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Signal Is Back

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Re: Signal Is Back

#41
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does performing a reset impact messages already in the conversation? I don't want to lose chat history but I do have one convo that has missing messages between my phone and my desktop app.

Nope, existing messages are kept.

Great. Thanks!

Re: Signal Is Back

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and of course see what is meant to be running in production (and run it yourself if you're able to). This comment of yours is only the second time I'm hearing of Matrix (the first time was several days ago, in a bunch of comments on an ASK HN discussing the WA policy announcement). And because of your comment (and the implication that Matrix is something one can run independently in production) I am now perusing ma…

Read this https://matrix.org/blog/2020/01/02/on-privacy-versus-freedom

That was mightily insightful, thanks.

From the article you linked:

> It’s also true that decentralised systems are harder to evolve than centralised ones - you can’t just push out a given feature with a single app update, but you have to agree and publish a public spec, support incremental migration, and build governance processes and community dynamics which encourage everyone to implement and upgrade. This is hard, but not impossible: we’ve spent loads of time and money on Matrix’s governance model and spec process to get it right.

For me it seems to largely come down to a juxtaposition between the above risk (owed to Matrix) and the below risk (owed to Signal).

> you end up thoroughly putting all your eggs in one basket, trusting past, present & future Signal to retain its values, stay up and somehow dodge compromise & censorship… despite probably being the single highest value attack target on the ‘net.

Definitely something to think deeply about.

Might I add, as a complete Matrix newcomer, the description of its decentralised model in that article reminds me a bit of IRC in the 90s - except with solid encryption.

It certainly seems to make sense if liberty is one's priority.

Re: Signal Is Back

#43

We rarely get to see an app have to grow suddenly like that. And with Signal being open source, it must be very educational to follow. Has anyone found a publication around what they had to do on the technical side (code)? Edit: Their server's repo hasn't been updated since April 2020. Why? https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

Did it scale more than Pokemon Go? https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/what-...

Re: Signal Is Back

#44

Is it technically possible to have end to end encryption with Signal if it evolved to first attempt to use direct connections via RTC or some other method? If they're incurring serious costs to run, that tells me Signal's days are numbered until it has to start commercializing.

This came up on the forum and someone raised a good point - would direct connections require the sender and receiver to be online at the same time? I feel like the architecture has to be more clever than just a WebRTC connection between clients.

The Signal protocol can deal with offline messaging, but it requires a server to do it. That is because of how the forward secrecy works. Presumably the amount of traffic would be fairly negligible for what would just be keying information.

Re: Signal Is Back

#45
post #27
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a federated solution? I'd be happy to run my own conversations on my own server.

Because matrix (the open source protocol) is federated, you have options: matrix server (for self-hosting), SDKs, bots, libraries, etc. = https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now matrix clients = https://matrix.org/clients/ matrix bridges (to interoperate between matrix and other services like irc, slack, telegram, etc.) = https://matrix.org/bridges/ if you don't want to manage on your own, and simply want to…

How many users does matrix have? I tried it last fall on 2 different servers. (Hosting an own server is not possible on a small root server you can get for 5 EUR/USD a month, it requires signifcant resources.) My experience was a bit disappointing. It seems pretty overloaded already, especially the irc bridge. And we are talking of thousands of users. I'm pretty convinced that with millions signing up it would collapse completely.

Yes, I'd hope federation of many servers is the way to go. But it seems so resource demanding that not many free servers are available and even running your own one is not cheap or easy. No idea whether it will ever scale.

Re: Signal Is Back

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Move from the cloud to k8s hosted on their own metal. The Signal server is simplistic (a compliment), it’s the bandwidth that you’re going to get raked over the coals for at cloud providers. Burst to the cloud for outlier events.

If I'm not mistaken, signal is specifically hosted on AWS to so that governments can't just blacklist their IPs without blacklisting all of AWS. So moving to bare metal isn't really an option.

Remember that AWS can terminate (as shown recently with Parler) any time they want.

Re: Signal Is Back

#47
post #27
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a federated solution? I'd be happy to run my own conversations on my own server.

Because matrix (the open source protocol) is federated, you have options: matrix server (for self-hosting), SDKs, bots, libraries, etc. = https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now matrix clients = https://matrix.org/clients/ matrix bridges (to interoperate between matrix and other services like irc, slack, telegram, etc.) = https://matrix.org/bridges/ if you don't want to manage on your own, and simply want to…

Matrix is not ready for the general public. I am a user who can (mostly) deal with the horrible user experience of pgp. With matrix I immediately run into trouble that some of my chats could not decrypted the second day any more. The documentation is confusing, the spec has been changed less than a year ago IIRC and different clients a at different stages of implementation. Nothing that a random user could handle.

Re: Signal Is Back

#48

Glad that is back and happy to see Signal growing, but I really don't like the tongue in cheek tone of Signal on social media, I hope they don't take this route like Telegram (who is becoming a social media platform itself with feature bloat). Hope Signal adapt a serious tone and keep the product thight adding features for privacy and security. Just a personal preference, maybe the hip tone helps to grow.

Signal's tone on Twitter reflects that Signal is a tool that can be used non-techies.

https://signal.org/blog/ has a more serious tone.

Re: Signal Is Back

#49
post #43

We rarely get to see an app have to grow suddenly like that. And with Signal being open source, it must be very educational to follow. Has anyone found a publication around what they had to do on the technical side (code)? Edit: Their server's repo hasn't been updated since April 2020. Why? https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

Did it scale more than Pokemon Go? https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/what-...

Great read, thanks for sharing.

This is a great case for GCP.

Re: Signal Is Back

#50

We rarely get to see an app have to grow suddenly like that. And with Signal being open source, it must be very educational to follow. Has anyone found a publication around what they had to do on the technical side (code)? Edit: Their server's repo hasn't been updated since April 2020. Why? https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

The lack of development-in-the-open on Signal-Server is a little concerning, in terms of not giving visibility on what's at least theoretically running serverside. If you compare it with Matrix, the last commits to Synapse were ~32 hours ago, Dendrite was ~31 hours ago, and Conduit was 3 hours ago - so you can keep up with where development is at, and of course see what is meant to be running in production (and run i…

Thank you for making Synapse happen Arathorn!

I have given you flack over the Synapse migration path for server operators over the last few years, but this Signal outage brought home how important it is that Matrix is a more than suitable replacement for Signal among my family and friends, and how smooth it has been to run my Synapse server over the last year.

You and your team are doing an awesome job!

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