I think Signal takes its community temperature from their forums rather than other places that people normally talk on the internet like HN, Reddit, or Twitter. It is rather odd and those forums are pretty trash if I'm to be honest. There are a lot of people that fight tooth an nail on there to make Signal as static as possible, meaning no new features or anything else. A particularly interesting one I saw was a user saying Signal has pretty much solved the E2EE part and needs to focus more on privacy and anonymity[0] and a user just said that's not what Signal is about. I've seen users argue about deletion as "well you can't guarantee message wasn't seen, so don't 'trick users'" and argue that data sent to you is unequivocally yours and no one else's (even saying if someone accidentally sends you a nude that this is justification to not delete. Because they want the nude). So I've stopped going there because the environment is toxic at best. But on the other hand, I think places like Reddit/Twitter (and even HN) are critical on Signal in ways that don't make sense. Just creates too much noise (Twitter threads are just full of users asking about usernames no matter the topic. Come on people. I'm frustrated too, but you're just noise).

I love Signal and think it is a great problem. I think it is too slow (e.g. username rollouts...) -- especially with Moxie's famous fuck decentralization speech -- and needs to actually adapt to the moving ecosystem, but people complain about it in weird ways. For better or for worse, right now it is the best game in town simply because messaging apps require networks. We'll see if they last though, because they aren't adapting fast enough. I think this would be a shame. But it is also a shame that Signal is failing so hard.

[0] https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-needs-to-shift-to...