How many Signal users here?
Do you still prefer SMS to Signal? If so, why?
Do you prefer WhatsApp to Signal? If so, why?
I have a pet peave dozens of pet peaves, one of which is people who want to communicate via SMS - friends, banks, etc. The only thing going for it is that it is nearly universal. But my main complaints are
1. it is device specific. At least with Verizon there is no good way to send and receive texts other than from my phone. And I hate this partly because I often don't know where my phone is (like right now), but mostly because thumb typing seriously aggravates my forearm tendonitis that goes back to grad school, which then went away, and then came back when I started using a phone a lot, and then went away when I quit. And voice transcription depends on a reliable, low-latency connection, which is rarely my situation. Plus you can't do it in a crowd or when people are sleeping in the same room or whatever. So I consider SMS to have the worst Global Interface Score* on the planet.
2. it is insecure. Banks should really stop using it for a second factor.
And the main alternatives are Signal, WhatsApp and email.
I like email. There is some friction because you need to have a subject, though a friend often sends emails in the form, "A short subject line EOM" which tells you that you don't have to actually open it. That said, I think the problem with email is that it doesn't have enough friction, but that's a different convo.
Plusses: email is an open protocol that works on a wide range of devices and messages on one device are available on all others. Security is still not particularly convenient. And people who get a lot of email at work tend to hate email for personal correspondence and I get that many of those people have no choice regarding limiting work email.
Then WhatsApp, whose business model is to mine your connection data and sell it to advertisers on Meta's other platforms. I go nuts when friends ask why I am not using it since it's "free." So that's a non-starter for me (and while I'm ranting, no, I'm not going to Venmo you the money either).
The big plus for WhatsApp is the network effect. So many people are on it, it's tempting to use it, which is precisely why I don't. I've just made the decision that I will write a postcard and drop it in the mail rather than participate in the Meta data mining economy more than I absolutely have to (for now; I might change my mind).
And that's how I have slowly been trying to convert friends to Signal. It basically has every feature that WhatsApp does, is fully secure, is not selling my data, works across devices and my messages from one device are available when I log into another. It seems to be surviving despite depending on donations and enduring the hostility of the UK government.
Anyway... main question is that I'm just wondering how many people in a group like this are using Signal or WhatsApp and how many are not. I get the feeling that adherence to SMS as a main channel is increasingly becoming an American thing.
*Global Interface Score (GIS), a term I just invented, is meant to measure the overall global pain and suffering a bad interface inflicts on the world. The interface is rated on a scale of 0 - 10 with 0 being no pain inflicted and 10 means that it makes users scream and weep, and this is multiplied by the number of users, divided by a million. So since SMS is about a 7 in my book and has 5 billion users (there are more cell phone accounts in the world than people - the total is about 8.6billion), gives it a score of 35,000. Compare that to a really awful interface like Adobe Illustrator clocking in at 9.6 with under 30m users worldwide and it only has a GIS of 288.
