This morning, my entire family either switched or said they already had a Signal account. Now we have a family Signal chat.
I expected resistance, not compliance! I’m very happy.
Ive been chatting to my brother and sister on signal for I thinkn3 years now. TODAY Sister asks me “is Brother on Signal too?” (They’ve been chatting on apple iMessage-text thing this whole time. Not knowing they are BOTH on signal, just not chatting through there)
Mom is starting to chat to me on signal, but its probably a 30% success rate at best. (Mom also on iPhone)
One day, apple will change their Terms and Conditions enough to kick my family enough to leave, but it is not this day…
Where the fuck do you live, heaven???
Fucking adopt me
If I even dare suggest this, my family disowns me
I’ll reiterate that this was very much not the expected result.
My friends and I would love to switch to Signal but every time we try it we just find that the app isn’t very nice to use and a lot of functionality we have come to take for granted is missing. Has it improved recently or is that still the case?
What… What sort of functionality? I struggle to think of something it lacks as a messaging app…
I can imagine live location and stickers. Like all the stickers from WhatsApp can’t be transferred.
Well, I suppose. I’ve found that my keyboard has most of that, so I don’t need it in the apps I use.
Signal is easy to use, but I think mainly that some people might say that it’s “boring”. The motif and colour is not as jazzy and lighter as WhatsApp, and people like jazzy and light colours.
I cannot find anything lacking in the app that exists in the default texting app. If you would like to provide specific examples, I can possibly give a better answer.
All the stickers you have in WhatsApp. For almost all my friends it’s one of the main thing that keeps them from switching. I also just noticed it doesn’t have live location.
I used a bot to transfer some in the past, it wasn’t the simplest solution but it exists. I don’t remember what it was called anymore unfortunately
Everywhere I’ve searched the solution is to transfer only one at a time.
I’ve never once used WhatsApp and … Honestly don’t really know what stickers are in this context.
For location, I wrote a whole paragraph that I then realized came from a place of privilege. I will acknowledge that that’s on me.
But what are stickers?
Stickers are quite big in some countries. They are slightly bigger emojis that use gifs or pics that people themselves can make. Some of my group chats are filled with memes with my friends faces on them. We communicate a lot through these. Make up our own moods and ways to express ourselves. When a new sticker is used in another group chat we sometimes find it so hilarious that we share it in another. WhatsApp makes it very difficult to transfer stickers away. You have to do it one by one.
About your comment: thank you for teaching me.
About what it says: I don’t know how best to express my frustration, so I’m just going to say … Actually I can’t even think of a positive way to share my thoughts.
It’s cool that you’re able to put yourself out there that way. It’s very upsetting that Meta gets to decide whether or how you do so.
I share your frustration, it’s yet another trick such that WhatsApp doesn’t have to compete.
Same here. Switching the whole family to Signal was much easier than expected when I, the trusted IT professional laid out all the reasons they should.
I should look for a clear and simple list of reasons, published somewhere to share with family and friends. ADHD and lazy stand in my way.
Oh, you’re a trusted IT professional? Must be nice.
Fuck yeah
My friends group and I switched years ago. Had things we weren’t comfortable saying with fascists in control of the government the first time around.
We have the messages set to auto-delete after 1 week. We’ve been debating changing that to 24 hours cuz this fascist train ain’t slowing down.
Though I recognize the potential wisdom, I don’t know that I could (yet, at least) get my family on board with auto delete.
Looking forward to doing that with my family as well. Need to get everyone in the same room first…
They can’t do it via whatever messenger they’re using now?
Unfortunately I think some of them will need in-person IT assistance.
Ah, sorry. Good luck to you and them.
I’ve talked friends and family into using Signal. Some of my family still insists on using FB Messenger though.
Everyone in my fiancée’s family is installing signal except her brother. I guess he will miss out on planning (or I will)
One of my friends still uses google hangout to talk with me. I’m the only person they talk to on there. I ask them every so often to switch to signal. It’s, like, trivial to install. it’s free. They won’t do it. It’s too much.
I do not understand ADHD depression brain and I want to be kind but I’m also like “just give me your phone I’ll do it”.
Rough. My aunt is like that. Every time I log into hangout, I see a bunch of messages from her and kept telling her I’m not active.
She suggested we switch to Facebook. I cant deal with this.
Getting used to a new UI can be stressful and taxing to the audhd brain. If it’s your own choice that stress and effort can be fun, it can be an adventure. But if you perceive the world around you to be forcing you into it, it feels like being attacked. Other people forcing you into an exhausting situation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_demand_avoidance
I had a meltdown for most of a day the last time I updated Discord on My phone.
I just look at this picture and then all is well
I do not understand ADHD depression brain and I want to be kind but I’m also like “just give me your phone I’ll do it”.
I’m the exact same (I have said give me your phone I’ll do it before lol), but I think it’s that they don’t like change so much that any amount of change stresses them out a lot.
I guess you gotta wait till google kills Hangout, can’t be that long right (I didn’t know it still existing, I’m surprised it does knowing that Google kills every app)?
Did you drug them?
HAha, nice work man. My friends are deathly afraid of anything internet that isnt corpo net. They wont touch the fediverse or signal with a 49.5ft pole.
Did you give them reasons? People I know willingly give google and m$ all their data without a blink and dont care. Why would they do something inconvenient ?
I do feel like just saying im leaving fb messenger, if you want to talk get signal. But then ill just be left out.
Did you give them reasons?
There’s one person in the group chat who will often rant, especially about political topics. That person actually was already on Signal but also participated in the group chat.
After one rant in the group chat, I said that we should all switch to Signal, as it’s more privacy respecting and therefore a safer place to have opinions.
Apparently that was enough.
My parents are pretty much the same. Trying to get my dad to trust and/or use KMyMoney (or GNUCash for that matter) is like an uphill battle.
or said they already had a Signal accoun
If you’d opened Signal you would hablve know that yeah as you’d have seen which if your contacts have Signal… ?
I never grant apps access to my contacts. I no longer trust any app to know my contacts or associates unless the stated purpose of that app is to manage my contacts.
Not that it helps, mind you. People with me in their contacts likely do not practice such discipline. I’m probably just an isolated old weirdo because of it, but it’s my hill to die on. It’s a small, pointless hill, but goddamn it, Snapchat is never going to know the name of my furnace guy.
I’m the same. I played Watch_Dogs, I know what the Bellwether is. I’m not giving them that data.
Guess that didn’t work for me.
My family used to use Signal after the whole WhatsApp fiasco a few years ago. Everything was going fine until we switched back because of a family emergency. I suggested switching back several times after that, but to no avail :(
My condolences.
I have a weird switcheroo situation. My family came across no worries but my friend group, nobody switched.
I deleted all the meta bullshit a while back and went 100% signal, let everyone know where they could reach me and so far 1 person has contacted me via signal (in about 6 months). Feels kind of shit tbh.
Still cant understand why people stay on those platforms full of ads and horrible UI when soooo much better alternatives are out there.
Sorry, but your friends don’t care about you and/or are dangerously stupid and de facto untrustworthy.
Yep. It’s that simple, at this point.
People stay on platforms that are literally detrimental to their wellbeing because they are addicts, to social validation, to feeling like they’re part of the popular group, to their attention span destroying dopamine hits, whatever.
Anybody who thinks that having all of their online messages and posts be easily read by a violent fascist government and their corporate collaborators, who can easily tie them back to their entire identity … anybody who thinks this doesn’t have a high liklihood of seriously biting them in the ass… is dangerously stupid, and de facto untrustworthy.
I think its more so willfully ignorant than stupid, which in itself could be seen as stupid I guess.
If my 80 y/o grandma can do it then noone has an excuse
Hah, yeah, willful ignorance is imo… just a kind of stupidity, its actually an active, intentional stupidity that takes effort to maintain.
Powerful stupid, you might say.
Or, you know, just outright delusion.
So thats much worse than say, genuine naive ignorance or actual inability to comprehend the relevant concepts and their importance.
Those behaviors I would generally be more kind towards, because… there’s either room for improvement or they really can’t help it.
But if you insist on being wrong, even though you know you’re wrong?
You’re fucking stupid, lol.
As you say, if 80 yo gam-gam can figure it out… ~90% of people have no excuse.
Most people don’t think about these things. When it becomes a value based decision, it’s pretty clear what’s going to happen. As long as you don’t know or care about what Meta is doing, there are no values or emotions involved in the decision. That’s when using the worst platforms becomes a purely a practical choice.
I gave up facebook a year or so after college. Told my friends, made sure the group chat had my number, same situation.
That feeling sucks, still a little bitter and bothered by it almost a decade later. I try to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they’re just busy and the average person is a cognitive miser.
This is exactly what I expected when I suggested it and precisely why I’m so pleasantly surprised. I’m sorry for your experience.
I was getting my family on board and then a week later Signal dropped SMS/MMS support and my family uninstalled Signal. Frustrating.
Maybe I can try again with…everything going on.
rip. That is probably the biggest feature that was taken away and that I miss from any app ever
I was loudly opposed on their repo but ideology won over practicality. I think it severely hampered their adoption rates letting perfect be the enemy of good enough.
I get their reasoning but I think it was quite obvious when I was talking to someone via secure Signal infra vs SMS.
