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·
    10 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·
      10 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·
      10 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·
          10 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·
            10 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·
              10 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·
                10 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.

        • u_tamtam@programming.dev
          0·
          10 months ago

          Neither XMPP nor Matrix will ever become “the next WhatsApp”: the current internet has seen too much consolidation for the tech majors to permit it (and open and federated protocols can’t compete, do not have the marketing budget nor the platforms to promote their software, but I salute the EU’s Market Act attempt to shake-up the status quo).

          But that doesn’t really matter IMO. What (I believe) is important in the grand scheme of things is that such protocols remain alive, maintained and secure, so that:

          • small-scale instances can flourish and contribute to a more resilient/efficient internet (think of family-/district-level providers ; this is the kind of service I personally offer: family members and friends at large appreciate that the messages and data that we exchange aren’t shared over some cloud or facebook server for no good reason)

          • IM identities can persist over time: if you are a business or an individual, you may want to look into having a stable/lasting contact address, that will survive the inevitable collapse of facebook/whatsapp/instagram/… If you are old enough, your current email address probably existed before facebook. Why not your IM address?

          And yes, I hear you, this is rather niche, but what got me there (and on XMPP in particular) is having been long-enough on the internet to become tired of the never-ending cycle of migrations from service to service. More and more people will have a similar experience as time goes, so this niche will only grow :)

          • helenslunch@feddit.nl
            0·
            10 months ago

            the current internet has seen too much consolidation for the tech majors to permit it

            While that may or may not be true, it’s really not important for several reasons.

            1. All current XMPP clients I have seen are janky as fuck.

            2. No one is going to spend the billions of dollars necessary to advertise XMPP clients to end users who aren’t actively looking for them.

            3. The vast majority obviously doesn’t care about their privacy.

            Just seems like a fruitless endeavour.

            • leetnewb@beehaw.org
              1·
              10 months ago

              Which xmpp clients have you used? Conversations and its forks seem far from janky. Movim is nice, Dino is looking good, Kaidan is looking pretty good. Prose could be interesting.