Signal Group User Activity

"How active is each user in the signal groups I'm in?"

This project reads the configuration directory from the Signal for Desktop app and generates a spreadsheet that looks like this:

	Alice	Bob	...
Neighborhod Chat	1	5	...
Roomate Chat	12	0	...
...	...	...	...

Each cell is the total message count for a user in a chat.

The goal is to afford distributed collection of group participation metadata from a community that uses disparate signal groups. No one member of the community is a member of every signal group, so we need to make use of multiple users' signal data.

I personally would not at all feel comfortable sending someone my decrypted signal database, so I implemented this as a dockerized python command line tool that runs locally. It generates a simple csv file that's easily inspectable before sharing.

Usage

First build the docker container for the tool

$ ./build.sh
Sending build context to Docker daemon  716.3kB
Step 1/12 : FROM archlinux:base-20241110.0.278197
---> 8f94599caa7b
[...]
Successfully built 1c3e3a1b45f5
Successfully tagged sigint:latest

The following command will run the analysis against the signal config directory you point it to, and dump the output to ./output/table.csv

Linux

$ ./run.sh -c ~/.config/Signal

INFO:main:writing message count table to /output/table.csv

Macos

$ ./run.sh -c ~/Library/Application\ Support/Signal

INFO:main:writing message count table to /output/table.csv

Group Filtering

Adding -f will filter the groups under consideration to only those listed in config/chat_list.txt

$ ./run.sh -c ~/.config/Signal -f

You might want to run the command once without filtering, then paste the chat name column from the spreadsheet into config/chat_list.txt and narrow down to only the ones you care about and run it again with -f. This will ensure the output spreadsheet only has columns for users in the groups you care about, and not every single user you ever saw on Signal.