I started writing this post on 2023-03-22

Some time ago, Signal - The Private and Secure messaging app - has added stories to their application. If you don't know what that means, it's a way to share small snippets of your life with friends and family which are visible for 24 hours. They've become somewhat controversial over the years as every app has started to adopt them after Snapchat had become popular, which is also why many people aren't happy with Signal adding this feature. However, I think that Signal having stories is actually fine and the way they implemented them made me re-consider if I myself really hated stories that much.

The concept of stories, or status as it's called in some applications isn't a new one. It is something that was primarily popularized by Snapchat all the way back in 2013, from which point on many other applications - including Signal - have adopted it's format to strengthen social interaction between peers. It can be used for various things: Sharing snippets of your life, informing your peers about your current status, or spreading a message to all of your peers. However, due to the rise of social media like Instagram, YouTube and many MANY more adopting this feature, some more tech-savy people had grown tired of seeing it added to every app there is out there.

For a while, I was one of those people too. Even just seeing some application think of adding a similar feature made me cringe, letalone seeing it implemented. Though, after having it turned off within Signal for a while, I've finally decided to turn it on and see what it's all about. Signal's implementation of Stories is what I would describe as the closest we've gotten to just using Snapchat. This is because you can create different categories of people to which you want to share your stories to - just like on Snapchat - in addition to sharing stories to already existing group chats. This means that you can decide who exactly gets to see which stories that you post. You can also react or reply to them directly, and control read-receipts seperately from your main messaging (so you can keep them off, whilst still seeing who viewed your stories).

Of course, all of this is designed with privacy and security in mind and uses the Signal Protocol as usual, which gives it an edge over some other messengers with similar functionality.

So, I've been using it for about 1.5 months now, and I must say that I actually like it! Usually I use it just to share memes, or small status updates about whether I'm currently available or if I won't be able to respond. Sometimes I also share snippets of things I see outside which I find worthy to be shared. I am honestly surprised at how long I've neglected this kind of feature from basically just having seen too much of it, even though the functionality is actually quite good.

Online you just see a bunch of people all over the web complaining about the addition of Stories, saying "you can add stories but not keep SMS?" because a lot of people are still upset about Signal sunsetting SMS support on Android. After actually using it for a bit however, I've long stopped understanding these people and have decided to move on. Signal stories are great, live with it.

---

Thanks for reading! I wish you a good rest of the day, evening, night, or whatever other time you're reading this!