Signal may not be something you think of when you think of social media. But with the addition of Signal Stories, it’s a nice option. All photos are end-to-end encrypted and disappear after 24 hours. This prevents Signal from using my face for their own marketing.
You can’t prevent screenshots, of course, but you do have the option to select which people can see your stories. But I believe you can trust the people who use Signal.
I highly recommend trying the Stories feature out if you are missing the picture sharing that the less privacy respecting platforms offer
I don’t use Stories on Signal, though I turned it off, which you can do in Settings.
But it is a welcome addition to Signal regardless! Good on them for having it as an option.
A small thought: wouldn’t it be so cool if Signal can acquire Snapchat and Kik to essentially kill both of them (while enjoying to keep the intellectual properties and similar of both? See Cisco and Pure Digital Technologies).
Interestingly, while NPOs cannot be acquired, but they can acquire a company. See the College Board (an entity registered and recognized as a non-profit though in practice they’re like a for-profit college without shareholders) and Carnegie Dartlet, a company.
To be fair, Whatsapp stories are e2ee too. But the metadata probably isn’t so I guess Signal Stories wins.
It’s a welcome addition although it looks like there are no support for it on Desktop Clients.
Keep up the good work, Signal devs!
… stories have emerged as a new way to communicate, with their own unique purposes, norms, and idiosyncrasies. Ephemeral, low-stakes, and image-heavy, people use stories to share updates about their lives without the expectation of a response. …
Abuse of the story concept is one of the things that killed my interest in Facebook.
A photograph of a plate of food does not form part of a person’s life story.
A person’s life story online should be specific and focused (EX engineering, photography, art, education), not broadly about virtually everything. I think the tendency for many to post pretty much anything about themselves contributes to the thoroughly-debunked “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” narrative.
Though I only have close friends and family on Signal. So I use the stories to send something that is for example relevant to an inside joke or something similar.
I don’t know how many are seeing this, but Signal is slowly turing into Whatsapp with even one of the Whatsapp CEO working on the project as it’s head. I doubt the security of Signal too, it uses non-free blobs and refuses to publish it’s app on a secure store such as F-Droid instead of Play Store. Signal also is not recommended by the great RMS.