I use wire (wire. com) for daily chatting. I like it but I couldn’t find any good communities in wire. In session, or simpleX, there are privacy (and other) groups in which anyone can participate… Can we start a privacy group in wire so we folks can also hang around?
I wouldn’t invest time in Wire.
I got my entire family to use it seven or eight years ago. Since then, Wire has continually made changes that have only made the system worse for free users. I assume they’re doing it to push people to the paid subscriptions, but it could also simply be developer incompetence. Either way, there isn’t a good alternative for a non-techie group of people, amd switching costs are high, so we’re stuck on it as it slowly degrades.
Notifications have become consistently more flakey over time, and none of our Android users can “Share” media with the app anymore (it doesn’t show up as an option). Wire used to have an animated GIF lookup option built-in - sort of like fancy emojis - which disappeared earlier this year. Group video calls were disabled for the free tier last year. It’s a slow enshitification, and I’d recommend not investing time onboarding a bunch of people.
I find Signal to be very user friendly, what don’t you like about it?
Metadata. Requiring a phone number to register. And a hostile anti-federation, anti-API stance by Signal. Sure, you can run your own server, but you can’t connect to anyone in the official Signal network, and third-party apps are also disallowed.
Wire has the same problem, don’t get me wrong. They’ve been resolutely refusing any third-party connections (mainly requests from Matrix bridge folks). But Signal isn’t an improvement on these fonts.
Signal is building straight alternative to WhatsApp. And it is very good because everyone who uses it can easily switch to Signal, without complications. Federation adds many new concepts (problems) for normal human, more latency and makes development way slower which is also very bad for mass adoption. And they are against only of 3rd party clients which use Signal in name. Molly exists, f.e. So Signal rocks 🤟😄