this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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People that do use signal value privacy or just want to get away from predatory companies
Once interoperability breaks this, what's going to be the reason for people to use it?
There's a good chance Signal will have even less users than it does today if that happens, because the few users who care will leave.
and there needs to be a reason for people to switch; what's that then?
There will be more privacy, because there will be more Signal-to-Signal chats.
Also, SMS support is vastly less secure, yet Signal users loved that, and there was backlash/mass exodus when they dropped support.
As I already stated: privacy. People want privacy, but they also want people to talk to.
If Signal can only speak to Signal, nobody will get Signal because then you can't talk to anybody. And there's no point of a chat app where you can't talk to anybody.
Add interoperability and suddenly people are more willing to try Signal because you won't be a social outcast with nobody to talk to anymore. Suddenly you have a few contacts that are on signal and find the app convenient to use. Then the users grow from there. Meaning more Signal-to-Signal chats.
I've started that 3 or 4 times now.
I also don't appreciate how you appear to be acting like speaking with WhatsApp users is mandatory. It'd be an optional feature just like the (vastly less secure/private) SMS was. Even for those people, this change would be a major win, because they'd have more people to talk to as more people join the app.
As long as you have a way to know if it’s a Signal to whatsapp conversation, I don’t see the problem.
If you only want to talk to Signal users, you could just deactivate the interooerability option.
It's incredible that everybody was fine with SMS in Signal behaving this way, which is vastly less secure.
I wasn't. Like a WhatsApp integration, I think using SMS defeats the purpose of Signal. My phone can handle SMS just fine, I don't need that feature. But when you take a feature away, you only hear about people who used and liked it to there's a clear bias to think there was a huge backlash.
I haven't seen numbers to support the alleged "mass exodus" that happened when they removed it.
You are very very much in the minority. The backlash was enormous and the user count plummeted.
There's no way to argue that it defeated the purposes of Signal. Nobody forced you to use SMS.