Discord doesn’t require a phone number to use it and there’s tons of servers that don’t require phone number verification. The vast majority of servers I’m in have no phone number requirement. Signal straight will not work without your phone number, in any capacity. I’m sure you’d trust Signal over Discord with your phone number any day of the week but as I said, that’s an irrelevant point because we’re talking about why people are more attracted to Discord over Signal. Slacks vs ugly cargo pants.

I said that the reason they DONT is because other platform dont have the advertising budget, nor the user base to make users jump ship.

Have you ever seen an ad for Discord? I haven’t see one before and I only know about it through word of mouth. There’s nothing stopping people from creating Signal groups for various hobbies and including a Signal link in their social media page.

Refusing to use Discord might be noble from a privacy/security point of view but from a broader perspective, you’re significantly limiting your social interactions and not because of the people but the app the people are using to communicate with. It’s like not using a phone at all because pretty much any phone is a privacy/security issue.

My guess is Telegram’s being bankrolled by entities that are willing to eat the cost of this kind of data usage.

Exactly. And they didn’t even give the 25 MB limit to every user. Some users were always stuck at 8 MB, and others 25 MB. I’m the latter and I was blown away at the decision to cut the file size limit down to 1/3rd of what I was used to.

https://8mb.video/

^ This website will compress videos down to 8 MB but the video quality ends up being awful, plus I’m not so sure how I feel about the privacy/security issues of uploading personal videos to some rando website so they can be compressed.

That’s a feature that was implemented what, 1 or 2 years ago when Signal’s been around for a decade?

You can’t possibly expect people to just jump from one social app to another that has such a relatively small user base and little familiarity. Entire Discord servers would have to jump ship and it would just be a nightmare for most people.

What Discord prioritizes, Signal treats as an afterthought. Things like group chat, video chat, GIF usage, etc, Signal has never really prioritized.

Discord’s mobile and PC apps both allow users to select GIFs within the application, whereas only Signal’s mobile app allows users to select GIFs within the application and Signal’s desktop app doesn’t allow for in-app GIF selection. If you’re reading this thinking "who tf cares about stupid stuff like that?", you’re completely missing the point because regular ass users care about stuff like that and they totally will say “fuck that” to an alternative if it doesn’t have features like this. Why doesn’t Signal incorporate in-app GIF selection for its desktop app? I’m sure it will be eventually implemented but dragging their heels like this for popular features and then having the nerve to ask "why aren’t people flocking to us instead of Discord/WhatsApp" is such an out of touch question to ask.

When open source developers ask for feedback from regular users and their response to said feedback is"ACKSHUALLY it’s your fault, not the application’s fault", as it often is, it’s no surprise that their software never gains traction. It’s like a guy who wears cargo pants to a formal affair and then gets into an argument over attire because in his mind, cargo pants = more pockets = superior, completely oblivious to every other factor.

Another thing-- Signal requires your phone number, Discord doesn’t. I know right away folks are going to rage about how Discord is the real privacy nightmare, not Signal. I don’t disagree, but the average user is just going to be more wary about being forced to give up their phone number in order to use Signal, even if the software now allows them to hide it.

I don’t like being misinterpreted.

I hope you’re right.

Signal isn’t an alternative to Discord. I use both and they’re used very differently. Group movie watching for example is pretty easy on Discord.

Digg had users and people jumped ship to Reddit because it was better.

If Discord was open source, I actually would not mind paying a fee for it. Fixed or reccurring, ideally the former. But that’s never happening. And forget buying that Nitro thing.

Until a viable alternative is presented, I doubt Discord will die anytime soon. Part of the problem is people have a hard time accepting that even if you make the best meal in town, you’ve gotta get people to step inside before they’ll try it. To an extent, this does involve winning a popularity contest of sorts if you want Discord to die.

I think often times folks are torn between enjoying a space/app as is, and making compromises to attract a larger group. IMO Linux has the same issue and that’s part of why die hard fanboys get so aggressively defensive when this is brought up.

It’s the software equivalent of being the bitter "nice guy" that simultaneously wants to attract a girlfriend (users) but is kind of an asshole to women. You might think you don’t stink but please wear deodorant.

Makes me wish Proton had their own password manager.

Also how is durovs arrest can be justified by saying “telegram aint e2ee”?

No one here has said or implied that.

I think the distinction here is that if your phone provider, WhatsApp, Signal or mail carrier is informed that someone is engaging in illegal activity using their service, these entities would comply and give the information they have on you-- be it a lot like SMS or a little like Signal (phone number, registration date).

In the case of Telegram, they’ve been informed countless times that specific individuals are engaging in blatantly illegal activity and unlike the previously mentioned entities, Telegram is refusing to comply with any legal requests.

I believe that’s the situation but if I’m wrong, by all means correct me because this is a very interesting subject.

I use a VPN 24/7 and I haven’t had any issues with Lemmy for posting/commenting. I know reddit fully blocks my VPN with some IP addresses unless I use old.reddit, which is part of why I’ve just had it and left.

Yeuup

Jokes aside, I’m a firm believer that upvotes/downvotes should be private and I think it’s very unfortunate that they aren’t. I’m fine with people downvoting me and me not knowing who they are.

Every app from the Play store requires GCM though, and Signal functions even if a user disables GCM. It pertains to a phone’s ability to notify a user of a new message. But again, users can disable GCM and the app itself will continue to work just fine.

For what it’s work, the APK on Signal’s website (obviously) doesn’t have the external Google dependencies. Personally, I really don’t see this as an issue at all.

How significant is it that the server code is open-source or not? It’s possible for Signal to publish their server code while running completely different software on their servers. The point of the client is being open source and audited on a regular basis by the community, which is why it doesn’t make sense to trust the server-side software.

The entire point is that we don’t have to trust the sever at all. The client is open source and regularly audited by the community. As long as the client stays fully open source, everything’s fine. Also, the closed source dependencies are part of a spam reduction effort which IMO is well worth it. Prior to this, Signal had a spam problem and the client itself remains fully open source.

Signal could have very well not even told people that they added a closed source dependency on Google to its servers and just lied by publishing fake server code that omits the closed source dependency., but instead they were very transparent about the spam problem. In terms of they “why?” regarding the closed source dependencies, their argument is that making it open source would almost immediately result in all anti-spam measures being thwarted. Frankly I’m inclined to agree and again, as long as the client is fully open source and regularly audited, the server code is irrelevant to user privacy/security.

https://community.signalusers.org/t/spam-scam-on-signal/26665

https://signal.org/blog/keeping-spam-off-signal/

Assuming you’ve audited Signal, can you tell us what your findings were and why you think Signal must be up to something pretty bad? I’m very curious and would love to be enlightened by someone as knowledgeable as you.

I really hope someday folks in the internet learn how to properly use quotation marks and why paraphrasing but adding quotation isn’t okay. Someday…

Saying it sucks = blaming the users? Okay.