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Signal Is Back

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Re: Signal Is Back

#21

Post by Arathorn »

curiousmindz wrote: post #7

We rarely get to see an app have to grow suddenly like that. And with Signal being open source, it must be very educational to follow. Has anyone found a publication around what they had to do on the technical side (code)? Edit: Their server's repo hasn't been updated since April 2020. Why? https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

The lack of development-in-the-open on Signal-Server is a little concerning, in terms of not giving visibility on what's at least theoretically running serverside.

If you compare it with Matrix, the last commits to Synapse were ~32 hours ago, Dendrite was ~31 hours ago, and Conduit was 3 hours ago - so you can keep up with where development is at, and of course see what is meant to be running in production (and run it yourself if you're able to).

My assumption is that what's happening is that Signal-Server is going through contortions to switch everything to UUIDs, in order to avoid hardcoding phone numbers everywhere as identifiers, and this work is being done on a private branch. Meanwhile, there's presumably a private branch for the current live production deployment too. (For Matrix, we maintain a separate branch for the live matrix.org homeserver instance, to allow for hotfixes etc - although it's public, at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/tree/matrix-org-hotfix...)

Re: Signal Is Back

#22

Post by pentagrama »

Glad that is back and happy to see Signal growing, but I really don't like the tongue in cheek tone of Signal on social media, I hope they don't take this route like Telegram (who is becoming a social media platform itself with feature bloat).

Hope Signal adapt a serious tone and keep the product thight adding features for privacy and security.

Just a personal preference, maybe the hip tone helps to grow.

Re: Signal Is Back

#23

Post by decrypt »

divbzero wrote: post #14
zie wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is 2 fold. 1) a bahillion new signups, so they just needed to deploy a bajillion more instances of the server. 2) The clients basically DDoS'ing their servers. If you look at the android client source, you can see all the commits they put in are about handling errors properly when the server(s) get overloaded.

Anyone know if these commits are already in App Store and Google Play? I looked for a Signal update on iOS just now and did not see one.

From what I understand, this affects only Android devices, thus the Android 5.2.1 rollout. None for iOS.

Re: Signal Is Back

#24

Post by brewdad »

skept wrote: post #8

If you're still having delivery issues in any of your private conversations try "reset secure session" from the chat menu. It worked for me with a couple of my contacts.

Does performing a reset impact messages already in the conversation? I don't want to lose chat history but I do have one convo that has missing messages between my phone and my desktop app.

Re: Signal Is Back

#25

Post by zerof1l »

Can somebody explain their financial model? How are they paying for the servers and stuff. The claim "No ads. No trackers." and that they are "free for everyone".

Re: Signal Is Back

#26

Post by vlmutolo »

Arathorn wrote: post #21
curiousmindz wrote: post #7

We rarely get to see an app have to grow suddenly like that. And with Signal being open source, it must be very educational to follow. Has anyone found a publication around what they had to do on the technical side (code)? Edit: Their server's repo hasn't been updated since April 2020. Why? https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

The lack of development-in-the-open on Signal-Server is a little concerning, in terms of not giving visibility on what's at least theoretically running serverside. If you compare it with Matrix, the last commits to Synapse were ~32 hours ago, Dendrite was ~31 hours ago, and Conduit was 3 hours ago - so you can keep up with where development is at, and of course see what is meant to be running in production (and run i…

Very much agree with everything you just said.

Quick question, semi-relevant: does the matrix.org homeserver have open monitoring? Is there someone I can look to see server load?

I’m curious whether Matrix saw a similar influx of users this past week.

Re: Signal Is Back

#27

Post by mxuribe »

amelius wrote: post #9
ketamine__ wrote: post #5

As Signal is a non-profit what are the possible solutions to reduce costs going forward while maintaining availability?

How about a federated solution? I'd be happy to run my own conversations on my own server.

Because matrix (the open source protocol) is federated, you have options:

matrix server (for self-hosting), SDKs, bots, libraries, etc. = https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now

matrix clients = https://matrix.org/clients/

matrix bridges (to interoperate between matrix and other services like irc, slack, telegram, etc.) = https://matrix.org/bridges/

if you don't want to manage on your own, and simply want to pay someone else to host for you = https://matrix.org/hosting/

So, yeah, matrix offers many solutions. ;-)

Re: Signal Is Back

#28

Post by bilal4hmed »

amelius wrote: post #9
ketamine__ wrote: post #5

As Signal is a non-profit what are the possible solutions to reduce costs going forward while maintaining availability?

How about a federated solution? I'd be happy to run my own conversations on my own server.

try https://www.element.io ....its open source, decentralized and e2e.

Im interested in their dendrite server which is written in Go and supposed to be very very efficient

https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/08/dendrite-is-entering-beta

Re: Signal Is Back

#29

Post by xfer »

imposterr wrote: post #18
toomuchtodo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Move from the cloud to k8s hosted on their own metal. The Signal server is simplistic (a compliment), it’s the bandwidth that you’re going to get raked over the coals for at cloud providers. Burst to the cloud for outlier events.

If I'm not mistaken, signal is specifically hosted on AWS to so that governments can't just blacklist their IPs without blacklisting all of AWS. So moving to bare metal isn't really an option.

Governments can easily block AWS as well and they have. Even simpler, they just go for the kill-switch and kill internet.
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