101–110 of 965 posts
Is it possible to self host signal? Can signal move towards a model like the fediverse where the software development is decoupled from the hosting costs?
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SMS rates are absolutely bonkers considering the technical way they're transmitted. The US is an outlier in SMS rates actually being reasonable (usually unlimited or close to) for consumers - but for the rest of the world the insane mark up on that communication method has mostly obsoleted it... That'd be all well and good... the technology would die naturally, but all my American relatives continue to stubbornly use…
> for the rest of the world the insane mark up on that communication method has mostly obsoleted it... For P2P communication. SMS is alive and well for B2C messaging, most importantly for 2FA OTP delivery, but also as a first line of defense against spam/bot account creation. It's not a good solution to either problem, but it's slightly better than nothing (which apparently makes it good enough for many), so I suspec…
I've got an Android phone so all iMessage transmissions come across as SMS (or MMS).
Some of these things raise an eyebrow and I'd like them further broken down (but in the mean time, I'm still donating): * $19 million for 50 staff - That's $338k/head on average. At face value for a nonprofit, I'd like these costs broke down as this seems excessive. There is far cheaper IT labor available outside SV. * 20 petabytes per year of bandwidth, or 20 million gigabytes, to enable voice and video calling alon…
Signal can be better, IMHO, by separating from phone number requirements. In other words, let users have secure random ids, rather than forcing each user to hand over their phone number for phone company verification. It turns out the budget shows the phone number registration problem: the costs to deal with phone number verification seem to be $6MM, which seems to be 10% of the entire budget. If Signal staff are rea…
The phone number requirement is why WhatsApp won the space over in the first place. There were loads of username+password-based services before it, but none reached the market it did. Why? An incredibly wide user funnel, singing up is frictionless. You might understand that it's a bad idea, but that makes you an outlier.
Signal can be better, IMHO, by separating from phone number requirements. In other words, let users have secure random ids, rather than forcing each user to hand over their phone number for phone company verification. It turns out the budget shows the phone number registration problem: the costs to deal with phone number verification seem to be $6MM, which seems to be 10% of the entire budget. If Signal staff are rea…
The phone number requirement is why WhatsApp won the space over in the first place. There were loads of username+password-based services before it, but none reached the market it did. Why? An incredibly wide user funnel, singing up is frictionless. You might understand that it's a bad idea, but that makes you an outlier.
> Storage: $1.3 million dollars per year. > Servers: $2.9 million dollars per year. > Registration Fees: $6 million dollars per year. > Total Bandwidth: $2.8 million dollars per year. > Additional Services: $700,000 dollars per year. Signal pays more for delivering verification SMS during sign-up, than for all other infrastructure (except traffic) combined. Wow, that sounds excessive.
Why is it that SMS is so damn expensive? (or more specifically, what is it about Twilio et al's businesses that makes them cost so much?)
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If you check their costs, SMS (used for registration) is the most expensive part of their operation.
There was no "registration" and TextSecure never sent you messages. It was strictly peer-to-peer.
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Yeah, decouple Signal user identity from the phone number.
Which might be said to increase privacy. I suppose there's something to the point about combating spam. But surely there are other ways to do this, right?
In most countries, you can get an anonymous phone number anyway.