Live data from Hacker News

Signal is having technical difficulties

status.signal.org

141–150 of 750 posts

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#141
I think it’s because many people from India joined Signal after Dhruv Rathee published a video suggesting people uninstall WhatsApp and install Signal or Telegram. He’s got 1.7M views within a day, and I’m sure he’s bringing lot of new users to Signal [and NordVPN because of the paid promotion].

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#142
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/

Good call. Donated

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#143

This 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.

If there was ever a time it was going to go down its preciously after qulck exponential growth in the 10s of millions of users.

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#144
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But it’s par for the course for newly popular services. It is, but most consumers don't care, they just what their stuff to work 100% of the time as frictionless as possible, and, on top of all things, for free. Otherwise they just run back to the usual free surveilanceware. I've tried and failed to convince some young, highly educated zoomer friends with good incomes to move away from WhatsApp and Facebook and even…

Using Telegram is a rational decision if you want a service that's good at fun conversations. Signal's value proposition is _secure conversations_ and it does that much better than other services. "Fun" is not part of Signal's value proposition. More people want/need fun conversations than need secure ones. Regardless of what people "should" want, Telegram serves people's mundane everyday needs materially better than…

Why are there so many Telegram fanboys astroturfing in this thread? This thread has nothing to do with Telegram.

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#145
post #64

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.

Signal grew 5x in one day[1]. A week before Musk amplified the WhatsApp story with his "Use Signal"[2] tweet. It then did the rounds on MSM. WhatsApp shoots itself in the foot (though IMO it's a blip in their stats). Parler (thankfully) has been kicked off AWS. All good news for alternative messaging technology.

https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1349577579091566592

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1347165127036977153

edit: as daniel_sk points out this is not a x5 increase but crossing the threshold from 10+ to the next 50+ mm downloads.

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#146
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That’s helpful, thanks.

So they’re 4mil in the hole? How is it possible that they’re still running?

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#147
post #126
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/

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…

This is all probably correct, and should change in the long term. In the short term, I hope you've donated to Signal, and it would also help if you'd dispel the misinformation when you hear it.

The world would be better if the world were better, but until it is, would you mind helping out a bit?

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#148

Time to jump ship! Use element / matrix an open, decentralized, end-to-end encrypted chat protocol with slick clients for Android, iOS, Desktop & Web: https://element.io/ Also easy to self-host a server, if you need full control: $ mkdir -p ~/synapse $ pip3.6 install --user jinja2 matrix-synapse $ cd ~/synapse $ python3.6 -m synapse.app.homeserver \ --server-name my.domain.name \ --config-path homeserver.yaml \ --gen…

Can I use it if I don't want to host a server? Are there any trustworthy public servers?

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#149
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

for changing amazon smile: is it "Signal Technology Foundation - Location: Mountain View, CA"? no description available unfortunately. seem to be a bunch with the name signal and that was the closest in name to what seems to be the signal foundation

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#150
post #80

After 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)!

I was tempted to self-host, but went with https://element.io/matrix-services

If I had an IT department and a secure server center I would for sure self-host. In the mean time I will get used to the tech and support the cause

Post reply on HN