Convincing people to use apps such as Signal is hard work and most can’t be convinced. But with those you manage to convince, do you feel happy to talk to them on Signal?
The problem is these people use Signal on Android/IOS which can’t be trusted and IOS has recently been in the news for having a backdoor. And it has also been revealed that american feds are able to read everyone’s push notifications and they do this as mass surveillance.
So not only do you have to convince people to use Signal which is an incredibly difficult challenge. You also have to convince them to go into settings to disable message and sender being included in the push notifications. And then there’s the big question is the Android and IOS operating systems are doing mass surveillance anyway. And many people find it taking a lot of effort to type on the phone so they install Signal on the computer which is a mac or Windows OS.
So I don’t think I feel comfortable sending messages in Signal but it’s better than Whatsapp.
These were some thoughts to get the discussion started and set the context.
This is the ideal scenario as I see it, in order of importance:
As I understand it, the goldilocks solution is therefore the Matrix stack. BUT! It’s hard to set up and nobody uses it!
The best real-world option, with feasible UX and an existing critical mass of users, is therefore Signal. It only fully meets the first criterion, yes. But personally I give it a bit of credit for the second too, in that it belongs to a non-profit foundation with multiple stakeholders, somewhat like Wikimedia. Signal will do while we’re waiting for a proper email-like open standard for secure messaging.
Is it really that hard? For me it was just downloading an app and creating an account–easier than setting up Facebook Messenger. I think it doesn’t yet have the network that Messenger/Signal/Whatsapp have, which makes it harder to use with others, but setting up has been easy in my experience.