… and I can’t even continue the chat from my phone.
410mb for chat app seems very unoptimized
It’s because it’s an electron app. So in addition to the chat app itself, it also includes a full Chromium runtime. Worse still, the Electron architecture doesn’t really lend itself towards reusing electron itself; this means you might have several copies of the same version of electron on your machine for various apps.
People complain about the sizes of things like flatpaks and snaps, but tbh the whole architecture of applications is like this these days. Ironically, flatpaks and snaps could help with this because their formats can work decently with filesystem level deduplication.
wait till you meet Line 😶
Signal’s desktop app is as horrendously unusably bad as the project as a whole is good, tbh.
It’s no wonder people prefer stuff like Telegram. It has native apps and all. Or can be used in a browser. Meanwhile Signal is only used in a browser, but you have to download it and it fucks up font scaling and it shits the bed on font antialiasing and it can’t even get UI design consistent with the OS it’s running on and it won’t even use the OS emoji font.
Let’s not even mention how you still cannot use Signal on a tablet.
Signal’s desktop app is as horrendously unusably bad
I think this is a bit dramatic. I’ve been using it for years, no problems.
The best version of the Signal app was back when it was available as an actual web app.
telegram has an “advantage” of not having e2e encryption by default, which makes stuff like sync much easier as chats are fully stored on the server (encrypted with your user password).
and if you enable encryption (aka start a secret chat), the chat will only exist on the device you started it on and stop getting synced
And anytime you clicked on a link or image in the chat, you’ll have to click into the message field again (or press Ctrl+t) to be able to type a reply. I don’t understand how this absolutely infuriating thing hasn’t been fixed in years. Is nobody bothered by this? I want to be able to alt+tab into signal and just start typing ffs.
That’s why I am so happy that I switched to Matrix - selfhosted with Signal and WhatsApp Bridges(amongst others) and now I only need to keep one App on our mobiles, Notebooks,desktop,etc. but I can still communicate with everyone. (we have have a few mixed groups now)
Is Matrix another one of those apps that when you click on a download link it takes you to a page full of tech jargon shit like “nightly signed beta configs here, just unjibble the .trag file and recombobulate with a python scrab to mambo directory: AAATGFHHOLLLM56888NGAAA.tar.gz” ?
Or is it like an app normal people can use?
I don’t have the time nor the crayons to explain that to you.
as a big proponent of FOSS I see where you’re coming from - but the reality will always be that apps which have a significant learning curve to even install are obviously hugely off-putting to the majority of users. While the rest of us might be comfortable cloning a repository and building from a tar file, expecting the average person who wants to talk with friends and family to jump through those kind of hoops is exactly what has held back wider adoption of better standards.
Things like flatpacks and snaps have gone a long way to making this less daunting, but when matrix isn’t a ‘self-hosted decentralised chat’, it’s a *‘version of whatsapp that isn’t always online, and i don’t know where to download it and have to learn what the terminal is to even get it on my laptop’ * - we can’t be surprised people stick with the less secure, private, easy options. That’s why I’m a big advocate of signal - it’s not perfect and part of me wishes it was matrix or threema or one of the other standards, but getting people comfortable with the idea of free and open source software, while making it as simple for them to install on their phone or computer as anything meta makes is a really good first step - in the meantime, it’s up to us in the wider community to make the other solutions more intuitive, simple, secure, and trust that if a good enough job is done of that - they will come.
I managed to get my parents on signal because it’s functionally a WhatsApp clone
Sorry,but have you at least read the wikipedia article before writing this post?
Matrix is a standard. Not an App. Just like Lemmy is.
There are dozens of clients (Element, Schildichat, Fuzzychat, Beeper) available to download for basically every system imaginable and in all major Appstores.
You can easily join an existing instance - and with beeper there is even one existing that handles all the bridges for you.
Only when you self-host it gets more tricky-just like it does with Lemmy(as a matter of fact Matrix is far easier to selfhost than Lemmy). And again there are various distributions available. They aren’t as easy as the clients and not as easy as flatpacks, but someone who has done their due diligence can absolutely handle them easily. (And self-hosting should absolutely not be “as easy as flatpacks/snaps” - the risk for both the admin and the net itself is too high). But again: The average user has little incentive to selfhost. Just like you don’t selfhost your Lemmy instance.
The Matrix environment is as easy to use as Signal, Threema, WhatsApp for ages now. In some points I would even argue that it’s more user friendly than Signal,btw.
Of course not,
with the new encapsulator all you need is to reconfigure your turbomutator to allow electrostabilizer executable to directly read instructions from your self-hosted AI model.
Who even uses python to scrab anymore? Install podman dude.
Podman breaks the retroencabulation.
I think you mean lazy illiterate people. just pay Google/amazon and be done with it
Don’t be an elitist bung hole, dude.
elitist because I said they don’t want to read? lol ok … you weirdos get so butthurt over a simple statement
Not everyone has the ability or spare time to become skilled in every field. Calling them lazy and illiterate for not learning a complicated thing (when they may already be learning some other complex subject) is kinda the definition of elitism.
Tech bros are so fucking bad about this shit. Doctors too. I’m not an idiot, I fix big industrial machinery for a living, I can rewire your whole house up to code, but I don’t work in tech so I don’t know what the fuck a flapjack api is or whatever.
tech bro? wtf does that even mean. maybe stop crying that cOmpUteRs ArE hArD and use your brain
being able to read and follow instructions = elitism
please get your head out of your rear end
it’s as easy to get into as lemmy/masto/fedi
Your post encouraged me to self host Matrix ^^ That’ll be a nice project for the next rainy day
Thanks,welcome to the club! It can be a bit “tricky” at times (and I use a container manager,cloudron, meanwhile as I got too deep into the rabbit hole and now host too many things to maintain them myself) but once you get it set up it’s rock solid.
And I am really optimistic for Element X/Matrix 2.0.
It’s a great standard.
Gonna repeat what I said to Mikina - Thank you for sharing your setup, this kind of information is always extremely valuable <3
Signal package has Electron (which is built on top of Chromium and NodeJS) + Signal app code and assets. So not surprised that it’s bigger than Chromium.
Like I know native apps are always better, but why doesn’t electron ship an installable runtime so we don’t have to have a shitload of inert chromium installs on one machine?
You don’t understand. This way if some app crashes it will not cause others to crash too.
This is how google introduced the “multiprocess architecture” of Chrome.
You can still have separate processes and everything else with a shared runtime, you just save having all this wasted storage with every application bringing its own bundled runtime.
.net or Java applications work in a similar way, one Java app crashing won’t take out another just because they’re sharing the same runtime
I’d rather not have frameworks based on web browsers. Programming is not that difficult.
For most uses of electron I’d agree, but if some engineers are going to use it anyway, I’d prefer the approach I’ve described.
Programming is not that difficult.
Learning how to do something in a new language and framework isn’t that tough, I agree, but no one is going to become an expert in something overnight. I don’t reckon many desktop native engineers are choosing electron unless they actually need it, so if you imagine the case of an expert web engineer building a desktop UI, they’re going to do a much better job with their main skillset than something they have just learned.
but no one is going to become an expert in something overnight
It’s not like they need to become experts. But also that’s actually possible (at least the effects of that), especially with all the AI around.
It’s not like they need to become experts
I mean if they would produce a better UI by using their expertise, how would not becoming an expert in the new thing be better? The reality is that the people paying the engineer are going to want the better UX over the benefits of not using electron in most cases.
But also that’s actually possible
Respectfully, no it’s not, not with software engineering unless you’re talking about learning a simple library or something.
If someone can genuinely master something in a day it wasn’t much of a skill to begin with.
I’ve been in this industry for about 20 years now, I would find it very hard to believe an engineer who says they’ve gone from no knowledge to expert in a new framework/language in any short period of time. I would either assume they’re trying to pull a fast one or more charitably just in the “naively confident” phase of learning:
especially with all the AI around.
AI can assist you if you more-or-less know what you’re doing, but a novice replacing proper learning with ChatGPT pairing is going to write some shitty code. I use AI in my role semi-regularly, and in my experience, no model has consistently produced me anything (non-boilerplate) longer than a couple of lines that didn’t need some kind of refactor for it to actually be up to our code quality standards. Sometimes you see them spit out some ancient way of doing things that have been outright replaced by a more modern approach, if you don’t have the experience, you’ll not know any better.
I mean if they would produce a better UI by using their expertise, how would not becoming an expert in the new thing be better?
I failed to understand the meaning of this sentence. It doesn’t make sense to me. Producing a better ui is not even on the table when we are talking ui frameworks and native programming - you use what’s available, and if you are a graphics designer then maybe you should’ve sticked to that instead. Becoming expert in native ui is super cool but I wouldn’t expect such miracles from everyone. Just producing a valid low level code is enough to meet my standards of performance. That’s because those standards were heavily affected by web frameworks existence.
The reality is that the people paying the engineer are going to want the better UX
And I hoped it would be customers who would pay for a software or a service who would send valid feedback.
AI can assist you if you more-or-less know what you’re doing
Assuming web devs creating apps don’t know what they’re doing?
but a novice replacing proper learning with ChatGPT pairing is going to write some shitty code.
Chances are that code would be much more optimized than anything electron/CEF wrapped.
to actually be up to our code quality standards
Quality standards are great. But seeing companies shipping fixes to simple CSS issues that were breaking some of main app functions made me realize most of them don’t care about quality standards. If that’s how it is and if there will still be a lot of broken stuff across app updates - might as well just go all the way to proper low level languages.
May be, but I don’t think apps use it. Afaik Teams, Discord and such are all epectron apps, yet they have not much in term of dependencies and large install sizes, so they must ship with their own versions.
Haha, WeChat is even more outrageous than this. All your forwarded files will be automatically stored again. Your chat records will always be stored on the disk, but WeChat will tell you that the chat records have expired. In addition, it has recently been discovered that every Once you log in to WeChat, your avatar will be saved more than ten times
On my phone is only 171mb.
And that’s also a lot for an app that doesn’t have that many binary assets like images or videos. I do wonder what makes up most of these sizes. I see other apps that are arguably more complicated - like AntennaPod - using under 40MB; So I guess it has to do with actual native apps vs cross platform ones.
They’re talking about the desktop application.
“Only”
Your phone has bigger problems if it cannot take 170mb apps, this isn’t the 1990s
That’s a very bad way to look at things. Just because I have gigabytes of memory doesn’t mean I want to use unoptimized software.
And your way to look at things that “all apps must be 20 mb or less otherwise they are unoptimised” is better because?
Because optimized software is better for industry, people, and environment. Also seeing that some menu or window is not an html page but a native element makes my headache go away because I value my CPU cycles (seeing a cursor doesn’t lag when some complex page is displayed should not be considered a weird fetish) and like it when things don’t do stupid unnecessary stuff both visually and under the hood.
And it could be even less than that depending on specifics.
If developers optimized their apps, we could have phones that are 10x faster than 10 yeara ago. Instead they are the same speed and the same amount of apps fit in the bigger storage, because developers are lazy and use heavy, unoptimized technologies that use 10x the resources
That sounds like a problem with YOUR phone. Every phone I’ve bought has been faster than the last. Maybe you have too much bloatware?
I use open source Android only, will not use a phone with stock android. Bloatware is a non-issue on AOSP unless you do that to your own phone.
even the phone app is larger than telegram and whatsapp
Harddrives start at 16€/TB, so 500MB would be 0.008€. SSDs start at 50€/TB, so it would be 0.025€ or two-and-a-half cents
I don’t think people are worried about storing hundreds of Signal instances, this isn’t a photo backup.
The concerns are bloat, optimisation, and memory usage.Also, HDDs can go from $7.5/TB
That’s the point. The storage is a bad metric. While it might indicate poor performance, it’s not a direct indication of poor performance. The bloat and optimization comes from the usage of Electron. And people use Electron because it’s far easier to make cross-platform deployments for Web and desktop using a framework like Electron. Show me the QT/JavaFX app that mimics Signal and we can compare the cost to develop it. Electron isn’t the best choice for memory usage and reducing bloat, but it’s the best choice for quick development (in my opinion but also proven out by the market share it has)
Sadly, it’s the only way I can contact someone to buy a decent quantity of weed in this state. I get less even if I go to a state where it’s legal and I pay more.
What’s so sad about it? You have the ability to securely send E2EE messages for free. I’m very pleased with Signal after using it for years.
If you mean it’s sad about the weed being hard to get / illegal… yeah, I concur. Hopefully Schedule III happens soon and nationwide Medical will be legal.
Is it possible to run the android app on Linux somehow? Hmm…
Waydroid! No idea if Signal works with it though, worth to try it
Well dooh, you installed Chrome with it. Add to that their application and there you have it.
Yeah, I’ve been having a lot of issues with Electron which is basically a browser emulator. It has gotten huge, so applications using it have gotten out of control in size. I get that it’s a quick way to build a cross platform application, but there really needs to either be a better way to distribute it that is more modular, or people need to start building on better cross platform front-end systems.
i am doing a full system upgrade and something wants to build chromium from source. i let it run in the background and cloning the repository alone has downloaded 33GB wtf 😭
Yeah, I had to move away from Arch Linux because lots of apps you have to build and Electron was one of the biggest culprits for using tons of disk space and time because it builds Chromium in its entirety from source. Electron is a great way to shift the cost of cross platform development from you to your customers.
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The inability to continue chat from phone is a feature.
