Thranpages :: Sensible Ramblings :: Who Is Signal For?
I've always been keen on alt tech and self ownership. The beginning was the 2021 Mass Exodus from WhatsApp when I managed to persuade a few friends to switch to the open source and privacy-respecting Signal app.
What drew me to Signal was that it is a perfect drop in replacement for WhatsApp. Its UI works the same way, its featureset does the same thing, and AFAIK in Signal both metadata and its contents are worthless if intercepted by snoopers. Even better, it is very normie-friendly. All that separates it from WhatsApp is the number of active users.
Better yet, Signal has a half decent desktop application. I could use it to type longer messages with a proper keyboard. Goodbye glass!
Fast forward one year when I'm one half of a startup. These upsides led me to select Signal as an informal IM application for our business, chosen over the bloated and snooping Slack. My plan was genius: I'd create group chats as an analogue to Slack channels and invite my fellow founder to these, thus our personal message history wasn't inundated with business chat, and the conversations were categorised for easy future reference.
This worked fantastically. We built a lengthly conversation history in General, Marketing, Fundraising and Technical channels. These provided a vital record of easily searchable company data. Then after two years of message history, we grasp the long overdue opportunity to upgrade our hardware. We purchase some new company laptops. Everything else is easily migrated - source code, cloud storage of company assets, ssh keys - except for the chat history.
