I managed to get people over to Telegram. Signal was a no go. It’s still a bit inconvenient. Mobile only unless you link a desktop is a non starter for me period. Majority of people don’t care about e2ee. They want an easy to use app that syncs everything and doesn’t require reading a manual.
Bad guys can and will use any platform that preserves privacy... but the default unsecured policy of Telegram was a bigger concern to me and the dread of having to request all contacts to enable end-to-end encryption (the instant messaging equivalent of having to explain to grandma why she should use pgp keys for privacy of her email communication).
Sad you got downvoted. Signal UX is 100x worse than Telegram and I probably can calculate it to prove this exact number.
I’m dreaming about Telegram client and Signal-like openness.
Right clicking on a conversation on signal does nothing. On telegram is shows the menu that if expect.
Signal takes many seconds to render the main window. Telegram opens in a reasonable amount of time.
Chat bubbles in signal reveal some hidden icons when you hover them, but have a separate right click menu when you click them. You basically have to guess which of both menus contains the action that you need.
Copy paste of images often doesn’t work on Signal. The voice clip button does nothing. It simply doesn’t work, but doesn’t show any errors or log anything.
I want to like Signal, but the clients are simply terrible, have bad UX and are full of bugs.
The only one of these I'm seeing is that there's no right-click menu for conversations in the desktop client, which does slightly violate my expectations. As to everything else:
Signal desktop takes 4 seconds to launch for me. That's a bit slow, but I launch it at boot and leave it open all the time.
I see a ... menu when I hover over messages in a chat; its contents are identical to what I see right-clicking the message.
Copy/paste of images into and out of chats works for me. The voice clip button works for me.
I'd be annoyed if I ran into a bunch of client bugs like these too, but they do sound like bugs rather than bad design. If you haven't used it in a while, they may be fixed.
To be fair, Signal has gotten a lot better and a lot easier to show people how to sign up. Back when I did my migration off FB Messenger it was a different story and Telegram was basically on par with Messenger
My initial Signal onboarding was long enough ago that I don't remember it. I do remember some general unreliability about eight years ago, but it's been solid during the past five. Several nontechnical people I've recommended it to during the past five years needed zero handholding.
