Signal is having technical difficulties • Hacker News Board

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#101

Post by interestica » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 6:36 PM UTC

KMag wrote: post #64

hcurtiss wrote: post #40

This is not good. I've moved so many people over in the last week. For purposes of getting them invested, this is a truly inopportune moment for an extended outage.

I haven't moved any friends in the last week, but I've gotten lots of notifications in Signal of many friends joining this week. Hopefully it just requires some simple modifications of some parts of their infra that they didn't realize were scaling bottlenecks. Based on my friends, mostly foreigners and English-speaking locals here in Hong Kong, Signal has grown about 20% in the past week.

It's an interesting anecdotal-metric. I've seen Telegram to Signal signups at about 5:1 for my contacts.

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#102

Post by SoSoRoCoCo » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 6:36 PM UTC

hcurtiss wrote: post #40

This is not good. I've moved so many people over in the last week. For purposes of getting them invested, this is a truly inopportune moment for an extended outage.

Same here!

Last night a friend from India popped up on signal. I told him "Welcome!" and he said "You finally wore me down, I've left WhatsApp and I'm trying to move my family off of it..."

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#103

Post by zamadatix » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 6:36 PM UTC

neltnerb wrote: post #60

tonymet wrote: post #34

Is it possible to switch to backup Signal server within app? i'm researching running my own in emergencies.

This is a perfect time to learn about using matrix... which is how I told my friends that I usually talk to on signal that signal was broken. It's actually decentralized so like email only one server goes out at a time.

How does this change things for the user though. E.g. in email it doesn't matter if your email is down or everyones email is down, you're not switching to a new email host every time yours goes down and you don't particularly care if someone else can communicate while you cant.

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#104

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 6:36 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #82

alan5 wrote: post #71

I just donated to Signal after seeing the error banner in the app. I realised I was more than happy to pay WhatsApp's yearly charge back in the pre-Facebook days (think it was 70p or so?). Figured I could give Signal a few quid every now and then, maybe keep a server up for a few seconds :) Donation link should anyone be interested: https://signal.org/donate/

your comment led me to do same!

[deleted]

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#105

Post by tamiral » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 6:36 PM UTC

bitcharmer wrote: post #76

hcurtiss wrote: post #40

This is not good. I've moved so many people over in the last week. For purposes of getting them invested, this is a truly inopportune moment for an extended outage.

Yup, and it's not like Signal should be surprised with it. The influx has been happening for a while now and it seems like they were incapable of handling it. I have no idea how I'm going to defend them against all my family members I somehow managed to convert from WhatsApp to stay on this platform.

It’s an FOSS teaM working around the clock to support... let’s not be mean I’m sure they are doing all they can to get this resolved

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#106

Post by spiznnx » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 6:37 PM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #86

Guess who is not having technical difficulties, ever: Telegram They are going to be the next Facebook. I don't understand why people underestimate them so much. When they rolled their own crypto in some areas, people made fun of them, yet no one could break it. When they published their source code openly, people say they aren't open source like signal. When FB bought WhatsApp, people seriously continued to choose it…

It's not e2ee by default. If you exclusively use e2ee (secret chats), it becomes less featureful than signal/whatsapp/iMessage. No group chats!

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#107

Post by LordAtlas » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 6:37 PM UTC

vecio wrote: post #25

LordAtlas wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see a banner on the top of my app. I only found out when the desktop client kept timing out with 502 errors and after asking on Twitter, found other people were having issues too. It's there on https://status.signal.org/ though.

There is a banner in the Android app, not on the desktop.

Yeah, I'm using Android but not seeing a banner in the app.

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#108

Post by bilal4hmed » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 6:37 PM UTC

alan5 wrote: post #71

I just donated to Signal after seeing the error banner in the app. I realised I was more than happy to pay WhatsApp's yearly charge back in the pre-Facebook days (think it was 70p or so?). Figured I could give Signal a few quid every now and then, maybe keep a server up for a few seconds :) Donation link should anyone be interested: https://signal.org/donate/

Saw this on reddit, so copying here

Donate to them so they can buy more servers https://signal.org/donate/

* If you work in the US, many corporations will match your donation. Easy double of your donation

* Set https://smile.amazon.com to Signal, so your purchases on Amazon go to Signal

* Use services like Paypal to donate, that sends 100% of the money to the foundation

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#109

Post by leokennis » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 6:37 PM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #86

Guess who is not having technical difficulties, ever: Telegram They are going to be the next Facebook. I don't understand why people underestimate them so much. When they rolled their own crypto in some areas, people made fun of them, yet no one could break it. When they published their source code openly, people say they aren't open source like signal. When FB bought WhatsApp, people seriously continued to choose it…

Telegram isn’t bad. They are not E2E encrypted by default, and they don’t offer E2E encrypted group chats. If that’s not important to you by all means use it; it’s a solid service with good apps.

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#110

Post by schoolornot » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 6:37 PM UTC

robrtsql wrote: post #56

tonymet wrote: post #34

Is it possible to switch to backup Signal server within app? i'm researching running my own in emergencies.

Signal is totally centralized. The server is (if I recall correctly) open source, but if you were to run your own server, all of your contacts would have to be using your server too in order to communicate with them. I assume that the hostname(s) of the central Signal servers are hardcoded in the app somewhere, since they're not meant to be replaced.

Server is open source but good luck setting it up. There is no documentation for it. Also, they have intentionally excluded the option for clients to connect to alternate servers. This stance really rubs me the wrong way. I love the Signal protocol, everything else is kinda meh.