Signal is the world’s most widely used truly private messaging app, and our cryptographic technologies provide extra layers of privacy beyond the Signal app itself. Since launching in 2013, the Signal Protocol—our end-to-end encryption technology—has become the de facto standard for private commu...

We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.

  • helenslunch@feddit.nl
    0·
    7 months ago

    I love Signal but this is one of many problems with centralized servers. Not only can they be disabled by the gov but they cost, as seen here, tens of millions of dollars to keep running at scale.

    What is the advantage? Why are we not using P2P systems? If I can download a 30GB video problem-free over and over again, shouldn’t it be simple enough to do with a 1mb text file?

    A huge part of their costs is just verifying phone numbers, which is something the service does not need and shouldn’t even have.

    • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.comEnglish
      0·
      7 months ago

      to do with a 1mb text file

      God you must be like my wife and write fucking novels as text messages.

    • u_tamtam@programming.dev
      0·
      7 months ago

      If you are curious, you should give XMPP a shot, it’s equivalent to Signal in terms of encryption, but anyone can host their own. Signal is ideologically opposed to anyone but themselves being in control of your account, and because of that I don’t want to trust them.

        • squeakycat@lemmy.ml
          0·
          7 months ago

          Indeed. Xmpp is lost as a general purpose chat app for everyone. I have many issues with matrix but it’s the best chance we have, particularly with bridges.

          • u_tamtam@programming.dev
            0·
            7 months ago

            Edit: Sorry, I responded to the wrong parent.

            I don’t believe Matrix is better positioned than XMPP to succeed. On a technical aspect, Matrix hasn’t managed to stabilize its protocol, and they’ve been a decade into it. This has resulted in only a single organization being in charge of the protocol, the client and the server implementations. This isn’t sound, this isn’t sustainable. And now, unsurprisingly, this organization is in a financial crisis, has lost important customers, has no budget secured to maintain its staff in the next years, and recently underwent a major licensing change that we can only interpret as a shift towards an opencore model at the detriment of the regular user.

            • slacktoid@lemmy.mlEnglish
              0·
              7 months ago

              The license change is to a GPL variant from the Apache license. How does that affect the regular user? Wouldn’t it be better?

              • u_tamtam@programming.dev
                1·
                7 months ago

                I can’t pretend to know the future, but if you read between the lines and the justifications provided, this isn’t really about AGPL per se, but about Element brokering AGPL exceptions. Practically we can expect all kinds of forks with opencore options that might enshittify the user experience in different ways, and further solidification of Element’s single-handed control over Matrix (which had been a prime concern for many years). Matrix is by the day closer to the closed-source centralized silos it was first pretending to oppose.

  • onlinepersona@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    7 months ago

    In total, around 50 full-time employees currently work on Signal

    […]

    When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year.

    That’s 380k/employee on average. Even if half of that went to taxes and other expenses, on average they’re paying their employees around 190k/year.

    Bro, as a European dev, that’s triple my salary! They could possibly double or triple their workforce if they hired from outside of the US.

    • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
      0·
      7 months ago

      I don’t care if employees are well paid. I do care that Signal takes 50 employees to operate. What are they all doing? This is a genuine question