Getting Started with Signal
I really want to like Signal, just... it&#x27;s so shitty at times.<p>Discord and Slack are great. Even Microsoft Teams.<p>Shitty things about Signal:<p>1) When you set &quot;Disappearing Messages&quot; it&#x27;s for any messages that come in after that point. I think it should be for the whole thread. Even though the UX implies it&#x27;s for the entire conversation, it&#x27;s really just for messages sent after the setting was changed. Moreover... let&#x27;s say you change the settings a few times... you have no idea if &#x2F; when individual messages will disappear.<p>2) When you delete a message on your phone, it&#x27;s still on your desktop -- and everyone else&#x27;s devices. It&#x27;s really frustrating that if I send a typo, I can&#x27;t delete it or fix it. Worse, it appears to delete... and being native to Discord &#x2F; Slack &#x2F; Teams... I expect it to delete for everyone. They did change message text from &quot;Delete&quot; to &quot;Delete message for me&quot; but even that doesn&#x27;t even delete across all my devices.<p>3) You can&#x27;t edit messages after you send them.<p>4) Functionality is different on a phone vs a desktop. You can&#x27;t do nearly as much on the desktop version.<p>5) It&#x27;s funky when you change phones. You can&#x27;t like sync all your old messages from one device to another. It&#x27;ll pull them on to a Desktop client, but it won&#x27;t pull them into a new Mobile phone client. Dunno, just bad UX.<p>6) Signal is still based on phone numbers... I don&#x27;t trust phone number based 2FA, so I don&#x27;t really trust Signal to be based on phone numbers either.<p>But it&#x27;s not all bad! Some things they added which make it feel less horrible... they finally did add meta data previews for URLs. That was nice. They added ability to give tapbacks &#x2F; emjoi responses, and &quot;reply&quot; to messages. I think all this in the last year or so. They&#x27;re working on it... but like it still feels like they&#x27;re aiming for shitty old cell phone text messages as what they are trying to replace... I wish they were aiming for Discord &#x2F; Slack &#x2F; Teams as those platforms have really done a great job with chat.<p>By far, the platform with the most improvement was Microsoft Teams. They had this wonky Skype For Business who knows hybrid approach. And they had a lot of the same issues around messages not being synced between devices. They fixed that in the last 18 months. I&#x27;ve been using Signal since Snowden, but in my opinion Signal still has a long way to go before it&#x27;s something I would actually want to use to chat with friends.