Snowden showed that Signal went from 10mil to 50mil downloads in 1 week (since competitor TOS changes & Tech-industry censorship)
Signal is having technical difficulties
131–140 of 750 posts
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#132Signal is having problems because of how "successful" they are being right now. This is a good problem not a bad problem. They'll adapt.
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#133After getting burned by Keybase, I didn't even look at Signal. I am curious to see how Signal works in the long term without a revenue model. I paid for Matrix and got my team on it, working great. The nice thing about paying for something is you know what it costs.
I'd estimate that Signal is a fair bit better than Keybase since the latter wasn't end to end encrypted in the first place. But since you're on Matrix now, of course that's self hosted and as stable as you make it yourself. Decentralization for the win, kudos for going with an even better solution (even if I disagree about Signal not being a stable choice)!
> since the latter wasn't end to end encrypted in the first place
I’m pretty sure keybase is end-to-end encrypted, at least that’s what they are claiming. What makes you think it isn’t?
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#134This is bad. I spent a lot of time and effort getting non-techie friends to switch from whatsapp, and now what is supposed to be the best alternative is having a massive downtime. I think I'll just give up.
Totally agree, but looks like they just got Slashdotted. Hard to imagine it'll be down much longer.
Shame they couldn't anticipate this, or scale better. Curious what their postmortem will have in it.
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#135After getting burned by Keybase, I didn't even look at Signal. I am curious to see how Signal works in the long term without a revenue model. I paid for Matrix and got my team on it, working great. The nice thing about paying for something is you know what it costs.
I'd estimate that Signal is a fair bit better than Keybase since the latter wasn't end to end encrypted in the first place. But since you're on Matrix now, of course that's self hosted and as stable as you make it yourself. Decentralization for the win, kudos for going with an even better solution (even if I disagree about Signal not being a stable choice)!
Uhm, Keybase is totally E2EE. Were you thinking of forward-secret (which Keybase chats are not by default)?
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#136Snowden showed that Signal went from 10mil to 50mil downloads in 1 week (since competitor TOS changes & Tech-industry censorship)
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#137I 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/
We have no info as to how much money they need or how much they currently have. For all we know, this was just an area of oversight and not related to funding at all. I’d prefer to pay yearly than to feel the spectre of guilt for using a “free” app.
They're a non-profit, so their financials are publicly disclosed. ProPublica only has it as recently as 2018, but here was the financials then: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/82450...
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#138Just a friendly reminder that Signal runs on donations and that if you can go and give them some money: https://signal.org/donate/
Or that you can use that money for a Matrix server instead of supporting centralization. Element is less polished than Signal app but they've been catching up quite fast. If you and your friends aren't locked into the Signal ecosystem yet, might be worth considering, especially if you're techies.
Which Matrix server?
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#139I 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/
Signal is being used by at least 10 well-paid medical professionals (group chat) that I know of, and one of them proclaimed today that Signal is owned by Elon Musk (probably because he tweeted about it). I did not care to educate them. And this is in a first world country with a rather wealthy population. Why am I saying this? Users don't give a damn, they expect free things, and they expect things which work. They h…
Problem is that the largest of the free products aren't free. They are surveillanceware. "Free" is used as a gimmick to get them onto as many phones as possible to surveil people. Those players have zero incentive to change that, and will be more than happy to use "free" to edge out any paid competition. This is how paid apps became almost non-existent outside of professional niches.
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#140Guess 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…
Well first off Telegram doesn't actually do end to end encryption unless you manually opt in. They don't allow end to end encrypted voice or video calls. They don't allow end to end encrypted group chats. Telegram is also a for-profit company that has no guarantees that they'll continue to not harvest your data because they're a pre-profit startup company.
What are those random emojis in voice calls for, then? I assume (warning: assumption) the voice calls are actually encrypted, even if it's with keys received from the server and opportunistic unless you verify the emojis for a particular call. (Video I don't know, and group chats and most 1:1 chats are definitely plaintext yeah.)