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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#381

Post by toast0 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #243
chimeracoder wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter said that's why they got rid of the SMS 2FA. They said it was costing millions to have that enabled for them. Previous Twitter employees have said that this is incorrect. Because Twitter began as an SMS-only (and then SMS-first) application (remember 40404?), they very early on established direct-connection infrastructure for sending SMS, meaning that they have a marginal cost of literally $0.00/message in…

> they very early on established direct-connection infrastructure for sending SMS, meaning that they have a marginal cost of literally $0.00/message in most markets. I am very, very interested to understand how that works, because without more detail or sources I'm calling bullshit. I definitely understand how Twitter could have greatly reduced their per-message fee with telecom providers, but at the end of the day T…

Carriers that run their own messaging infrastructure can allow for direct connections from 3rd parties, and set the price per message to whatever they want, including zero.

For something like Twitter where you could post by SMS, the balance of traffic might have been such that giving Twitter free outbound SMS was balanced by the charges incurred by customers sending to Twitter's shortcode. Or it might just be balanced by increased customer happiness when they can use the product more effectively.

If the carrier doesn't run their own messaging infra, they might be paying their IT provider on a per message basis, and might not be able or willing to set the messaging rate to zero.

For a use case where SMS is used to show control of a phone number, getting a zero cost direct route is a harder sell, but it can happen if the routing through aggregators is poor and the carrier is concerned about that, or if there's some other larger agreement in play.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#382

Post by jzb »

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 lovely.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#383

Post by jahabrewer »

nwellinghoff wrote: post #282

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…

> Get off the major cloud providers that charge insane egress fees.

And run their own DCs? Cool, they'll just need a lot of upfront capital aaaaaand they're back in the "need money" boat. Except more so.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#384

Post by FalconSensei »

lxgr wrote: post #59
munk-a wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SMS rates are absolutely bonkers considering the technical way they're transmitted. The US is an outlier in SMS rates actually being reasonable (usually unlimited or close to) for consumers - but for the rest of the world the insane mark up on that communication method has mostly obsoleted it... That'd be all well and good... the technology would die naturally, but all my American relatives continue to stubbornly use…

> for the rest of the world the insane mark up on that communication method has mostly obsoleted it... For P2P communication. SMS is alive and well for B2C messaging, most importantly for 2FA OTP delivery, but also as a first line of defense against spam/bot account creation. It's not a good solution to either problem, but it's slightly better than nothing (which apparently makes it good enough for many), so I suspec…

> For P2P communication. SMS is alive and well for B2C messaging, most importantly for 2FA OTP delivery, but also as a first line of defense against spam/bot account creation.

In Brazil, businesses use Whatsapp to communicate with consumers. You order pizza and book doctor appointments over whatsapp

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#385

Post by discard124 »

rglullis wrote: post #345

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.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#386

Post by eviks »

YeBanKo wrote: post #267
m3kw9 wrote: post #240

They could use a free plus subscription model for really pro features, like “extra privacy”, “faster sending speed”, “create bigger group rooms”, these are bad features but you get it

As soon as there is “extra privacy” for a premium, I would ditch Signal immediately. It’s either provate and secure or it’s not. Certain things cannot be half measured.

Or the extra privacy could be the current misfeature where you can't properly sync messages across devices. No reason to ditch over that?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#387

Post by urig »

hiatus wrote: post #379
nvy wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The sms decision made signal go from THE messaging app on my phone to an app I only use with a very small subset of my contacts. It is infuriating that they didn't allow users to retain that functionality when it costs them nothing, and they could have disabled it by default.

You paid them nothing and are infuriated. Interesting.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#388

Post by cyrillite »

GabeIsko wrote: post #295
charles_f wrote: post #279

You have to appreciate the complete transparency, gently nudging towards giving without ever begging for it. Refreshing compared to the alternative that Wikipedia is showing, with the tantrum-like emails we receive from their CEO like "LAST REMINDER" or "We've had enough" ; which they ironically send to people who gave.

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…

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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#389

Post by contact9879 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #363

Support for Signal development supports all privacy-oriented software and systems, because Signal is open source. The Signal Protocol already is an industry standard. What other Signal development - either the components, the code, or the concepts - are used by others?

The only issue I'm aware of is that The Signal Protocol is only really defined in Signal's GPL'd code. So it's almost impossible to write a clean room implementation (e.g. Wire tried and ultimately failed. they ended up also GPL-ing their library).

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#390

Post by wkat4242 »

teekert wrote: post #377
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/

Whatsapp got pretty big at 1 eur/year (iOS) and 1 eur for lifetime (Android) here in the netherlands. I do fear they'll loose most tech un-savvy users because they don't know how to pay (safely).

That doesn't mean they were actually profitable at those rates though. They could have been in growth hacking mode with venture backing.
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