There are so many great reasons to be on Signal. Now including the opportunity for the vice president of the United States of America to randomly add you to a group chat for coordination of sensitive military operations. Don’t sleep on this opportunity…
Editing to add the link to the messages: https://archive.is/2025.03.26-131842/https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/signal-group-chat-attack-plans-hegseth-goldberg/682176
This is long, and there are probably valid points, but I got to a point in the middle where it was abundantly clear you never used the sms functions of signal (you described a ux event that is impossible) so I don’t really feel like taking this seriously.
I won’t disagree that users can have bad opsec…but that’s not up to signal to decide, it’s for them to improve.
Matrix has iirc one checkbox to enable encryption by default and it’s been set for a while unless I’m mistaken (noone I know uses matrix). Yes you have to set it for groups, but large online group discussions usually don’t need encryption on. There’s also still the self-hosted option where a group chat with your friends on your server doesn’t need encryption at all.
I guess my point is there’s really more nuance here than I care to argue about, but the SMS tooling in signal was nowhere near as big of a point of confusion as you think it was, and I have not gotten a single new person onto signal since they took it out.
I remember multiple times my chat switching to SMS when I did not have a stable data connection, though, admittedly, it’s been years since signal dropped support and I don’t remember the specific mechanics of the situation, but I specifically remember the same message chain would have both sms and signal messages in it.
I’ve used signal for at least 6 years now, and I remember online discourse being centered around why signal included SMS in the first place, with most of the discussion being around how people dislike the false sense of security comingling insecure data with secure data provided. The discourse didn’t change until after signal announced they were dropping support and suddenly people came out of the Woodwork talking about how horrible signal is for adopting good security practices.
Why doesn’t telegram or Whatsapp get the same treatment?