Oddbean

I had hoped that Molly would continue supporting SMS so I could have possibly gotten some family members to use Signal for "texting" (plus I'd know my SMS were encrypted at rest). It was really great to have conversations opportunistically use an e2ee protocol when possible, without the user having to think about anything. Sadly, Molly also abandoned that feature, just like Signal. I would have switched clients in a heartbeat, too. Missed opportunity. Seems unlikely that they'll switch the code back at this point. 😐

Sadly all the family members that I converted to Signal over the years went back to SMS. It was years of effort and making small improvements down the drain. If I go through all that level of effort again, I am going to do it with something where there's not a monoculture of clients. I've learned my lesson there. No matter how much I think a developer has my back, it's just not worth the risk. 😞

I can't trust myself on these things but the normies I talked to found the SMS integration confusing. I think it's for the best there's a clear distinction that "this messaging app is different". People are used to use different communication channels all the time, not that hard.

That may be true for privacy advocates, but many people are not used to different apps for what they see as the same thing (texting). They don't get why they have to use a different app to talk to me when this other one works fine for everyone else. "Why can't I just enter Dr. Hax's phone number and send him a text with the texting app that I use for everyone else?", they wonder. So, to them, it's more confusing to have different apps. They don't see any difference between Signal and Messaging. And that was the beauty of the old Signal: they didn't have to know about these underlying security features.