Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 30, 2025 18:16 UTC (Thu) by hailfinger (subscriber, #76962)
In reply to: Flee from Meta by Klaasjan
Parent article: Linux-related discussion as a cybersecurity threat

I used to recommend Signal, but their target audience is people who value confidentiality over availability.

Signal does not have the ability to store received media files in the phone gallery or any other storage media easily backed up incrementally, you just have the option to back up the gigantic blob file created once per day as "backup". The ability to store media outside the Signal container has been requested repeatedly and denied repeatedly, usually with arguments along the lines of "you don't know if the sender would allow you to back up the media" and "you can export media files individually to phone storage, just not in bulk".

If you want to share pictures/videos in a way the receiver can benefit from automated off-device backups to avoid data loss, pretty much any non-Signal messenger is better. Signal-JW exists and claims to be Signal-compatible while allowing phone-managed storage of media, but that won't help your conversation partner recover their valuable family pictures.

If you're recommending a messenger to friends and family, be ready to explain why their data disappeared after a phone was stolen or damaged if the messenger doesn't support user-friendly automatic backups.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 31, 2025 8:29 UTC (Fri) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (2 responses)

> Signal does not have the ability to store received media files in the phone gallery or any other storage media easily backed up incrementally, you just have the option to back up the gigantic blob file created once per day as "backup"

When you recieve an image you can select it and ask to save to local storage (aka your phone gallery). Since most images I receive via Signal are memes anyway I don't mind this, I just need to remember to save the few photos that are interesting.

For the same reason I don't have every image in WhatsApp backed up to the cloud, that just wastes a ridiculous amount of space.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 31, 2025 10:20 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

This becomes a user-by-user thing; I back up all images I'm sent via WhatsApp, since virtually all of them are family pictures I want to keep. It's simpler to remove the 1% of images that are memes than to manually back up the 99% that are things I want.

Signal doesn't offer the choice - it insists that everyone has to work the way you do, not the way I do.

Flee from Meta

Posted Jan 31, 2025 12:43 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Signal doesn't offer the choice - it insists that everyone has to work the way you do, not the way I do.

What I would personally like is the ability to explicitly archive (and subsequently delete) some subset of the overall Signal message store.

There are conversations that _must_ be kept for various reasons but I don't want to waste a couple of GB of precious handheld space on them all the time.