I've used Molly for over a year. Overnight it lost the device registration and will not contact the servers to re-register. The backup feature also does not work which left me dead in the water for several days with no fix. I switched back to signal and had to start a new database. It was a disaster. YMMV
Sounds pretty much like my experience with the official Signal app. It is a mess too and I only use Signal/Molly because I have friends who use it.
But sadly the competitors are as bad, just in different ways. Why has nobody yet managed to build a good IM client? It does not seem like we have come far from what we had back in the Pidgin days.
Because everybody (except Telegram funnily enough) is prioritizing security over user convenience.
Most apps on the market are E2E by default these days, and that introduces a whole host of complications. It's the wrong tradeoff for 95+ percent of users. If you can only afford 1 device and only switch to a new one when the old device breaks, E2E is a disaster in the making. For the overwhelming majority of users, making sure that they have access to their messages when they switch devices is far more important than being protected from the NSA. This is something most signal advocates are completely unwilling to talk about.
Wire was able to implement a fully E2E-encrypted messenger with proper multi-device support almost a decade ago, long before it became mainstream. Fully FOSS too, including the server. For some reason it never became popular. They don't have proper desktop clients (just the usual Electron mess), but then, which one of them does except for Telegram?
My memory is really fuzzy, but I recall back when the new IM apps were all coming out and competing for the small share of people wanting to test them, either the Wire app or using the Wire service had a hard cost ($5 USD?) (no free-to-test tier, you had to pay to use). I believe history has shown a vast majority of folks will choose free (even with ads, sadly) over a hard cost for IM. Signal talked a better game and offered everything for free.
I mean, E2E is the entire point of Signal. if you don't think E2E is important then Signal is the wrong app. Personally given the current political climate I think having the technical knowledge to understand what E2E is and not wanting E2E is bonkers. High chance of people getting killed or jailed in the US for mainstream political positions in the near future.
Signal seems to work alright for me, although I felt the desktop app gets a bit annoying because of too many frequent updates happening to the app, which I believe is based on Electron.
But besides this, there is really a strong need for a web client, just like Telegram or WhatsApp. If only the protocol can be extended in such a way that it allows for integrating into a web app, that would be incredibly great.
Which is pretty odd as WhatsApp allegedly uses the very same E2E encryption and has no problem implementing a web client. I really don't see the point of Electron if it doesn't allow you to provide a web client.
I have been particularly impressed with the device migration experience. I have an 18gb db, and even the time my device died I managed to get things over correctly.
Why do you need a message history? The only use I can think of, if someone uses it against you in court. I don't remember looking up anything in history.
I look up old iMessages, emails, group chat comments, and so forth constantly, often finding valuable gems of wit, reference-material, recommendations, or media that I dimly remember from years or even decades ago.
Signal and other messaging apps offer a 'search' bar across all sessions & history, so I doubt I'm the only one.
It's hard for me to imagine being so present-focused such a history wouldn't be personally useful.
Or, so worried about "someone [using] it against [me] in court" that I'd need more than the occasional auto-expiration, and specifically my messenger "protecting" me with intermittently-enforced loss-of-histories (on just theft/loss/hard-failure of primary device).
I really hate that the desktop app unlinks after a relatively short period of time. I rarely use Signal, so few of my friends are there, so I have to relink the desktop app almost every time I open it. I wouldn't mind scanning a qr code every now and then, but then the history refuses to sync because security. So far I haven't find how to change it.
The Android app is stable enough, but the UX of having to look at the phone while typing a reply on a normal keyboard is annoying. This is why I prefer Telegram every time.
Anecdotes of occasional problems, even at a low or unquantified rate, are valid & useful evidence that something negative is happening.
Anecdotes that sometimes those problems don't occur are nearly worthless. Of course that's true - the original anecdotal
complaint already implicitly relies on, & grants, the idea that there's some default, "hoped for" ideal from which their experience has fallen short.
To chime in, "never had your problems" thus adds no info. Yes, people lucky enough not to hit those Signal limits that cause others to lose data exist, of course. But how does that testimony help those with problems? Should their frustration be considered less important or credible, because of your luck?
The as-if portrayal is one way your anecdote will be perceived, even if that wasn't your intent.
Very few of the protocols supported by Pidgin were encrypted, unless you used the OTR plugin. That makes it a lot easier to support things like chat history.
Conversations has an issue where the main tool for reading a backup on a computer (ceb2txt (so, say, I can properly and correctly archive a text dump archive of a person I loved who died)), will not work for me. I filed a support request and there's been no movement on it whatsoever and it genuinely seems like nobody gives a shit. Restoring a backup even with all the images and media files in the correct place with the correct filenames will then refuse to show any filenames.
This is par for the course with chat backups, though.
Messenger - Bad - No way to save chat responses of people you have talked to. This means you only ever have one side of a conversation, making it meaningless.
Twitter DMs - Bad - See Messenger.
Jami - Ehhhh - Saves a git local repository of messages. The only problem is message syncing is effing abysmal.
Dino (XMPP) - Bad - Does not allow backing anything up, this is "intentional". Depending on which protocol you use, as soon as you move to another device all the messages you _had_ are retroactively converted to Cannot Decrypt. They're my effing messages!
Discord - Good - Discord History Tracker (tedious to use but slurps everything up into a sqlite3 database that is itself, an official archival format)
WhatsApp - Good - Dumps a text record + files/images/etc. onto the phone's filesystem. This is reasonably easy to archive.
Signal - Mediocre - If you have an old Signal backup from 2018? That you could only transfer off your phone by deleting old messages? lmao you're effed. Load up a version from ten years ago, gradually update it and then maybe, MAYBE you can extract the sqlite3 archive? These days you have a .signalbackup or whatever which is an encrypted archive, and I assume that there's a tool to decrypt it, but uhhhhhh. Last I tried to use it it required way more RAM than I had accessible.
Telegram, which ostensibly claimed to provide e2e but really only did in very specific circumstances? My right wing uncle is still bitter about that. Then there's the rolling over the founder did after getting pulled up by Interpol.
Maybe you don't believe Durov's statement[0] about it. But is there any actual evidence anywhere that they've ever violated the secrecy of non-e2e private groups or messages for anyone? I've yet to find any.
That wasn’t the original question though. Twitter and Messenger are also untrustworthy. Telegram’s message export is very good compared to all the other options.
The deathblow for Signal was that I was in a group and some group messages just got lost for some members completely unnoticed. So you could never be sure if you missed something or someone.
I'm using WhatsApp again, now since years and had never issues, it just works.
