Signal PINs
Sigh. What about fixing backups so that I don&#x27;t need this?<p>There is always something absolutely odd with Signal. The obtuse insistence in creating it&#x27;s own vault makes it annoying to use to share media and to make backups. Down to the built-in unusable camera app. I have almost everything duplicated in&#x2F;out of signal because of this. Huge space waste. What&#x27;s the threat model? Under the assumption that I can root the phone this is pointless. But if I trust the sandbox it&#x27;s also pointless. Anonymizing file metadata in&#x2F;out would have been more pragmatic, but pragmatism here is frowned upon.<p>Remote contact discovery: technically impressive. I would have gladly opted out though to remain anonymous to some contacts that have my number. Yeah, that&#x27;s the real &quot;privacy&quot; bit which is worth 10 times this PIN debacle.<p>I&#x27;m still bound to use a phone number which I _don&#x27;t_ really care about even just to use the desktop version (ahaha, <i>desktop</i>, yeah.. <i>cough</i>).<p>When I saw the PIN prompt for the first time I realized the money injection was giving its first fruits. I gave matrix a first good try. Finally I can choose from a plethora of clients, run my own server if needed.<p>The setup though is still not dumb-proof as signal (which is why I tolerated all the issues with signal so far), and the phone clients I&#x27;ve tried are not as polished.<p>That being said, when I mentioned PINs I managed to convert most my tech contacts to matrix within a week. The real question is whether the other ones will stay, jump over, or just go back to whatsapp (which they never removed).