Basically: if Signal want to get to the first HundredMillion users, then they have to have mass-appeal – which means: Emojis, Stickers, Videos, and maybe Stories/Fleets/Reels. Back in the days of USENET we fought the same battles, practically invented (?) emoticons and embraced “readers” (not “browsers”) which gave us programmatic “.sig” files – because we need to express ourselves.
A small but relevant war-story: when building End-to-End Encryption for Facebook Messenger, I was ambivalent about adding “disappearing messages”, on the self-righteous basis that they were “security theatre”, and memory is that Moxie was strongly in agreement. But David Marcus demanded them as a feature, and he overruled me, and Marcus was right and I (…and Moxie) were wrong, and Messenger E2E shipped with a very nice “disappearing message” user experience.
A few months later, “disappearing messages” arrived in Signal and have been very popular.
As such: there’s a lot of growth for Signal to take by aping other platforms and providing the means for people to better express themselves.
Signal Lite? It’s a decent idea, but arguable that a further-split codebase multiplies the surface for bugs by two. Easier and safer just to get it right the first time.
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