411–420 of 965 posts
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.
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.
unlikely the people i want to talk will bother setting this up
To have self-hosted chat services, you either need a niche enough service that you'll never have two parties that would want to talk to each other while being on different servers, or federation. Signal chose the former, so here I am with eight communication apps on my phone.
Maybe the next best thing could be to support multiple servers, like how email clients let you fetch data from more than one email provider, if they're so worried about federation inhibiting their ability to control the ecosystem that they plainly won't go there and hold speeches about how harmful that situation would be. Then we could have self hosting and also Signal wouldn't have to care about federating with my self-hosted server.
Edit: Not sure why people downvoted this. Boss, is that you? I'm increasing my donation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone know much does it become worth it to build your own? They spend around $3-4m on storage and bandwidth
Data centers cost billions. Signal, and pretty much everyone else who isn't already in the data center business, is far away from breakeven on that.
Does anyone else think that this strategy of growing the userbase with a "free" product and then start panhandling for donations is outright dishonest? There are tons of smaller XMPP or Matrix providers that didn't get access to millions in funding from these big corporations like Signal did. Who have to run a business in a way that requires paying customers from the start. But now that cash is tight (and after they…
> open it up to let other people run their own servers instead of trying to control everything. If you know of a good open architecture that solves the problems of spam and impersonation while maintaining the convenience and ease of use necessary for mass adoption, please share it.
Screw "convenience". It's a poison pill. "Convenience" should never be put above "resilience" (not to mention "freedom") in a value scale. The American obsession with "convenience" is turning us all into cattle and it's getting harder and harder to get the rest of society to function without being controlled by some corporate overlord.
I'll probably donate, but I find it annoying that Signal only offers Linux packages for Debian-based distros. I've had headaches with the Flatpak. I would think that the Linux desktop audience - while not huge - would be the most interested in Signal. That is, might not be a lot of Linux users but percentage-wise I'd bet more Linux users are interested in Signal than macOS or Windows users. Even an AppImage would be…
The Flatpak works fine for me on Fedora, though of course it's an Electron app, and it periodically has to be re-connected if I don't use it much.
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/
I wonder how many people paid the $5 for WhatsApp back in the day. It gave you nothing but you were able to do it. I think I did.
> 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.
Sounds like a great case to get the fuck away from SMS and phone numbers. But hey, they still want your whole address book, and announce you're on signal to everyone else on signal. The whole "secure" thing is a joke. Its all linked to your identity via your phone#.
I do agree about being linked to your phone number - doing it that way means not considering a lot of people's valid threat models. They are working on moving to usernames, though. It's in beta now.
> 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.