They allow usernames as an alternative to sharing your phone number with other people. You still need a phone number (and the phone app) to create and activate an account.
It's very phone-first.
signal-cli lets you register from a computer. If you have a modem in your computer, you can use this to receive the confirmation SMS. A friend also managed to register a landline (I think the phone received a code through a voice message).
Wonderful UX though: account unlocked by seed phrase which you can note down and easily transfer between devices.
Transmission of the signal and key is another matter.
This comment I'm writing right here might not mean what it appears to mean, and might not be aimed at who it appears to be aimed at.
It's effectively merely illegal to pollute the shared medium with noise.
But I think that there's room for nuance, sure it's closed source and a closed garden, but that's precisely what allows it to be gratis and free of spam (you can't build the client, you can't build a spamming client)! Sure it's controlled by an entity that may or may not use that data for ads. But it's metadata and not content, sure the NSA or some three letter agency may tap it for national security reasons(or at least masquerading as natsec reasons), but not even subfederal law enforcement and courts can access the contents of the message (E2E encryption).
The contributions of Free Software has been unquantifiable, but if it continues to treat all closed source things as equally bad, then you get extremism. Surely there's a difference between an entity seeing metadata, and an entity seeing message contents, this is a non trivial distinction.
Congratulations to signal if they develop an algorithm where they can't even see the metadata, but I'm not even convinced that it's good? The article cites cases of Meta products being used for malicious purposes, at least we hear from them? At least Zuck shows up against the senate to answer when shit hits the fan, if Signal is used in other parts of the world to organize coups or ethnic cleansing, you just would never hear about it because it's all super anonymous 5 stars, but ethically they would still be contributing as much as Facebook or Whatsapp.
And on that topic, I don't think overfixating on Meta's role in a multi actor causal chain to be very productive? I think it comes more of a place of Free Software developers being jealous that they didn't win the popularity contest, and less from a place of genuine concern. I used to be anti Whatsapp too, but at some point I realized that 1B users have as much say in what technologies we should use than developers, it's not all about the tech. Whatsapp has gained the trust from billions of users, ignoring them and telling them we know better because we have been indoctrinated by recruiting evangelists of an extremist ideology is not the way forward. I do believe in moderate free software and Whatsapp is one of the lowest hanging fruits to accept in the path to moderate FS
Cab you envision systemic reasons that lead to Whatsapp's users using the software without trusting Meta?
I get my internet through Comcast or AT&T. I certainly don't trust either.
1 Gbps fibre of similar quality to GFiber for $89/month (vs 70) in almost the middle of nowhere. 2.5 and 5 exist too, but are pricier.
>Whatsapp has gained the trust from billions of users
Bear in mind what Brian Acton said ("It's time, delete Facebook"). If billions of users trust it it might be because they're not aware of the shell games they pull https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662215
I don't think most of us are driven by this. We care about user rights and good software.
> it's not all about the tech.
We agree. It's all about politics.
> telling them we know better because we have been indoctrinated by recruiting evangelists of an extremist ideology
Caring about having control on one's computing is not extreme.
> moderate free software
What is moderate free software? Having access to the source code but not too much? Being able to modify but just a little? Being able to redistribute but to a limited number of people? Being able yo use it but only for a restricted set of goals decided by the software provider?
The idea that free software is extreme needs to die.
I fail to see what you are actually proposing and what drives you.
Thanks for asking. My postulate would be having access to binaries.
You can achieve the four user freedoms with binaries to some extent. Mathamtically Freedom(source)>freedom(binaries)>freedom(SaaS)
You can use software for any purpose with a binary. You can study software, although in a less efficient manner, with a (complete, offline) binary. You can modify the software with a binary! You can share software with a binary.
To give a concrete example, Users can share WhatsApp, if a user doesn't have Whatsapp, it sends a link to their phone through SMS to download the application , you can also share the installer files on desktop. The right to share is not infringed. That said, you are not allowed or empowered to modify Whatsapp. This is a distinct type of partial freedom which is easier to concede, that some of the freedoms can be infringed. Whereas the stronger claim above is that even a single freedom can be partially fulfilled.
I think that's my motive, to recognize that WhatsApp isn't the Devil as a 0.5 star rating would suggest. Extremism goes even against the very goals of the ideology, as it's very hard to take seriously if it requires so much dedication and extreme stances, it's much easier and reasonable to ignore free software than it is to accept is tenets completely or moderately. Make it more moderate and achieve more penetration.
Claiming the platform is responsible for the actions of their users is a bit too much, I oppose to that kind of thinking.
Have you heard about net neutrality?
Regarding the responsibility for user actions. I'm assuming you'd think the same of Facebook in the cases of Myanmar and the Trinidad Tobago cases? I was just trying to hold the original article in estoppel without espousing a specific view, I think it's nuanced with a lot of grey areas.
Radio and TV neutrality was a hot political topic at the time as well, the incumbent government was pro-intervention and regulation, so that helped. But the FSF had a big impact, going as far as getting Linux to be installed as a dual boot in state sponsored Notebooks for Kids programs.
The good thing is that the field is a bit more open if anyone wants to dethrone whatsapp, but since they were first movers and they have the network effects now, it seems like almost inconsequential, a contender could have negotiated zero-rating with a carrier anyways and work up from there.
I think I understand why they do that (if you send someone a message on Signal, they try very hard to make it difficult for anyone but the recipient to read it, whether that's by intercepting traffic or reading data stored on your device, or rummaging through your backups) but it does make it a bit of a pain.
Ideally, we’d agree universally: chats saved for one month (the context we can actually remember from a conversation), emails for five years (for administrative control), and conversations never recorded. However, we’ve been manipulated into needing exactly the opposite. Worse yet, we think it’s possible to maintain privacy while transcribing and archiving everything in our minds, making it public.
For many people their messenger has replaced the photo album. Its where you have all your life memories such as baby photos, first school day, etc. Forcing those to be deleted just sounds dystopian.
Companies have taught us to do otherwise for their profit, don’t forget to back up that.
Even if I would agree with you that people keep too many digital pictures, if someone wants to do it I would also defend their right, because I do not think it is that negative that is worth fighting against.
PS: to put it to the extreme shouldn't we spend any time on hacker news "but spent more time with their families, sharing stories and souvenirs."?...
- Can't move from iOS to Android (and vice versa) without losing your chat history because backups aren't compatible.
- Can't send media with their creation timestamps. All photos shared with family/friends via Signal can't be used to build a photo album without manually sorting pictures.
- Can't automatically save pictures to Picture Roll, Google Drive, Dropbox for integration with your other pictures.
- Only one desktop/computer can be linked to Signal desktop.
- Many useful chat widgets such as polls or real-time location are missing.
- No transcription of audio messages (WhatsApp only has a few languages) and lot of issues with audio messages such as iOS users not being able to play audio messages created on Android but not with Signal.
I don't think they should strive to reach feature parity with Telegram or asian messengers, but why can't they try to at least match WhatsApp in core functionality?
I get the privacy focus, but most of us are not dissidents in foreign countries or journalists who could be killed over their picture metadata. Give us a mode for normal users.
I regret moving my family over to Signal because before I used to have all their pictures as part of my photo stream. Since switching I need to manually save pictures but they don't have the correct timestamps then.
Absolutely not the case. I've got 2 at the moment, right now. Had 4 running when I had 4 computers I was using.
>Can't move from iOS to Android (and vice versa) without losing your chat history because backups aren't compatible.
Yeah, this is a real pain which I wish they had solved years ago. For personal reasons my daughter has her old android phone with our Signal messages on it, as it's the only way she can keep them as far as we're aware at the moment. It was a pain when I moved from Android to iOS for this reason.
>Can't automatically save pictures to Picture Roll, Google Drive, Dropbox for integration with your other pictures.
I would think this is by design. Signal is designed to be private.
>why can't they try to at least match WhatsApp in core functionality
I would imagine 'funding' and 'privacy' cover a lot of it.
There are many other alternatives out there, e.g. SimpleX, but many — if not most — suffer from the inability to synchronize chats across several devices.
DeltaChat should pose no problems to users coming from WhatsApp, having more or less the same UI as I remember from WhatsApp back then. DeltaChat is an amazing app, check it out:
You needn't even disclose who you are.
What is the backend for it? It's hard for me to find on their website. If it's also Telegram, than what's the point?
I would also like to point out that Telegram has very smooth chats sync across devices because those are NOT end2end encrypted by default.
One problem I did run into was “allowed number of outgoing emails”. If you use groups in DeltaChat, even a small grouop of say 10 members will incur a lot of outgoing messages. The provider I originally used has a limit of 200 emails per day, so that was a showstopper.
If you use DeltaChat's chatmail server (which will happen per default if you don't provide an email account of your own), this will not be a problem.
It uses SMTP/IMAP to propagate and store individual messages. This means that DeltaChat it will work with your usual email account (it will create an IMAP folder named DeltaChat), but if you install the app and say “Yeah, just let me in!”, it will create a random username for you on one of its own chatmail servers.
It may sound like a bad thing to use email, but it works very, very well. Most people won't even notice.
See e.g.:
Kinda surprised to find this on privacy policy of the default chatmail instance:
> unconditionally removes messages after 20 days
Didn't see any warning about this in the GUI or the chatmail page.
Does this mean after 20 days the messages on my app will disappear? or just they'll only be available on my local app after that point?
In any case, that's a pretty big red flag that it's not clear.
https://delta.chat/en/help#what-happens-if-i-turn-on-delete-...
Even WhatsApp has sync by now (even if it's artificially limited and works differently).
[0] https://support.delta.chat/t/list-of-all-known-client-projec...
According to my expectations, resetting your computer app and data and reconnecting to your account should result in an more or less empty message history.
That flexibility gives you the freedom to chose the communications platform according to your self-interests. And in today's targeted ads economy, those self-interests matter too much to neglect in favor of staying connected with everyone.
I'm pretty actively involved with my friends and just have the union of all messaging apps and even I frequently forget to respond to messages I've started to read because something else happens: baby cries etc
Otherwise it seemed like the most promising alternative I've seen that satisfied various requirements.
1. It cannot synchronize chats across several devices, so you need a separat “account” for each device. This can, to some extend, be mitigated by creating a group for each contact you communicate with, and then add all their and your accounts to that group.
2. Message propagation is somewhat unreliable: If you use the method described in (1), some accounts may not receive a given message.
But yes, you needn't disclose your phone number in order to create an account/profile on SimpleX.
- No multi-device support.
- No group calls.
- Establishing a contact requires sharing a large link or QR code, which is often inconvenient.
- Message queues drop messages if not retrieved within a relatively short period. Last time I checked, it was 21 days, which is shorter than some of my off-grid vacations.
- I couldn't find clear information on who runs the message queues, so I have to assume most are controlled by a single organization. This makes it effectively a centralized service with respect to privacy and resilience.
- Funded almost entirely by venture capital, making its longevity questionable, and the likelihood of future exploitation relatively high. I'm not comfortable depending on such a service to keep in touch with people.
It's vastly more complicated than Signal.
I suppose whether it's "there" yet depends on your personal needs, but it absolutely is making progress. Maybe slow, but steady and visible.
Can you explain a bit more about where you feel the complication comes from?
This group of friends are mostly not very technical. They were able to create an account on matrix.org perfectly fine. They felt a bit strange that they had to pick a username "like in the past" and not use their phone number. But at the same time they felt pretty nice not giving away their phone number to a foreign company/organization.
In what way? I've found device sync to work fine now (better than messages on macOS/iPhone), and not lost sync with any of the other devices I'm using. Not had to sign in needlessly for over a year.
Also fuck them for requiring a phone number.
That also what causes the problems. The sad part is that it didn't have to be this way, but being publicly listed currently means that you got to pump those stocks. Very few people invest in stocks because they believe in the long term future of a given company, that's old school thinking.
The types of stockholders that "take ownership" also isn't going to help fund the company long term. They buy the stock once and the hold on to it. How is that going to help?
WhatsApp needed to be a subscription to not go down the ads and data collection rabbit hole. Now there's no going back, more and more ads will appear and more and more tracking will sneak in. This is a Meta product after all, so I don't even understand why people are surprised.
The Signal foundation was established in 2018 with $105 million from WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, and it actively solicits donations. I give $20 a month.
They released a blog post at the end of 2023 emphasizing the need for donations and estimating operating costs would cross $50m/year in 2025.
Personally I think the small staff, donation-based funding, and security-focused security constraints are a plus: the platform seems way more stable than most and does what it needs to do.
[1]: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
Any recommendations?
In theory you could even make that interoperable with WhatsApp i( in the EU) since the DMA makes that mandatory, I am not aware if anyone who did it though.
https://developers.facebook.com/m/messaging-interoperability...
XMPP is very efficient and delightfully simple to use and administrate. I never tried E2EC with it, but there are options on the clients, like OMEMO. It has limited federation.
The simplest server IMO is Openfire, but offers range from Lua-written Prosody to the extremely expensive Isode servers that can do complete federation, HF radio XMPP and probably coffee and pizzas too.
Omemo I heard of. from what I read it’s a solid alternative to Signal’s protocol. Is it easy to use? Is there something we can just run the server, spin up some users and have them easily dm each other?
From a product point of view, maybe that's a fork of Signal? Maybe Signal Group, or something along those lines?
https://www.newsweek.com/telegram-messenger-russia-fsb-ties-...
https://istories.media/stories/2025/06/10/kak-telegram-svyaz...
Signal might be good at message encryption, but let's not forget that it handles user privacy unacceptably poorly.
Unless I'm mistaken, they use paid services provided by third parties, perhaps PayPal as indicated in the source code. But guess what - there's no mention of PayPal in privacy either.
2. The privacy terms themselves were updated 7 years ago, which is impossible for any company operating on the internet.
It's just impossible to claim to be famous for privacy and occasionally forget to update how you handle privacy for 7 years.
Google captcha sends your data to Google? Come on. Not even remotely in the same ballpark.
“Privacy of user data. Signal does not sell, rent or monetize your personal data or content in any way – ever.
Please read our Privacy Policy to understand how we safeguard the information you provide when using our Services.”
I clicked Privacy Policy and there is whole page explaining whats happening with your data.
Your comments seem a bit biased?
I've been really hesitant to view Signal as a privacy friendly alternative to WhatsApp, because they still don't offer any way to make an account without a phone number, while a phone number is definitely not required to run a chat service.
Also the fact that servers are run by just one organization is very troubling to me. It's just not the right direction.
Okay, so they are not sharing data and your whole premise was wrong. That happens. But now how do you change your mind?
It's true that having to disclose your phone number to the service and especially to other users is now a significant drawback compared to internet-first services like WhatsApp that use entirely separate identifiers. Many people have raised this objection, and to their credit they've at last rearchitected to allow exchanging messages using user names and without your phone number being disclosed to the other party.
They still have the phone number at the core of account registration, I suspect for similar reasons to the use of a (one-time sign up) captcha: because they raise the cost to create spam accounts. I'd understand if that's not acceptable to you, but I don't think "unacceptably poor" is a reasonable assessment of their handling of user privacy.
Another example of their approach to privacy: they went to great lengths to design their Giphy search to avoid revealing your search terms to them or your IP address to Giphy: https://signal.org/blog/giphy-experiment/
In the case of GIPHY that you mentioned, they are sending IP addresses, which is considered PII (according to GDPR), and this should be outlined in the terms and agreed to by the user prior to sending the data.
Signal's privacy terms were last updated in 2018. We are in 2025 now. It is unimaginable for any operational organization not to update their terms for 7 years.
All together, this is what I call "unacceptably poor" in terms of handling users' privacy.
There is no acceptable reason for an online service to demand your phone number IMO. There are a lot of other issues with signal though.
Needs to be a large billboard marketing campaign which is “zuck eats children and owns WhatsApp” or something. Then you might get 5% of people move over.
My immediate family are on it and two friends. That represents a year of trying.
Unfortunately, we living beings tend to go with what costs the least amount of energy - this being thinking and going through extra efforts to achieve a goal. Hence, we‘re stuck with WhatsApp by a law of nature.
The one everyone uses is better.
If you dont have a way to move masses, it does not matter.
Or the guts to say "I'm going this way, I'll be happy if you join me" and follow through
Its not friends and family. Our office administration basically runs on a WhatsApp group. I just sent a location to a plumber using WhatsApp. They dont know / use / want anything else.
At best, you might get some close people to use Signal or whatever but you have to use whatsapp to function.
Especially US people won’t understand that.
I've been using Signal for years, precisely because of WhatsApp and Meta and what they really stand for. Kids (adult) and family are all on it because of me.
Initially, I was the only person who used it, but I refused to used WhatsApp and got four of my friends (who were the only real group chat users I was interested in talking to) to use Signal. We all regularly use it, even though they are all on WhatsApp. They know my ethical objections to WA and Meta. Every Friday there will be a group call - even though we're all on iPhones now (I was on Android for many years).
One in particular takes the mickey out of me for it sometimes because he says "What difference are you making? One Person? Makes no odds."
But it -does- make a difference. A tiny one, maybe, but it's something that has been worth making the effort for. I think it's important to tread the right line between expressing why you're doing it and not making yourself unpopular but I think it's an important thing to try to do.
And now if anyone asks if I have WA I just say I don't use it, you can either text me or use Signal. I have probably 20 contacts on there, and anyone who I have meaningful connections with uses Signal. Once installed it's basically zero friction for them, they just find me there instead of WA.
I know network effects are massive, and it won't shift any time soon, but I think it's important to draw an ethical line in the sand, and it's something I decided to do a long time ago. One guy gave me a WA ultimatum and I just said "OK, but that's not for me, I'm not using it", and that was that for about a month. Then he installed Signal.
Any business that communicates via it I express my preference and if they insist that's how they message (had this with an insurance company!) then I say I won't use their business any longer.
I've got 150 contacts on whatsapp, over 200 on my phone. I am on several organised groups on whatsapp with 150+ members who use it for event management.
They are never going to signal. There isn't the momentum.
I may well be. But outliers are important. It is possible.
WA has massive network effects, of course. It's embedded. And I agree it's unlikely to change without a combination of legal controls and societal awareness (both of which seem extremely less likely than say a year ago).
But if everyone gave up when faced with such a situation, the world would be in a worse place than it is today. And Meta are relying on exactly that happening.
I feel like that's all just wayyyyy too esoteric to the average person. I mean if those things (company founder has bad politics and too much invasive tracking) were a hard pass I would pretty much have to throw away my phone. We might care a lot about tracking here on HN but the average person really doesn't.
On the other hand, the big thing in the news right now is that Whatsapp will soon roll out ads. People don't really care that Zuck stole their data and kissed Trump's ass. But they do hate ads. I think the more ads Whatsapp shows, the bigger the opening will be for someone else to come along and convince people to switch.
It seems Meta (a repeat offended with this) is yet again making that mistake with whatsapp. Prediction: they'll run it into the ground just like they ran Facebook Messenger into the ground. And Facebook itself of course.
Whatsapp only showed up because of extortion prices for SMS messages. It did the same thing for a fraction of the cost (1$/year initially). Easy sell, so it grew to many users. But who uses SMS at this point? I get a few once in a while. Mostly stupid 2FA codes. The core premise for Whatsapp has long disappeared.
Whatsapp is probably going to implode as Meta starts pushing through unpopular things like advertising and continues to be in the spotlight for routinely doing dodgy things with respect to privacy, surveillance, etc. They are just not a great brand when it comes to that and they are losing a lot of trust over time.
Mostly people use whatsapp because other people use whatsapp. Not because it's particularly good. IMHO it actually always was a bit meh compared to other things. But world+dog seems to like sending me messages with it so I'm on it.
For the same reason I've had Signal on my phone for a few years now and more and more messages are coming in via that. Neither are optional at this point. I expect Signal will eat a lot of the Whatsapp traffic soon.
And if not Signal than something else. Whatsapp was famously built with only a small team. That's 16 years ago. These days building something like that from scratch could be done in a fraction of the time with minimal effort. You could vibe code an MVP in an afternoon and it wouldn't be horrible. This stuff is a pure commodity at this point. We don't need trillion dollar big tech companies doing this for us.
Also Signal requires a phone number to sign-in. It's not exactly private. AFAIK the proprietary server can glean your IP, your phone number, who you talk to, and when you talk to them. This type of metadata is valuable information.
The WhatsApp co-founder gave Signal $105M in 2018. Signal costs ~$50M/year to run. It's also funded by wealthy donors such as Jack Dorsey (Twitter, BlueSky, Square). BTW Jack is now pushing Signal to integrate Bitcoin.
When evaluating the "ethics" of a chat platform, we should factor-in the metadata, soft power, and eventual leverage that centralized (controlled by a few) platforms like BlueSky and Signal afford to wealthy folks who are bankrolling it.
Options like Matrix or XMPP give users more freedom
It is of course possible to create signal clients that are forks of Signal.
I don't see how this is an -ethical- issue though providing the ethics of Signal align with that of the user (they do with mine), and if they're doing something unethical then you should not be using them anyway (hence me not using WA)
Yep, see email and the phone network /s
> It is of course possible to create signal clients that are forks of Signal.
Which may be killed at any time when they connect to the central Signal server, see LibreSignal
Never going to happen unless legally forced to. Which is not happening any time soon in the USA.
>WhatsApp's call quality is second to none. Never had a problem with Signal - in fact I've had situations where it's been a better option than anything else available to me.
Let’s f*ck up Zuck just because OP doesn’t like him. How can a post like this be at the top?
Please not that I advocate people to use Signal.
Because the ethics of WA and Signal are completely different, and Meta is finally moving in the direction of putting adverts into WA which was predicted years ago when it was bought by Meta.
If you are not from the U.S., then no, it's not a replacement for WhatsApp, it's the same
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
"but E2E encryption my dude"
You have forgotten about RSA, my dude
Why Signal, why not X, Y, Z? ask yourself why something from Cali always gets picked up and talked about, but people's favorite? nevaaaaaaah
Don't get me wrong, I use signal a lot and I love it, but presenting signals as an alternative to whatsapp is only going to disappoint people.
Telegram is closer, but neither e2e encrypted nor open source.
Still, I would say if you are in America and not dealing with state or industrial secrets, getting spied on by russians is better than by meta.
Basically, I use both: signals for my privacy oriented friends that will go through the ordeal of using signal, and telegram with the normies so that at least they get of the zuck train.
There is always a tradeoff between usability and security, and Signal is too secure for me
According to the Guardian article[0] this article uses as a source, WhatsApp has had updates to limit the number of times messages can be forwarded. But there’s obviously a limit to what can be done because the chats are e2e encrypted.
What does the author want from WhatsApp? Reading messages and blocking them if they don’t pass Meta’s moral guidelines is the opposite of want you’d want from your private chats and I don’t see any other way to effectively combat spreading misinformation.
And is there any indication that Signal would prevent situations like this if it gets more widely used?
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/30/whatsapp-fake-...
I use them both to connect with my family, signal for chats, but whatsapp for video calls, because very often in Signal you are minecraft.
First place here is FaceTime link (so it opens in a browser), and second is WhatsApp.
miracoli•2h ago
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(Telegram: even just having it installed would be seen as a political statement, it's where the weirdos congregate to antivaxx and flatearth and reinstate monarchy or whatever they do)
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On top of that, nearly all groups related to kindergarten, school, or various clubs use WhatsApp, and there’s practically no way to convince them to switch. If my wife weren’t in those groups, I’d have no idea what’s going on.