I would pay a subscription fee if only to get back SMS capabilities.
Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
111–120 of 965 posts
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#112Who is the active user base for signal these days? Everyone I knew who was using it dropped off after the SMS debacle, which was a shame. Edit: Wow some weird haters on HN today. I was honestly curious as an active signal user that was no longer able to use it to message people in North America and had never seen anyone using it in East Asia. Apparently this makes some other signal users very angry.
Same people who use WhatsApp for example.
The SMS issue was mainly a problem in the US where people used it for SMS and therefore never mattered since that communication was never secure. Those people probably never even cared for security since they, as you said even went out there and actually uninstalled an app. Something people seem to rarely do.
I use it for friends, family and colleagues. People now started asking me for it (or safe alternatives to Facebook Messenger) since Facebook started asking people to pay for non-targeted ads recently. They actually got people to think about the data they share with an outdated social network.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't really buy this argument. Is signing up with a phone number really that much easier for the average user than using a username/email account? Billions of people seemed to have no problems making a Facebook or Google account.
It’s the building a social network part that’s frictionless not creating user name process that’s frictionless.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#114Some 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…
It's easy to say that "you should do x" from the bleachers but when you're in the arena you run up against reality. For example, Signal had a blog a while ago about how they tried to avoid the sms features, actually for privacy reasons, but they found people just didn't use other alternatives. Here's a reddit thread of users advocating for SMS support https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/y3ymfl/keep_sms_sup... .
So it was the best of all the available options practically, if they wanted to grow and retain the users.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#115> 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.
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…
I think I understand your comment, since iMessage isn't SMS, but defaults to SMS for those not using it.
There are opensource self hosted solutions like BlueBubble that allow reasonably secure communication through iMessage to the other chat platforms on desktop/Android etc. I have zero affiliation, but I know others who happily use it. There are also less secure and paid solutions I can't speak to.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#116> 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.
is there any way they can reduce that cost?
Send them via whatsapp. A lot of online services give an option to send OTP via whatsapp along with SMS/Email.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#117> 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.
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…
> stubbornly use iMessange.
Personally, I prefer it over downloading yet another client, dealing with additional credentials, wondering about who can access my messages, and so on and so forth…
And all that just to message the handful of people that I know who use .
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we can rent server infrastructure from a variety of providers like Amazon AWS, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure Moving off cloud services to lower-cost provider like Hetzner, Vultr and DigitalOcean might provide a lot of cost savings. I also imagine they're using managed SMS services from one of these clouds, and moving off them to a combination of local SMS gateways in each country can also further reduce co…
Any idea what prevents Signal from using cheaper alternatives? Edit: I meant moving off cloud to Hetzner, Vultr, DigitalOcean.
As I understand it, you have to often use multiple gateways based on which one is cheaper and can deliver your message to the recipient, and also take care of handling retries in case one gateway fails. This is not something you typically want to handle if you're not aware of it, and the process of having to talk to each vendor and figure out their limitations is tedious.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, decouple Signal user identity from the phone number.
This will probably never happen. One of the reasons WhatsApp blew up is because using a phone number as your source of identification means there's much less friction in the signup flow. No username/password to create and your social graph is already there in your contact list. My mom was able to get our entire extended family on Signal without my involvement, which is a testament to how easy that is.
Why not both?
If I want discoverability, let me provide my phone number.
If I want privacy, just assign a random identifier.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#120[dupe]
More discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38291427