Somehow I managed to delete a post from a couple of years ago in which I posited that Apple should introduce Annoucements – a notification-free stream of self-deleting posts from people in your Address Book that you can dip into or out of at will, with the choice whether to receive what someone offers or not and the choice to post to some groups and not others. It seemed like the most obvious possible thing, especially as things like Find My and Journal and the like pointed toward Apple developing all the components of a social network without actually starting one.
And then Signal added Stories, and I realized that was 90% of the way there. You could have group chats with notification turned off, self-deleting after a certain period of time, and using the Stories functionality for media that didn’t make sense to paste into multiple group chats. It made all the sense in the world, especially given that Signal was for people in your contacts already,
Well, two things have happened since. For one, Signal added user names that made it possible to create a chat without having to give out phone numbers. And for another, the world took a twist that made it suddenly much more attractive to have a cross-platform, cryptographically sound means of sharing without relying on the likes of Twitter or Facebook or their fellow subservients. For all the potential that Bluesky has (and which Mastodon may yet have), they haven’t licked a way to do federated social media without making locked or private accounts functionally impossible.
But then, there you have it – the thing I posited all those years ago. Bluesky becomes the RSS follow feed, and Signal the private Twitstagram. It’s to a point that Signal has taken the pride of place on my iPhone dock that once belonged to Twitter, and then to Slack for the better part of a decade. I’ve been trying to will Signal to happen for two years, and we might be on the verge of getting there. If I could get that going in 2025, I would consider it a successful year…assuming we can prevent everything else going to Hell along the way.
The real trick is getting people to use it, though. Outside the US and Asia it’s all about WhatsApp, and good luck prying people off it. The lack of security in RCS might make Signal attractive to people who need cross-platform messaging in the States, but that would take a lot more awareness. So if you’re not it, get on it. And if you’re on it, get your friends onto it. And maybe we can save our bacon from Musk and Zuckerberg yet.