

Other chat applications have the messages stored on an intermediate server that automatically handles this and messages get delivered as soon as possible.

I call this out because it caused me a significant amount of trouble as I live in a rural, mountainous area and losing service is very common on a normal day out of the house.

I've been considering setting up and experimenting with a Matrix homeserver to solve this problem. Still end to end encrypted, but the messages are still stored on an intermediate server and can be delivered as soon as a client has service. At least the intermediate server in this case is completely under my control.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I used it as my SMS client but they dropped support for SMS, which sucks, because it was the only SMS client that worked properly for me. All the other ones I tried I have this issue where every SMS I get, I get it 2 to 3 times over the course of a month. It's super annoying. I have not been able to find any help to solve this and I just gave up. Even tried different carriers.

I like the idea of Signal itself for obviously better privacy but not enough people actually use it and people will just say they don't care about privacy because they have nothing to hide, so never going to convince people to switch. Really wish they would have kept SMS support though, as it does make it easier for people to switch when they know they will still be able to text people who also don't have it, all from the same app.

 

[WelshBloke]

I used it as my SMS client but they dropped support for SMS, which sucks, because it was the only SMS client that worked properly for me. All the other ones I tried I have this issue where every SMS I get, I get it 2 to 3 times over the course of a month. It's super annoying. I have not been able to find any help to solve this and I just gave up. Even tried different carriers.

I like the idea of Signal itself for obviously better privacy but not enough people actually use it and people will just say they don't care about privacy because they have nothing to hide, so never going to convince people to switch. Really wish they would have kept SMS support though, as it does make it easier for people to switch when they know they will still be able to text people who also don't have it, all from the same app.

Stop. Using. SMS!

 

[Red Squirrel]

Stop. Using. SMS!

What's the alternative if you want universal way to communicate? That's like saying to stop using voice calling. Anything else requires everyone to agree to use a specific client, such as Signal, it's not going to ever happen.

 

[orenero]

What's the alternative if you want universal way to communicate? That's like saying to stop using voice calling. Anything else requires everyone to agree to use a specific client, such as Signal, it's not going to ever happen.

No one would want to do it but you can encrypt messages over any platform using GPG and then send it to base64 or xxd and the text looks like this and the person would have to know the password to decrypt it, they could write something but I have not seen it yet.

echo "Hello This is a Secret Message" | gpg -c --pinentry-mode loopback | base64 | xxd -p
Enter passphrase:

6a41304543514d435464436469574d2b4955762f306c49427a564d504b2b
6843776c30446c4e44784b754f57537339424c536e49784e5637556b766a
4a4a52683866375469574e383037796d0a50357542586a2b443966675257
616d514262315078754c744e367471307176414a6f326237544259636a7a
632b5a346a774146582f5050710a


echo "6a41304543514d435464436469574d2b4955762f306c49427a564d504b2b
6843776c30446c4e44784b754f57537339424c536e49784e5637556b766a
4a4a52683866375469574e383037796d0a50357542586a2b443966675257
616d514262315078754c744e367471307176414a6f326237544259636a7a
632b5a346a774146582f5050710a" | xxd -r -p | base64 -d | gpg -d

gpg: AES256.CFB encrypted data
gpg: encrypted with 1 passphrase
Hello This is a Secret Message

This way you can send anything over any platform that claims to be encrypted or not, but no one would be able to easily determine what you are saying.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah my family are not going to put up with that lol. Or random people on FB Marketplace or pretty much anyone really.

I really wish they would overhaul texting so that it's universal and does not rely on any specific make/OS and it just worked across the board while also supporting encryption. For it to be successful it needs to just be part of the default messaging app and any phone should be able to use it with any phone, without going through 3rd party servers like Apple or Google. RCS was suppose to be that, but it requires Google so it's not any better than Apple. Won't work on custom roms.

Signal is great but the issue is trying to convince everyone to actually use it, most people don't care.

 

[orenero]

Yeah my family are not going to put up with that lol. Or random people on FB Marketplace or pretty much anyone really.

I really wish they would overhaul texting so that it's universal and does not rely on any specific make/OS and it just worked across the board while also supporting encryption. For it to be successful it needs to just be part of the default messaging app and any phone should be able to use it with any phone, without going through 3rd party servers like Apple or Google. RCS was suppose to be that, but it requires Google so it's not any better than Apple. Won't work on custom roms.

Signal is great but the issue is trying to convince everyone to actually use it, most people don't care.

What I am saying is they could easily implement this over texting like using your passkey ( thumbprint ) for example to decrypt the message or type the password in for the session so its less of a hassle to the end user. What I just posted above is the extremist way of doing things = ).

 

[Red Squirrel]

What I am saying is they could easily implement this over texting like using your passkey ( thumbprint ) for example to decrypt the message or type the password in for the session so its less of a hassle to the end user. What I just posted above is the extremist way of doing things = ).

Yeah I get that, but nobody is going to want to do whatever it takes to set it up at their end. Ideally if they came up with a standard and all texting apps from all vendors supported it and did it seamlessly then that would be one thing.

 

[WelshBloke]

What's the alternative if you want universal way to communicate? That's like saying to stop using voice calling. Anything else requires everyone to agree to use a specific client, such as Signal, it's not going to ever happen.

What's the alternative if you want universal way to communicate? That's like saying to stop using voice calling. Anything else requires everyone to agree to use a specific client, such as Signal, it's not going to ever happen.

Weird complaint!
I want privacy but im not going to do anything that gives me that!
I mean obviously shouting out of your window is an easy way to communicate with your neighbour but you can't really complain that everyone else can then hear your conversation!

 

[Red Squirrel]

Weird complaint!
I want privacy but im not going to do anything that gives me that!
I mean obviously shouting out of your window is an easy way to communicate with your neighbour but you can't really complain that everyone else can then hear your conversation!

So again, what's the alternative? I'm not going to refuse to talk to people because they don't have Signal. 99% of people don't care about privacy, that's why they use Apple or in some rare cases, stock android. I am not going to be successful in convincing everyone to switch to Signal or some other method of communication. Nobody cares.

Or imagine people that you may only talk to once or twice like if you're buying something off them. Do you send a text to tell them to install signal only so you can then ask if you can buy their item? That doesn't really make sense and nobody is going to go for that.

 

[WelshBloke]

So again, what's the alternative? I'm not going to refuse to talk to people because they don't have Signal. 99% of people don't care about privacy, that's why they use Apple or in some rare cases, stock android. I am not going to be successful in convincing everyone to switch to Signal or some other method of communication. Nobody cares.

Or imagine people that you may only talk to once or twice like if you're buying something off them. Do you send a text to tell them to install signal only so you can then ask if you can buy their item? That doesn't really make sense and nobody is going to go for that.

So what do you want?
Personally I'm fine with whatsapp and cranking up the disappearing messages if something is more than normally socially sensitive.
Ive absolutely used signal when people needed to and it took less than a minute to set up.
If you cant make that much effort then you obviously don't care that much!

 

[Red Squirrel]

There is not really a proper solution, other than actually standardizing end to end encryption in the existing protocols that everyone already uses such as SMS. Unfortunately that's probably not going to happen.

It's not about the effort *I* have to make, but all the other people. Everyone in my contact list would need to agree to use a different app such as Signal, and then everyone in their contact list would have to agree to do that too. Good luck trying to do that.

If you are in some sort of club or circle of friends etc then everyone can agree to use a specific app like Signal and set it up and use it, but the minute you have to talk to someone outside the club then you're back to using SMS.

 

[orenero]

So what do you want?
Personally I'm fine with whatsapp and cranking up the disappearing messages if something is more than normally socially sensitive.
Ive absolutely used signal when people needed to and it took less than a minute to set up.
If you cant make that much effort then you obviously don't care that much!

The "disappearing messages"` thing is for not. For example on non rooted android phones macrodroid can forward all messages over email to whatsapp, signal, etc. So your message is permanently archived over email. Where I have seen this is where people can't bring their cell phones to work but want to keep in the know and check messages over their email. But there are many more examples where others can circumvent your "security" its a crazy world = ).