this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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On the one hand I agree with them sticking to their guns re: adamantly protecting privacy.
On the other, the number of contacts I have using signal has dropped off a cliff, from 12 to just one. It certainly isn't rising. The people I know who used it have abandoned it and went back to WhatsApp.
Getting rid of SMS support was a mistake.
I'd personally prefer that when messaging with someone using WhatsApp, they make clear to you that Facebook can and will have some metadata, but not the contents of the chat itself. Shit, make it opt-in.
A big part of why nobody uses signal is because... nobody uses signal. If you could still talk to people on WhatsApp, the de facto standard in most of the world bar the US and China, more people might give it a try, and thus more people over time would be having signal-to-signal conversations.
IMO a good but imperfect solution is preferable to nobody using Signal, which is the realistic alternative.
I'll continue donating to Signal, but much like their SMS decision, I believe this to be a mistake that will severely hamper adoption.
Perfect is the enemy of good
This is exactly the problem. If they support interoperability then they will allow their users to continue using the Signal app which has high security standards, even if the particular conversation is not as secure as native signal conversations and they can't control what the third-party app does. This will help grow the Signal network (because now it is easier for WhatsApp users to incrementally switch to Signal) and become more secure.
By rejecting interoperability they may be slightly improving the privacy of the 1% of users where their conversation partner would have switched to Signal, but are harming privacy the 99% of users that will now need to switch to WhatsApp for those converstions and are harming their future network growth (which would bring even more users to a private solution).