How do they contrive to spend over a million bucks a year on storage?
Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
691–700 of 965 posts
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#692Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd pay substantially more for Signal if I could bot accounts. I'd like a signal daemon on all my servers for alerting which could message me via Signal. This is worth a monthly fee to me. I know people running small businesses who would really like to have a business Signal account: an ability to send Signal messages as a business identity without tying it to some specific phone number. This would be worth a subscri…
If you want one for just personal use; this works well: https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli Just sign up with a Twilio number (using voice call) and you can make your own bot.
I know I could do these things, but the problem is (1) it's a cat and mouse game of trying to keep up with functionality they don't want to support and (2) means I'm not paying them for a service, which is the point of doing it.
IMO Signal need to figure out what they sell to people with the money to say "yes, this service helps me make money" so they fulfill the big mission statement. That's true viability.
Within that bucket there's some real obvious ones: server monitoring and alerting (I have Signal, let my severs have Signal so they can talk to me, maybe at an agreed reduced throughput rate so someone doesn't just try to run TCP/IP over it), and letting businesses have a secure multimedia messaging channel to their clients for notifications.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#693Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are just non-profit fundraiser consulting tactics. Don't take them personally, just ignore them. The reason they exist is that Wikipedia has too much money, so they spend some on consultants who say they can raise more. It's weird, but that's how the world works. I would much prefer the Wikipedia endowment model of non-profit orgs. They have a standard operating procedure with a predictable budget, and endowmen…
> Don't take them personally No. They are meant to manipulate me personally, as well as other persons I care about. I will take them personally. More broadly, I don't have to excuse bad behavior just because somebody's making money off it or because it makes some too-narrow metric go up. Yes, it's a complex and imperfect world. But to me that's a reason to work harder to make things better, not a reason for people to…
With respect you are misinterpreting personally here.
They don't know you; they don't know me. I'm a nobody, just like you.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#694Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Those are just non-profit fundraiser consulting tactics. Don't take them personally, just ignore them. I don't take them personally, of course, but they do encourage me to avoid forking over any money.
any excuse to not donate!
Not really. They send those emails only to people who donated before.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#695There they go, saying Whatsapp is using their tech without proof they haven't tampered with it. Doing propaganda for proprietary shovelware.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#696Earlier quoted context omitted.
> spend $20mm (or whatever) to maintain access, and maintain infrastructure and they get to send as many SMS messages as they want. This is not how SMS pricing works in many, if not, most countries.
Is that true at scale? If I tell the telecoms that I want to send a billion messages per year it seems like they might be willing to take a lump sum instead of setting up the systems to bill based on usage. I have no experience directly with foreign telecoms, so I was simply explaining how something with no marginal cost could still be a very expensive system.
> Is that true at scale? If I tell the telecoms that I want to send a billion messages per year it seems like they might be willing to take a lump sum instead of setting up the systems to bill based on usage.
In most of the world, SMS is billed per-message, so it's basically no extra effort on the Telecoms side at all. In fact, Telecoms' online charging systems are fast enough to calculate users' data usage by seconds in real time, so they don't even blink at counting SMS.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#697I thought this was an article explaining how they move out of the cloud and saved millions using bare metal servers.
> millions upon millions of new people suddenly switched to Signal in January 2021 after WhatsApp updated their Terms of Service.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#698Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should Wikipedia do new stuff? Or rather, why is it okay for Wikipedia to lie to people to get funding for their new pet projects?
> Why should Wikipedia do new stuff? Because it's not perfect yet? The point of Wikipedia is not to have some servers ticking over. The project has a vision: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." I agree it's not ok for them to lie, and am bothered enough by their dubious fundraising tactics that I stopped donating. But that's a totally separate concern than…
> The project has a vision: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge."
That's not their vision. Not only do they require entries to be notable, they'll remove information from articles that are, in their editorial judgment, too long. Neither action is compatible with the goal of sharing the sum of all knowledge.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#699There they go, saying Whatsapp is using their tech without proof they haven't tampered with it. Doing propaganda for proprietary shovelware.
Every thread that Signal is mentioned, we relish this comment :)
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#700Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does it matter. 70% of something is better than 100% of nothing.
Because this isn't the only one way to donate, and if it were subject to the 30% cut, most people would want to know they could spend a couple extra hours steps for 30% additional impact on their donation. Very few people are going "No apple pay? No donation."
> if it were subject to the 30% cut, most people would want to know they could spend a couple extra hours steps for 30% additional impact on their donation.
43% additional impact.