281–290 of 965 posts
I don't understand how storage can cost a million dollars when they don't store anything. Even if messages are queued, how do you get millions of dollars in queued storage? It's hard for me to imagine... even if you receive and send trillions of messages I don't think you would end up storing much at all. As for registration fees, it sounds like they should use authenticator instead of SMS... and stop requiring a pho…
1) Get off the major cloud providers that charge insane egress fees. 2) Remove SMS verification. A simple solution might be the app gives you a code and then you dial in to them and punch in the code to them. Like a reverse voice based authentication. 3) Remove voice and video calling for non donating users. 3) Remove media texting until both users allow a p2p connection. 4) Remove no contact list message hosting for non donating users.
Lot of unpleasant trade offs there. But I would rank having a text based private messaging app as the top feature. Everything else is a "very" nice to have. I applaud what they are doing and the sacrifices that have been made so far.
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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.
Nobody is demanding them to stop supporting phone numbers as identifiers/verification methods. I'm not mad at all if somebody prefers using their phone number and not having a password for a service – just give me the option to use my email address and/or a username. There are too many "phone number only" services out there these days.
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> only someone would release a universal protocol Nobody wants this. Universal access means universal access for spammers. iMessage won over SMS because of cost and spam filtering.
> Nobody wants this. Not nobody. > iMessage won over SMS because of cost and spam filtering. Really? I've never used imessage.
Within the scope of messaging network effects, nobody.
> Really?
Yes. iMessage spam is rare and stamped out fast. Open protocols tend to have spam problems the moment they begin scaling.
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But that's not salary, that's the total cost per employee. So if you factor in ~40% cost for healthcare, pension, perks, and various taxes, then the average salary is closer to $240,000 which will still a bit high, is probably less than market for the average engineer working at the company.
Per the 990, which is just salary, multiple employees at Signal are getting paid over $650k. That's way above market for the nonprofit sector for comparable positions.
In curious Googling to see if there was an explanation for how their structure works, I stumbled on this interesting Glassdoor review:
> The bonus structure promised up to a 100% match with salary, but in practice the system was set up so that nobody got more than 50%, if that. Had I understood this I probably would have taken a competing offer that ultimately would have had much higher comp.
> The quarterly cliff on the bonus system, where a feature failing to ship within the quarter specified (even if just by a single day) was counted as if you hadn't done it at all. This led to death marches each quarter as everyone scrambled to try to finish unrealistic goals. It wasn't possible to get help from anyone else at these times since of course they too had the same problem.
> Nominally, the quarterly goals were set in a collaborative process. In practice it was a 2 day full day meeting where we were told what Moxie had decided we were going to do - our input wasn't really considered at all, including if it was even viable to complete in a quarter. I'm fine with top down control, that's how most corps work, but I disliked the false patina that this was some democratic process.
> Internal communications are a disaster, because Signal uses Signal for everything, including things Signal isn't at all designed for or good at. Bug tracking is literally done in a giant group chat. I have a newfound appreciation for JIRA.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Signal-Messenger-Reviews-E...
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It's a bit off topic, but I've wondered the same. We could stack a hundred layers of encryption algorithms, and if just one of them works, then the whole stack is secure.
You could, but you'd be adding complexity to solve a mostly non-existent problem. Security is rarely broken because the algorithm itself is broken. It's usually because one end has a key logger or other vulnerability. Or they are literally storing the unencrypted text in an unencrypted data store after reading it. In the meantime, the added complexity adds new places for errors.
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I really wonder why it’s so expensive to run. I always hear things about scaling but I used to run a top 500 alexia website and it was just a php app running on a mutualized offer for $5/month. Lots of manual caching though but still. My wild guess is that either the stack is not really optimal (last I heard it was java) or they do other costly things at scale (sgx?)
Java is likely the most optimized part of the stack. Many startups move up to the jam when there is little else that has optimized performance and efficiency like the jvm for 20-30 years. Of courses this is a moot conversation if you’ve never used Java at scale. Apple and others are Java houses.
You can push Java very far.
Of course you can also write horribly ugly code in it.
Has anyone tried setting up their own Signal server? Be cool to do this, and then give all your friends the ip for truly private messaging. https://github.com/signalapp Seems like all their stuff is open source.
Wish they provided some numbers of actual messages, type etc. per day. Seems like a good game plan would be. 1) Get off the major cloud providers that charge insane egress fees. 2) Remove SMS verification. A simple solution might be the app gives you a code and then you dial in to them and punch in the code to them. Like a reverse voice based authentication. 3) Remove voice and video calling for non donating users. 3…