All things considered. Pretty impressive how cheap it is to run given the adoption of the Signal.
Second time around benefits too, and the guest time was pretty efficient in WhatsApp too.
Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
81–90 of 965 posts
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, decouple Signal user identity from the phone number.
This will probably never happen. One of the reasons WhatsApp blew up is because using a phone number as your source of identification means there's much less friction in the signup flow. No username/password to create and your social graph is already there in your contact list. My mom was able to get our entire extended family on Signal without my involvement, which is a testament to how easy that is.
They also blew up because it was also quite decent SMS app, so you just had to install Signal and use it instead of your default SMS app. All your messages are there, you can continue to communicate exactly like you did before, except that now, if the other person also has Signal, your messages are encrypted.
They stopped doing that (and I uninstalled Signal as a result), so they can also stop with the phone number thing, in fact, it would make more sense than with the current situation where Signal needs a phone number but doesn't use it (except for registration). I could even reinstall Signal if they do this.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#83> 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.
I did my part to help reduce costs by switching to the decentralized alternative, Session.[0] Bonus: Session does not demand users' phone number. Also no bundled cryptocurrency.[1] [0] https://getsession.org/ [1] https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/signal.html
I think simpleX[0] is a better choice at this point with all the recent issues around oxen: not coupled to any crypto, no user ids, can host your own servers if need be, etc
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#84Signal can be better, IMHO, by separating from phone number requirements. In other words, let users have secure random ids, rather than forcing each user to hand over their phone number for phone company verification. It turns out the budget shows the phone number registration problem: the costs to deal with phone number verification seem to be $6MM, which seems to be 10% of the entire budget. If Signal staff are rea…
That exists, and is called Threema
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#85I would pay for a few signal features:
1. encrypted backups or backup integration of my chats, photos and videos.
2. business features (backup, directory integration, search)
I have not used: 1. voice and video
Incredible that SMS costs so much. I wonder if it's worth it because it _saves_ so much in spam and other sorts of fraud or bad behavior?
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#86I'd prefer a federated solution, but XMPP doesn't yet have decent support for group chat that doesn't depend on being connected. https://xmpp.org/extensions/attic/xep-0369-0.1.html is still experimental.
Bravo to Signal for being easy enough for my family to use!
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#87Signal is one of the non-profits I happily donate to. Myself, my family, and my friends use it almost exclusively.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#88Seriously consider setting up a recurring donation if you prefer Signal. They have delivered consistently over the years. I set the $20/month back when they introduced the option.
I'm curious what the breakdown of donations is. I only have 1 contact with a $10/month and 1 with a $5/month badge. Of course there could be others not displaying the badge. Signal really needs 500,000 people giving $20/month and plus the rich guys giving some millions on top of that to be in a safe financial position.
Maybe something that could be done to encourage donations is have the client estimate how much raw infra costs your usage created and display in the donation screen.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#89Signal can be better, IMHO, by separating from phone number requirements. In other words, let users have secure random ids, rather than forcing each user to hand over their phone number for phone company verification. It turns out the budget shows the phone number registration problem: the costs to deal with phone number verification seem to be $6MM, which seems to be 10% of the entire budget. If Signal staff are rea…
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.
I don't really buy this argument. Is signing up with a phone number really that much easier for the average user than using a username/email account? Billions of people seemed to have no problems making a Facebook or Google account.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#90Who is the active user base for signal these days? Everyone I knew who was using it dropped off after the SMS debacle, which was a shame. Edit: Wow some weird haters on HN today. I was honestly curious as an active signal user that was no longer able to use it to message people in North America and had never seen anyone using it in East Asia. Apparently this makes some other signal users very angry.
Lots people are replacing meta/insta/WhatsApp with signal chats
Especially for long term chats with friends and fam.
I happened to start using it with my spouse only to apple just one kind of messaging notification to come thru.