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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#881

Post by andrepd »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #268
V__ wrote: post #36

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/

Mastodon org + Mastodon.social also have costs of 0.6 EUR/year, though they have two orders of magnitude less users [1]. This is really what most social media costs. These rates are even payable by many in poorer countries. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38117385

Yeah, the issue is more that there is substantial friction in paying any amount of money, especially in poorer countries with no access to e.g. banking or payment cards. I'm sure no one here, and few people even in comparatively poorer countries, would object if Signal/their messenger of choice cost 0.60$ per year to use. The problem is that making the service have a ~1$/yr price tag (as WhatsApp once had) is itself a barrier to a huge portion of the target audience.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#882

Post by discard124 »

rglullis wrote: post #877
discard124 wrote: post #871

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then is seems like you do understand why Signal isn’t as open as you’d like.

No. Signal has the funding, the technical talent and the customers. They are as "open source" as it can be. The issue with them is that they want to control the platform.

Have you considered that they might have a reason for that? You act as if control has no value to their mission.

Controlling the platform allows them to continue to evolve it while maintaining the convenient and spam-free user experience that users enjoy.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#883

Post by andrepd »

jeroenhd wrote: post #430
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon org + Mastodon.social also have costs of 0.6 EUR/year, though they have two orders of magnitude less users [1]. This is really what most social media costs. These rates are even payable by many in poorer countries. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38117385

With how much Mastodon.social tends to fall over when Twitter does something stupid (again), their rates are probably a bit too low for a more robust service like Signal. Signal also intentionally doesn't store too much data, long term data costs will slowly grow over the years. I imagine for a bigger platform, costs can grow to multiples of the rates for Signal and smaller Mastodon servers. €10 per year should be mo…

Signal also fell over flat when the whatsapp outage happened a couple years ago. It's just difficult to handle spikes in demand.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#884

Post by lannisterstark »

_ugfj wrote: post #809
moravak1984 wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. A former student of mine worked for a non profit in Afghanistan (his home country) for a few years. Said non profit was flying in McKinsey consultants for very short gigs at six figures (USD). Same can be said about many LGBT non profits that have shifted their goals in the developed world on the "T" part of the acronym. On countries where marriage equality is a given, no one is going to fund an NGO focus…

to me this smells transphobic but it's possible the trans genocide several US states are working on made me oversensitive

How is it transphobic to say organizations focused on LGBTQ shifted their alignment for the one part that isn't widely accepted in developed because others for the most part are?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#885

Post by zamalek »

linuxdude314 wrote: post #125
zamalek wrote: post #65

Earlier 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.

No, WhatsApp won because it successfully replicated and replaced the SMS experience in the developing world, where the cost of data was dirt cheap in comparison to the cost of a single SMS message. This is why it still has a stronghold as well…

Mxit existed long before WhatsApp. Possibly a decade. I used it in the developing world and it wasn't anywhere nearly as successful as WhatsApp. For example, nobody in my family used it.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#886

Post by dragonwriter »

lannisterstark wrote: post #884
_ugfj wrote: post #809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to me this smells transphobic but it's possible the trans genocide several US states are working on made me oversensitive

How is it transphobic to say organizations focused on LGBTQ shifted their alignment for the one part that isn't widely accepted in developed because others for the most part are?

Its a transphobic conspiracy theory to say, as moravak1984 explicitly did upthread, that they did it for money not because its an actual real issue where they perceive an injustice, whereas the issues where they've already won, and thus are shifting some attention from, are not, or less so, specifically because they have succeeded in shifting the situation on the ground.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#887

Post by nerdbert »

lxgr wrote: post #682
nerdbert wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know of countries that mandate a minimum price. If you are doing high volume you are free to work directly with carriers. If you are drawing as much billable traffic as you are sending, then that could even be a wash.

It’s not countries mandating a minimum price (although regulators often impose a maximum), but the carriers themselves. > If you are drawing as much billable traffic as you are sending SMS verification traffic is usually unidirectional, so that’s very unlikely to be the case.

Yes but in this case we are describing old-school Twitter, in which people made their tweets via SMS. That's why it was easier for them to make these deals.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#888

Post by j45 »

bombcar wrote: post #287
j45 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Java is entirely performant if you treat it right, and many of the problems with GC in J8 are fixed in later versions. You can push Java very far. Of course you can also write horribly ugly code in it.

You can write horribly ugly code in most languages.

But the secret of JVM existing as an option is eventually learned by most who scale.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#889

Post by j45 »

lxgr wrote: post #253
j45 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phone numbers are the easiest login for people, especially in a world where not everyone has an email address. I know this will invite comments about usernames. I would like usernames a lot too.

If only it was possible for a service to support both!

I know, too bad that possibility was only possible in the past and not with todays technology.

The knowledge of how to do this has forever been lost. Hopefully archaeologists can reconstruct it one day.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#890

Post by bitvoid »

Vinnl wrote: post #840
prepend wrote: post #837

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I don’t use signal much is this link to a phone number. Both because sometimes I don’t have a phone number. And I don’t want participants to know my phone number. I don’t get why they have this requirement as it’s not like having a phone number means anything significant. For me, I think privacy includes my ability to not reveal my identity to the network.

> And I don’t want participants to know my phone number. They're currently in the testing phase of allowing phone numbers not be known by your conversation partners: https://community.signalusers.org/t/public-username-testing-...

You still need to register with a phone number though. Until that's no longer a requirement, I'm personally not using Signal.
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