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Signal Is Back

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Re: Signal Is Back

#71

Post by johnchristopher »

rglullis wrote: post #64
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

Honestly, the main lesson I wish developers (and especially Moxie) get to learn is the one that teaches them that centralized services are fragile, bound to fail and simply not worth the cost.

And yet at the end of the day we don't hear about a mass exodus to matrix.

We don't even know if the main @matrix.org server would have held and if federation would have keep working.

Not worth the cost? How much did whatsapp cost to Facebook? How much did whatsapp cost before that?

Matrix is also running on free and so far we have hosted server offerings but no single individual account offer.

Re: Signal Is Back

#72

Post by DarkByte8 »

It would be nice to have a self hosted server that you can use with some friends. example: Me and 2 other friends use our own server while with my parents use signal server.

Re: Signal Is Back

#73

Post by johnchristopher »

DarkByte8 wrote: post #72

It would be nice to have a self hosted server that you can use with some friends. example: Me and 2 other friends use our own server while with my parents use signal server.

Green account promoting federation without naming it? It's getting a little bit obvious guys. I love both but come on...

Re: Signal Is Back

#74

Post by ohthehugemanate »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #6
ketamine__ wrote: post #5

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

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.

Key parts of the server (eg attestation that the running server code matches the public release) run in the CPU's secure enclave, which makes it non trivial to run on your own bare metal k8s. Also, I think Azure is the only cloud provider whose kubernetes implementation supports this. I know they open sourced their implementation but I don't know how hard it is to do on your own environment.

Re: Signal Is Back

#75

Post by rglullis »

johnchristopher wrote: post #71
rglullis wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, the main lesson I wish developers (and especially Moxie) get to learn is the one that teaches them that centralized services are fragile, bound to fail and simply not worth the cost.

And yet at the end of the day we don't hear about a mass exodus to matrix. We don't even know if the main @matrix.org server would have held and if federation would have keep working. Not worth the cost? How much did whatsapp cost to Facebook? How much did whatsapp cost before that? Matrix is also running on free and so far we have hosted server offerings but no single individual account offer.

> we don't hear about mass exodus to matrix.

This is argumentum ad populum.

> main @matrix.org server

There is no "main" server. matrix.org is the biggest one, but it is circunstancial. Matrix and Element do not want be the biggest instances or keep things under their control. I can bet that people working on Matrix would be thrilled with the idea of helping people create more instances, and even it would be beneficial for their business.

> Matrix is also running on free and so far we have hosted server offerings but no single individual account offer.

https://communick.com, there you go.

Re: Signal Is Back

#76

Post by jsilence »

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…

A couple of days ago an old long forgotten friend popped up apparently using Telegram now. Looking at the profile picture it became very clear that friend must have abandoned this phone number a while ago.

Not really a privacy issue for the new user, since this is his public avatar, but a nice reminder for this issue that phone number are ill suited as identifiers

Re: Signal Is Back

#77

Post by Daniel_sk »

I have been following the changes on GitHub in the last 2 days, I wish they would actually add comments to the commits to explain the reasons of change or further info. I think they have issues with message retrying and spamming the server.

- They added handling of HTTP 508 and do not retry jobs in this case

- There is a list of HTTP errors that are handled manually, including the new HTTP 508, but for example 503 is not handled and Jobs (e.g. messages) will be retried indefinitely and I have seen logs with many 503 entries and retries.

- They have increased the maximum backoff time from 30s to 60s (+ added jitter) and it can now also be changed remotely via server flag.

- Any HTTP error not handled explicitly is considered an IOException (strange?) and retried. List of handled HTTP exceptions (413, 401, 403, 409, 410, 411, 423, 499 and 508) is here: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/2c1c6fab356... I personally would not repeat requests automatically by default on any HTTP error - unless handled manually (so reverse logic), only on connection error.

- They have just switched off OkHTTP automatic "silent" connection retries: https://square.github.io/okhttp/3.x/okhttp/okhttp3/OkHttpCli... I don't think they have tested this enough, it's more of a blind try and I think it can decrease request delivery reliability. The OkHttp implementation retries requests silently (with backoff and retry limit) in case of: Unreachable IP addresses, Stale pooled connections, Unreachable proxy servers. This is transparent to the application. In the past I have complained to the OkHttp team that POST requests should not be retried at all and they fixed it (your requests need to be idempotent anyway, regardless of this).

- I believe they may be also having issues with requests that are non idempotent and have been retried by OkHttp silently or in cases where application has sent something to the server and server received it, but the response has never made it back to the client. In this case client will retry request and this can cause trouble if requests are not deduplicated on server side and idempotent. But this is just my guess.

Re: Signal Is Back

#78

Post by apatters »

zerof1l wrote: post #25

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".

They're pretty unique, the Wikipedia article has a good summary under "Developers and Funding":

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)

Initially funded by a $50M loan from the co-founder of Whatsapp. In addition to consulting contracts they have received millions in grants and donations from Mark Shuttleworth, Radio Free Asia, the Freedom of the Press Foundation and others.

Re: Signal Is Back

#79

Post by deathgrips »

rglullis wrote: post #65
rch wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kick in a few dollars a month, and recommend you do the same.

So, not really "free for everyone". TANSTAAFL. Downvoters, kindly explain what is so wrong about my statement. There are costs to run the operation, having generous benefactors writing big checks (a) do not change this, (b) makes Signal's operation dependent on the source of revenue and (c) hide these externalities long enough to hinder the development of cheaper/more efficient alternatives. IOW, "depending on donati…

Downvoted because... TANSTAAFL?

Re: Signal Is Back

#80

Post by strken »

rglullis wrote: post #65
rch wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kick in a few dollars a month, and recommend you do the same.

So, not really "free for everyone". TANSTAAFL. Downvoters, kindly explain what is so wrong about my statement. There are costs to run the operation, having generous benefactors writing big checks (a) do not change this, (b) makes Signal's operation dependent on the source of revenue and (c) hide these externalities long enough to hinder the development of cheaper/more efficient alternatives. IOW, "depending on donati…

You're getting downvoted because your comment doesn't add anything to the conversation. To claim something isn't free to the user just because it has externalities is a cheap rhetorical trick that doesn't give any new information or perspective.
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