Your communications can’t be compromised if you don’t communicate lol
Having friends is bad OPSEC!
Supreme privacy. Two can only keep a secret if one of them is dead.
I have two contacts
all the ones I chat to are on Signal but i went through this years ago, every time a contact sent me a txt message i sent a link to Signal and said see you there.
Both are dead?
Nothing more private than that.
I got all my friends to switch to signal!
I’m still working on that, but progress is happening
I just don’t have any friends
you’re not ungrateful and deceitful
so meta
I started when it was still called TextSecure, I had precisely 1 contact (just my nerdy friend from uni) for the first 3 years. I then convinced my partner to install it, had 2 contacts for the next few years.
When it became Signal, a few more jumped on. Once I had kids; I bullied my family onto it, by refusing to send photos any other way.
I have 62 contacts now, the bulk of my digital communication is through either Signal, phone, email or Lemmy. There is a little SMS/RCS.
It has been a 15 year journey so far, for me. You will get there.
What if I’m in my 50s and i don’t have half that number of contacts anywhere. Will I still get there.
And if those 30ish contacts find me on signal, where am I supposed to go and hide next.
I’m sure some genius has made a texting protocol that requires installing Linux and can only be utilized by console with sudo access.
You can finally get some peace and quiet.
Except from fucking Phil. That guy is the worst.
I’ve 36 contacts. I started 3 years ago. In a country where people stare at me for solid 3-5 seconds before they utter a word when I tell them I don’t ise whatsapp. Love it.
We’ll get there.
OG here too. I remember when they first supported voice calls. It was a separate app called redphone.
So what? That’s peak privacy.
Technically correct ✅
The best kind of “correct”.
I made a stoat account to escape discord with a few friends and this image is exactly what happened. Majority of people we know aren’t inconvenienced enough to move on.
Maybe all your contacts also value their privacy and therefore have not set signal to allow them to be discovered by their phone number
If that’s the case, then i would be more happier to get their usernames atleast. But the situation is way worse than that. They are deeply into whatsapp.
Do they have a need to communicate with you?
If so, you can just not install WhatsApp. Smartphones allow them to install multiple communicating apps, so your friends could remember to use signal when talking to you.
Actually, deletion of whatsapp and instagram drastically decreased my friend circle. Now i have more time for myself. I don’t think they have a reason to communicate with me. Anyway, am not installing whatsapp anymore.
I have notifications on when someone joins and maybe 75% of the time after I see the notification their account is “deleted” because they changed the privacy settings.
It’s not the end of the world but I do wish more people wouldn’t automatically pick the maximum privacy setting so that we could actually, yknow use it
Not picking the max privacy setting defeats the point of using it for privacy.
Classic catch 22!
Not really, it’s still encrypted. If you’re not a political dissident and just using Signal to chat with friends then it is helpful to make yourself available to said friends.
i’d say default to maximum and then opt in to less and less privacy
Guilty
At least i got 3 people to install Signal just for me.
I got family, 2 friends and thats it.
And thats all you need. I also have family, 2 good friends and the rest are acquaintances
When I switched to Signal I enforced it hard. Refused to talk to anyone on another platform. If they texted me, I’d responed, but always add “I’d prefer if we discussed this over Signal.”
I had more success than I’d anticipated. About 90% of my family and 80% of my friends moved over.
My best piece of advice for this is to start new group chats - people want to be in the group chats, and if they believe Signal is where it’s all happening, they’ll join.
It was way easier to get converts when it still supported SMS/MMS
I’m on the receiving end of this from a friend and I didn’t even think twice about it. I think we’re all in a place now where being asked to install yet another app is pretty commonplace. Plus phone app stores make it relatively painless to do.
I literally got Signal because my sister told me to get on it. That’s the only contact I have on Signal.
When the Recent Fascist Takeover happened, an American friend asked me for app opinions - I told him Signal was great, aside of the fact that the desktop app keeps getting updated every femtosecond. …we’re still talking over Discord, sad to say.
Signal keeps suggesting I add a contact for my old boss. (Who was a cool guy, but not cool enough to keep in contact with years afterwards.) Actually, when I had an internship a few years afterwards, the new boss’s preferred app was Telegram, so, uh, a red flag? …Yeah, didn’t get that job.
Very private 💪
If only you could also text from the Signal App. I used to have multiple signal contacts, but every single one of them dropped it when they dropped SMS support.
Which means they actually didn’t use signal at all.
They used SMS and are still continuing using SMS.
Yes, but their communications with me and each other were secure, which is a lot better than they’re doing now.
Did using signal with the old SMS feature privided any additional level of privacy or security? Means, no matter what all the SMS are unencrypted and goes through ISP right?
The point was to have all your messaging needs in one package.
Not if you were using SMS, but it automatically upgraded connections to secure chats if both people had signal.
I have two contacts. My wife, who I text/communicate with more than anyone else, and a long distance friend.
It took begging and pleading for years to get my wife to agree to it. She finally agreed after it came out that the phone network was likely hacked by China.
I tried to get another friend to use it, at whick point he asked if that was the app at the center of whiskey leaks. He never installed it.
after it came out that the phone network was likely hacked by China.
You’re referring to the phone network in the USA, right? It blows my mind that more people don’t know about it. China (specifically, Salt Typhoon) infiltrated the USA phone network in 2022. The infiltration was only discovered in 2024, and China still has not been evicted. Apparently the eviction will not be complete until compromised Huawei network hardware is extirpated.
Considering that PRISM is a thing, I think people already assume that all usage of the phone network is non-private. What difference does it make if China is reading my messages, when the USA already is, and the USA can actually arrest or murder me unlike China.
Yes I’m referring to Salt Typhoon. It is bonkers that this way, basically any phone/text conversation can be surveiled by not only the NSA, but by a foreign government.
