Comment on Signal – an ethical replacement for WhatsApp
Humanius@lemmy.world 9 months agoDon’t let perfection stand in the way of an improvement
I agree and it would be much better if people would use Signal instead of WhatsApp, but I think there’s still one problem.
Due to how messaging platforms work, every time you switch you lose pretty much everything (messages, media, etc) This makes switching very hard even for a nerd like me, because if Signal is not “perfect” it means that I will have to switch again at some point and lose everything again.
Can I ask why are you so attached to your message history? I recently lost my entire WhatsApp history and it hasn’t made any difference in my life to be honest.
You can save any media you care about. And Signal can backup your chats if that history is important to you.
Sure, but if I switch from Signal to another potentially better messaging app down the line my chat history will get fragmented
Thats a problem with silos (where one owner hosts all the servers) in general. You will have to switch the entire ecosystem once the inevitable enshitification sets in. It’s a good idea to switch to something open source and federated (where many different non profit organisations and even self hosting individuals host many different servers). That way you can migrate your history and contacts to another server of necessary but never have to switch the ecosystem again. Xmpp and matrix are the hottest candidates in my opinion, but you can check the messenger matrix that was linked in a comment above to see what suits you best.
Well said, the problem really is that Signal isn’t federated. I’m keeping an eye on Matrix for now.
I’ve been using Signal for years and my database was getting really bloated with media, attachments, etc but I didn’t want to delete it all. I used this and it’s incredible:
github.com/bepaald/signalbackup-tools
Just make a backup from within signal, copy that backup file to your PC, then run this tool. The commands I used make an HTML webpage that looks just like the signal messenger, along with a way of searching your messages. You can choose different commands to export however you like.
I used:
signalbackup-tools [input] [passphrase] --exporthtml [directory] --split --searchpage --originalfilenames
So while this doesn’t help you move off your current messenger, you don’t have to worry that your data/messages will be lost in Signal.
Be careful with that ol’ Chestnut. Circumstances may dictate perfection, where less than such may be catastrophic.
In that case it wouldn’t be “good enough” though. But I don’t think this is such a all-or-nothing situation.
mathemachristian@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 months ago
dessalines.github.io/essays/why_not_signal.html
original_reader@lemmy.zip 9 months ago
Most of the alternatives mentioned have such low adoption that they aren’t truly viable options yet—no matter how much we wish otherwise.
And I say that not as a critic—I actually use Matrix, XMPP, and Jitsi myself. But guess how many of my friends, family, or colleagues are on them?
Exactly.
That’s why I recommend Signal. At least there, people are likely to find folks they already know.