I’m actually pretty disappointed with the development of new features. SMS integration was great and now gone. And what they introduced in the last fwo years? Messages formating, planned-send and editing.
I had to use telegram few times in the last weeks and the bots, emojis, pools or location sharing make it feel pretty powerful.
For those not in the know, it's dolby's proprietary hdr format, in a similiar vein to their atmos product, which is high definition audio. You see it labeled in linux isos as "DV", and if it doesn't also have the HDR label there's a good chance your video is going to have the wrong colors in it.
Wow, I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve needed to compress a Dolby Vision videos in a pinch. Like, how have I been living my life all these years just sending uncompressed Dolby Vision videos around? It’s unthinkable
if we assume location sharing = latitude + longitude + unix timestamp + a ~10 minute update interval + sane defaults [0], it shouldn’t be too straining of a resource. At least I don’t imaging it would be. It’s basically the “data” required to store the following as a message, “48.858370,2.294481,1707360628” with maybe a special header that indicates it’s location sharing data. We’re talking less than 340 kilobytes to store/process 10,000 messages. Even if it updated every minute, you’re only sending 1,440 “location sharing” messages per day IF you’ve even set it to share updates for 24 hours.
Scale this to millions of people and it’s just a blip in the radar, considering its not enabled by default, turns off after some time. Heck, they could even have the client only send updates if your location has changed significantly. If you’re sharing location but your position hasn’t changed since last message sent, it could increase the time before it sends an update to further minimize the impact. Just my 2 cents.
I do agree its probably pretty low on their to-do list. Would be nice to have tho. Monthly donor here too, super happy with the app.
[0] With the assumption that it can only be enabled with some timer to auto-disable.
How is location expensive to encrypt? I share my location all the time but to do that I have to write an entire sentence to other people where I am. Just introduce a new message type (like with edits) frontend to enable location sharing. Location is sent every 5min or if the other person requests an update, than location is updated again (send location update request message to trigger response on the other side). Same encryption as everything else and easy to implement. Of course the devil is in the detail but the basis are trivial.
The “hardest” part would be to show the location on a map without leaking data but just add a warning dialog and open externally. Every link in Signal you press has the same privacy issues.
The amount of data is a joke for location “streaming”. There is no need to update the location every second, most people on earth don’t travel with rockets. Updating the location at most every 30 seconds is probably more than enough for most usecases. Let’s make it 15s. Let’s be generous and just use two 32bit floats (could probably get away with 16bit half precision or fixed point). The size of the entire message (without meta data and encryption) is just 8 bytes. There are emojis that need more than that. And in practice people that can’t share their location often just end up sending images, so the amount of data is definitely not the issue with location sharing. A single image you send on Signal uses more data than streaming the location ever 15s for a few days.
But it already has the ability to share your location, or am I missing what you’re requesting? Right now if you go into a chat, click the + sign, there’s an option to share your location.
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