zlacker

>>mikece+(OP)
> 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.

>>Duneda+Z
is there any way they can reduce that cost?

>>bilal4+S1
Yeah, decouple Signal user identity from the phone number.

>>java-m+s2
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.

>>tapoxi+66
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.