I’m a 34 year old dad, so I don’t do a lot of messaging, at least not with a lot of people. In high school there was Yahoo Messenger. In college it was MSN Messenger and SMS text messaging. Then came Google Talk and eventually Hangouts. Once Hangouts could also manage SMS, well, all of my messaging needs were taken care of. Then as Facebook more and more took over the social scene the need to get phone numbers from people disappeared since you could automatically get that just becoming friends with them on the one platform to rule them all.

Of course Facebook used this to find out who you knew in real life so you could become friends with them on Facebook and they also started harvesting all of your SMS and phone call metadata, but damn it was convenient. With time more and more contact with people was all just handled by Facebook and contact syncing broke and eventually my wife and I started to realize that we had friends, like real life friends, where Facebook was the only means of getting in touch. By that point Facebook messenger has also became how I did most of the scheduling and planning for the podcast.

Google killed SMS from Hangouts as it tried to drive non-business users to other platforms they created. Unfortunately they pitted them against each other and are frequently killing them off to just try again. In case you haven’t picked up on it yet, Google creates (or buys) amazing services that are damn near perfect, then they kill them. I finally stopped using hangouts after my wife uninstalled it and I was left with two friends still on there, but I don’t chat with them very often.

I’ve also reached the point where I actively distrust and dislike Facebook and I think Google is really creepy and unreliable for anything that’s not one of their core services. It was time to move on.

After doing some research I found Signal. It’s an open source messaging app and service that does end to end encryption if Signal is on both ends. They don’t collect any data. There’s a desktop client that works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. With the mobile app it can manage your SMS and MMS messages and stores them locally in an encrypted database. Even better, you don’t register a profile with them, just the phone number and give them a name to use with them. You connect with people by having their phone numbers in your address book. This means that if you ever have to change to a different service or app, it’s no big deal since the numbers aren’t stored in Signal’s app.

I’ve reached out to the people that I have chatted with recently on Hangouts and Facebook messenger and I’ve been getting their phone numbers so I can message them on Signal instead, most are still over SMS, but I’ve managed to get a few people switched over to using Signal themselves. Either way, it’s one app to handle my messaging needs. Now I just need to get the rest of my friends and family off of Facebook messenger.

I’m now starting to feel like I have control of messaging.