Disagree. Signal on desktop works very well for me and is very useful for quickly sending files from desktop to phone and back, especially when the phone isn't handy.
The desktop app is very useful but it's mainly because there's no alternative. It's bloated, slow, under-featured. Telegram also has an electron desktop app but at least it lets me do ultra-advanced things like changing the spellchecker's language on the fly.
As somebody who's used to 100KB snappy and fully featured IRC clients I'm always baffled when I use these modern clients that use 3 orders of magnitude more resource to look and behave like a cheap clone of a smartphone SMS app, but worse.
I'll take your word for the telegram app. I prefer signal to telegram. Any benefit of the telegram desktop app seems like a marginal one when the signal one works and signal do encryption well, properly and honestly. (Maybe telegram are catching up to this now, not sure, Moxie has always been solid and has forced the entire feature set of messaging to end-to-end encryption for which he's going straight to heaven).
My own irc client I wrote when learning C and then re-wrote learning GTK+ is better than any of them in terms of doing what I want non-bloated as a client. But it doesn't quite match the whole signal thing somehow. :)
Signal is excellent software. Game changing stuff. Telegram (indirectly), Whatsapp (directly) owe signal a great debt. The reverse doesn't seem to be true.
End to end ecryption for the masses is a huge, huge win that Moxie can take a vast amount of credit for making happen, then improving and increasing. So there's a little hero-worship for Moxie, a man with whom politically I probably have very, very little in common. It's a good feeling when you can do that.
Signal desktop was missing basic features like answering calls not long ago. It also had at least one significant vulnerability (some code injection IIRC) so I don't know if I'd say that it does "encryption well". Having applications with such a needlessly huge attack surface is not good crypto in my book.
I do like Signal, otherwise I wouldn't put up with that software. But you can both enjoy the protocol and Android client and think that the desktop app is a pile a donkey dung.
And you can put the stated criticisms of it in proper context. Then assess the costs and risks to yourself. Compare its use along with the rest of signal to the alternatives. And examine the response of Moxies team to issues.
At least that's what I did and came up with a "Hard Disagree" on that statement. Signal desktop is pretty good. (And no I don't like electron apps as a rule - it's the only one I use).
Deviation from perfection is not donkey dung.
>Signal desktop was missing basic features like answering [voice] calls...
vs
Messaging on phone and internet everywhere was missing end to end encryption before Signal. (Yes I used OTR with like 3 people, now I encryption with almost everyone, thanks signal).
Advantage signal. By a huge margin, for mine. Picked the essential feature. Got it right. Expanded from there. I find it pretty hard to fault what they're doing. People who want to do it differently because they think it's "better" (eg federation), don't seem to actually get much done in comparison to signal's massive win they chalked up for all of us.
I find it kinda odd that here, where people understand tech, there is more sticking up for facebrick, goo, appletax etc when they screw their users yet again than there is for Signal doing the opposite. The contrast between how they view people who use their stuff is very, very stark. Signal are pretty great. We need more love for anyone who can achieve at a similar level to make computing better for us. To push competition toward being better at privacy, security and so on and away from the direction of turnkey totalitarianism surveillance that the Stasi could only have wet dreams about. Alarmist right? Could bad things really happen here? Are the interests of Cook, Zuck, Seregey, Larry, Jeff et al not precisely yours or a wider population's? They all do seem really quite friendly to despotic regimes. But I guess those reigimes are foreign?
The Signal devs have always been extremely hostile to anybody making third party clients, because they say they know better than everybody else. Instead of making a library or daemon that could interoperate with third party software and decently built messengers, they preferred to create their own Moxie Approved(tm) bloated elecron crap.
So be it. But then when their software is crap I won't just accept the "well at least it's not Facebook" defense.
They've given their reasons for why they have the policies they do. If they were bad reasons somebody else would have made something that makes signal redundant.
Somebody will make signal redundant one day. When I look at it I see that day has not come. When it does the world is a better place for the advances made by signal.
The decisions they've made are /why/ signal is the leader of the pack by a margin. But please do make better ones. Please do give us something better than signal. Their libraries are all capital F Free. Go for it.
Crapping on them from the sideline, sure, go ahead but acknowledge they've done rather better than /anyone/ else in this space. It's not even close. So maybe their decisions are worth considering as having some merit? Disagree sure, but really. They've done it. Well. I haven't. Nobody else has.
I don't like electron. The desktop client works well for me on linux and for non-techy family members on mainstream consumer machines. There's some merit there you're completely discounting which doesn't seem quite fair.
And it's not "At least it's not facebook"
It is: "Whatsapp now is end to end encrypted thanks to signal" and "new players have to match signal's encryption"
That's crap loads more than "at least it's not facebook" that's actually good as opposed less evil. Straight to heaven for achieving that, for mine.
Almost every time I start it after a few days it just purges all my conversations, demands I relink my phone and then doesn't show any conversation history.
It's hard to call it useful when it's so unreliable and broken.
Lots of people don't know about that feature...If anyone is wondering. You can send a message (for example on your Desktop) to "Note to Self" on and it will be available for you on your other Signal versions (e.g. on your Phone). Very useful.
There are efforts to get Signal working on the PinePhone and Librem phone through Anbox. Signal also does not require Google Play Services, it can run with completely libre software all the way down. So, Signal is becoming a viable choice on a device that meets Free Software standards and is not a “spyphone”.
I think (but haven't tried myself) that you can nowadays even confirm your number on desktop, i.e. receive a text message on a dumbphone if need be, and then enter the confirmation code on your desktop.
