Signal is having technical difficulties • Hacker News Board

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#681

Post by topranks » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 9:54 AM UTC

erezsh wrote: post #572

KirillPanov wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not good. I've moved so many people over in the last week. Please stop moving people to centralized services.

If only decentralized services worked as well as centralized ones..

Yeah it kinda pisses me off constantly reading about how decentralised messaging, or ad-hoc wireless mesh networks, or whatever it is, is the way to go.

That shit works on a small scale. Serving the entire planet needs hierarchy and co-ordination.

Doesn’t necessarily mean everything has to be completely centralised, but some of the woolly wishful thinking you come across is not based in the real world.

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#682

Post by mike_d » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 9:54 AM UTC

nuker wrote: post #680

Daniel_sk wrote: post #365

"We have been adding new servers and extra capacity at a record pace every single day this week nonstop, but today exceeded even our most optimistic projections. Millions upon millions of new users are sending a message that privacy matters. We appreciate your patience." https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1350165610936766464

> We have been adding new servers and extra capacity at a record pace every single day No autoscaling?

Autoscaling is a myth. It works great until you actually need it, and then you discover quota limits and stockouts.

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#683

Post by pmlnr » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 9:58 AM UTC

whymarrh wrote: post #567

nimbius wrote: post #564

I fully expect to be downvoted to oblivion for this opinion but it needs to be said. Signal has been down for nine hours. the vast majority of people who turned to this platform today as an alternative to Whatsapp or Facebook probably quit looking into it after the first two minutes of that outage. for a platform that bills itself after installation as a suitable drop in replacement for your SMS service (and encourag…

I don’t understand, so what? They’re doing their best and if users go somewhere else so be it. I’m sure if they could avoid the outage they would. They’re not losing profits or anything. They’re hosting a free service. When they get the service back online users will have a secure messaging option that is even more battle-tested.

> They’re not losing profits or anything.

They are losing face. In oriental cultures, that's bad.

EDIT apologies for bad wording. In certain situations, losing face is worth, than losing money - in this very moment, in my opinion, this is rather bad for Signal.

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#684

Post by mike_d » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 10:03 AM UTC

superdisk wrote: post #649

I'm afraid Signal really dropped the ball on this one. I'd be surprised if any of the new 50M users stick around after this fiasco. Also, this doesn't seem to actually be a scaling/hardware issue like they claim. They're running on AWS so they should be able to throw more hardware at it in a matter of minutes, hours tops. As of now, they've been down for 14 hours! Not sure what's going on but it's the absolute worst…

> They're running on AWS

The client entry point (api.directory.signal.org) seems to be pointing exclusively to Azure and IBM Cloud depending on geography. It looks like just DNS, the website, and maybe some backend stuff are on AWS.

> should be able to throw more hardware at it in a matter of minutes, hours tops

Who exactly is going to pay for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in cloud spend you propose they turn up?

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#685

Post by pmlnr » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 10:25 AM UTC

oblio wrote: post #151

gre wrote: post #92

Centralized servers for the lose

How would things work in practice for a decentralized network? Regular people won't host their own servers.

I keep seeing this argument, and we all know it's bs. 20 years ago there were many email providers, people simply picked one, or hired someone to set it up and run it for them.

The same principles should and could apply for decentralized one; pick conversations.im for XMPP, pick matrix.org for Matrix, pick Mastodon.social for fediverse - or something smaller. Or ask someone to do it for you. Or run your own.

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#686

Post by ahmedalsudani » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 10:31 AM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #400

shafyy wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I'm for decentralization, but the reality is that if "we" (we techies) tried to push Element on everyone today they would just fall back to WhatsApp. So better to go for Signal today and then switch everyone over to a Matrix (or similar) client in a couple of years. As the past week demonstrated, it's possible to switch masses out of a closed, network-effect-dominated system.

I wish the person that downvoted you would give an explanation. I'd love to know how to avoid the middle step of switching family to Signal before, once it's more usable, switching to Element. (Or perhaps they meant that decentralization isn't better and Signal is the final destination. Guess we'll never know.)

lol don’t dwell on the downvotes.

We crucified Jesus some time ago for delivering a message. Downvotes for no reason are to be expected.

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#687

Post by ahmedalsudani » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 10:33 AM UTC

pmlnr wrote: post #683

whymarrh wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand, so what? They’re doing their best and if users go somewhere else so be it. I’m sure if they could avoid the outage they would. They’re not losing profits or anything. They’re hosting a free service. When they get the service back online users will have a secure messaging option that is even more battle-tested.

> They’re not losing profits or anything. They are losing face. In oriental cultures, that's bad. EDIT apologies for bad wording. In certain situations, losing face is worth, than losing money - in this very moment, in my opinion, this is rather bad for Signal.

As an “Oriental”, I assure you nobody loses face when they close shop for a good reason.

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#688

Post by pmlnr » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 10:34 AM UTC

samstave wrote: post #24

bjt2n3904 wrote: post #2

The centralized-infrastructure-Tower-of-Babel is about to collapse. As much as I love Signal, we've got to move to things that are decentralized. I setup a prosody[1] server a while back, but have nobody to talk with. If anyone wants to try their system out, I'm bjt@2n3904.net on XMPP. 1 - https://prosody.im/

Can you run a Prosody server on a rasPI? Do you need a static IP? (Xfinity appears alergic to allowing static IPs any more, and I am too lazy to setup my own router after 26 years setting up other peoples net infra..) Id love to chat with you...

> Can you run a Prosody server on a rasPI?

Easily.

> Do you need a static IP?

No, but you need access to a domain record to add the required entries for XMPP, and update them if your IP changes. One can do this for free (once you have a domain that points at their DNS records) with a provider like Digitalocean and their API to update the domains.

Set up guides: https://prosody.im/doc

Community to ask: https://homebrewserver.club/

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#689

Post by samoa42 » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 10:36 AM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #622

sedev wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that you mention it, I _did_ fail to explain why I brought up Telegram. My bad, thank you for calling me on that. I mentioned Telegram particularly because in my social circles, Telegram is number one by a long shot in terms of "people just want to be where their friends are and not feel left out." I should have actually said that, rather than jumping to the next part of the idea. (I am not here to defend Telegra…

That’s interesting. Do you live in a country where Telegram is particularly popular? Here in the US I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of someone using it. I don’t even know what the app icon looks like. My social circles are on some mix of Messenger, iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp, and if you count coworkers as social contacts, Slack.

not op and aware this may not be representive, but i share the preference for telegram as a just-works, "fun" and high-penetration messenger with whatsapp as a first and sms as second compatability fallback. this beeing in germany.

tg is light on resources like phone storage and bandwidth (and hence money) and has excellent multidevice support.

apart from that i don't belive one can have a seriously private conversation involving a device running popular versions of android/ios.

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#690

Post by pmlnr » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 10:50 AM UTC

Aaronn wrote: post #545

pmlnr wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If matrix.org were to see this level of influx of users, given their constant scaling problems, they would be down in minutes.

The whole point of Matrix is that you don't have to use matrix.org to use Matrix. Anyone can host a server and talk to anyone on any Matrix server.

> Anyone can host a server and talk to anyone on any Matrix server.

I host my web, my email, my XMPP, my TURN/STUN, etc, so I gave Matrix a try. In short: it's horrible. It's insanely resource hungry, both synapse and dendrite, plus dendrite is so not finished it hurts.

Stick to XMPP until Matrix is in an actually usable shape when one doesn't need a small power reactor to run it.