351–360 of 965 posts
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Based on App Store downloads on both platforms, they are well over 200M at this point.
A lot of people, myself included, have it installed but never use it after they dropped SMS support. Only a tiny fraction of my contacts use Signal, and most of those are also on Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, and others. Signal offers essentially nothing to me.
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"just because you're working for a nonprofit doesn't mean you have to work for less competitive wages" Actually it does usually. Because when people see real meaning in their work, as opposed to find yet another way to manipulate people on other peoples behalf, then you don't have to buy their consciousness as well. So sure, it is awesome, that signals employers get to have meaning and money. But I would bet, you wou…
Why shouldn't we want to pay people working at non-profits the same for their labor than they would get at for-profits? If they are doing just as or even more important work, why do we want to bend over backwards to justify them getting paid less for it?
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Costs for staff are not just salaries. It's also pensions, taxes, benefits, the offices, software licenses and all the other stuff. I've often heard 50% of total cost going to salary, but it varies. Still does seem high though.
Pensions aren't a thing in the U.S. anymore, especially not for tech. And when a U.S. company says "staffing costs" that does not include licenses, offices, etc. It's strictly salary and benefits. According to Signal's 990, it's paying multiple employees over $700k. That's above-market for corporate compensation, and it's way above market for non-profit compensation, to the point where it could be considered private…
Signal is trying to compete with the richest companies in the world; including for talent. And considering Signal's origins and motivations, they're not going to lower salaries or decrease benefits because some people believe that working for a non-profit automatically means lower compensation.
Signal had 40 million active users in 2021 [1]. With 14 million in infra cost, that comes to .35 per user/year. Total expenses are about 33 million, so about .825 per user/year. All in all that seems very reasonable. [1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/signal-statistics/
Definitely reasonable but the ultra privacy-conscious/paranoid can't easily donate or pay privately.
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In case one isn't aware, you can get a $1/month throwaway phone number from Twilio for that purpose.
Aren't these VoIP? Almost every service blocks VoIP numbers for sign ups these days, but perhaps Signal is an exception.
Signal had 40 million active users in 2021 [1]. With 14 million in infra cost, that comes to .35 per user/year. Total expenses are about 33 million, so about .825 per user/year. All in all that seems very reasonable. [1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/signal-statistics/
Definitely reasonable but the ultra privacy-conscious/paranoid can't easily donate or pay privately.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360031949872-Do...
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…
The details are there in this post, but I can offer a few guesses. Users may be using multiple devices. And the service has to deliver to all the linked devices before ejecting the message from its storage. The time limit for storing and waiting for linked devices to come online is about a month. With tens of millions of users, this could add up.
I always wonder why no one ever mentions Session. Is there some defect in its tech, or is it just not a comparable product?
That is a non-starter specifically in the context of vetting privacy-enabling software. Anyone got a list of privacy celebrities with enough spare time to vet reddit content?
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Whatsapp was asking for $1/year [1] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/18/whatsapp-...
I've been using WhatsApp when the nominal $1/year fee was still around, but somehow never ended up being actually charged, and I don't know anyone that did. It's possible that they were only enforcing it in some regions, though.
But I remember other people started to en masse switch to other messengers like Viber(?). And Whatsapp had to stop enforcing the fee.
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If you pay Signal $1/year, they'll realistically see about 60-70 cents of that – and that's only considering payment processor fees. Now add the cost of providing support (it's a paid product now!), payment handling on their end (in a privacy-preserving way, which excludes most common payment methods), and top it off with the immense damage to the network effect by excluding all the users that can't or simply don't w…
You can also charge for a 10 year minimum and get to a higher retained % You don't need to provide support, even much more expensive consumer services live without a proper one, so being explicit about the fact that you only pay for infrastructure could suffice Not sure why payment privacy has to be so strict for everyone The network effect damage is real, but maybe it could be limited with donations :)
Just ignoring customer complaints and selling the service "as-is" is usually not an option.