> 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.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/18/business/twitter-blue-two-fac...
My wild guess is that either the stack is not really optimal (last I heard it was java) or they do other costly things at scale (sgx?)
Bonus: Session does not demand users' phone number. Also no bundled cryptocurrency.[1]
My mom was able to get our entire extended family on Signal without my involvement, which is a testament to how easy that is.
The privacy is nice and it's been simple and easy to use.
I hope they stick around. Everyone likes to bash more privacy oriented companies if they aren't absolutely 100% perfect in every single way, but IMO perfect is the enemy of good and Signal has been very good.
The hardest part has been convincing people to use it, and if I have to get people to jump to another one it'll all just fall apart.
Not whether that's a good idea is more debatable; you're not wrong about discoverability.
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 reading this, I'd gladly pay $100/year for a phone-free solution for all users.
Signal encryption is its main feature (I think) and how easy it makes it (abstracts handling key transfer and all that), I'm just trying to think through... if I wanted nobody to read what I was saying , would I use an app/target as popular as Signal or something homegrown?
They are near-ubiquitous on a per-user level, but hard to accumulate without significant cost. (Unlike email addresses.)
But the down side is that phone verification tends to be on a per-service level. So, for instance, Signal incurs these costs when they verify their users, and every other service incurs these same costs when they verify _their_ users.
There are a number of businesses out there that are trying to act as clearinghouses, where they verify the users once, then allow the users' verified profiles to be confirmed by multiple services.
I wonder if any of those could be used to reduce these "registration" costs.
Moving off cloud services to lower-cost provider like Hetzner, Vultr and DigitalOcean might provide a lot of cost savings.
I also imagine they're using managed SMS services from one of these clouds, and moving off them to a combination of local SMS gateways in each country can also further reduce costs (and in one case I've personally observed, by upto two orders of magnitude). This obviously pushes a lot of complexity on Signal's side, but is usually worth it.
It seems like Session relies on Oxen's network, so while there is no inherent coin it is blockchain backed.
> Session’s onion routing system, known as onion requests, uses Oxen‘s network of Oxen Service Nodes, which also power the $OXEN cryptocurrency. Check out Oxen.io to find more information on the tech behind Session’s onion routing.
WiFi calling is a standard feature that does exactly what you describe for texts and calls, without using a third-party. I have cell connectivity turned off constantly on my phone and yet receive texts and calls via WiFi.
It is actually an awesome feature for receiving 2FA SMS at my parent's place where there is great internet but poor cell coverage.
What? I know silicon valley salaries are a thing, but absolutely everywhere else in the world this would be insane. Maybe change the headquarters to somewhere cheaper?
That'd be all well and good... the technology would die naturally, but all my American relatives continue to stubbornly use iMessage.
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.
Edit: I'm stupid and did the math backwards.
If you want to talk to one person, you can give them a USB key in person with a set of crypto keys and then use that to encrypt your messages over any transit method and it will be secure.
The hard part is the key exchange.
Seems like all their stuff is open source.
* $19 million for 50 staff
- That's $338k/head on average. At face value for a nonprofit, I'd like these costs broke down as this seems excessive. There is far cheaper IT labor available outside SV.
- I'd drop these features if possible, or give them to donors.
- I was actually expecting this to be far higher
- Long term storage should probably be donor-only
- Servers could likely be optimized by going hybrid cloud with colocation and owning own hardware, but again, was surprised how "little" they're spending on this.
- Stop contributing and supporting the "Your phone number is your identity" problem.
- Move towards helping educating society and establishing a set of encryption keys as their long term identity
This is really the crux of the problem. ~$3M of servers per year is more than enough to start purchasing hardware, I wish there were easier ways for people like me to participate and help Signal on the cheap.
As someone who participated in the builds they complain about being expensive (and ignoring their , I don't think it's a function of centralization or "troubling" as much as it is practical. Meta, Google, etc all have many billions they could be saving if they could figure out how to make it cheaper too.
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 suspect we're stuck with it for now.
> That'd be all well and good... the technology would die naturally, but all my American relatives continue to stubbornly use iMessage.
iMessage is not SMS, though. It just uses phone numbers as identifiers, but so do many other popular over-the-top messengers, including the most popular one globally.
We could stack a hundred layers of encryption algorithms, and if just one of them works, then the whole stack is secure.
How would it be worse?
You might understand that it's a bad idea, but that makes you an outlier.
Still does seem high though.
Every actual Java project: “oh, did you want that memory and those cycles for something else? Yeah, sorry, I need them all. Why no, I’m not actually doing anything right now, why do you ask?”
Edit: I meant moving off cloud to Hetzner, Vultr, DigitalOcean.
I know this will invite comments about usernames. I would like usernames a lot too.
So, that’s some of the active user base in my city, but none of those users are very motivated to use Signal with their network of contacts in general. There WhatsApp reigns.
For instance, maybe verifying a new number over SMS should cost $0.10 if that's going to make up 14% of the operating costs.
Begging for donations to subsidize excessive use by other users just doesn't seem sustainable.
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.
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?
Bravo to Signal for being easy enough for my family to use!
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.
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.
Let one communicate from a computer (or phone) with a username+password account, with people who use the service with phone number account.
This without the mechanism Whatsapp uses, where you can use it in a web browser, but it's still linked to your phone.
What would you recommend to use instead of Signal?
SMS is (unfortunately) core to the product, so I'm not certain how they could make it cheaper, while retaining the same properties (user+pass registration would be a nightmare for spam and change the UX).
Increasing the Java heap size just makes it so that when garbage collection eventually hits, it causes an even more massive slowdown across the entire application.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
I've got an Android phone so all iMessage transmissions come across as SMS (or MMS).
In most countries, you can get an anonymous phone number anyway.
The SMS issue was mainly a problem in the US where people used it for SMS and therefore never mattered since that communication was never secure. Those people probably never even cared for security since they, as you said even went out there and actually uninstalled an app. Something people seem to rarely do.
I use it for friends, family and colleagues. People now started asking me for it (or safe alternatives to Facebook Messenger) since Facebook started asking people to pay for non-targeted ads recently. They actually got people to think about the data they share with an outdated social network.
So it was the best of all the available options practically, if they wanted to grow and retain the users.
There are opensource self hosted solutions like BlueBubble that allow reasonably secure communication through iMessage to the other chat platforms on desktop/Android etc. I have zero affiliation, but I know others who happily use it. There are also less secure and paid solutions I can't speak to.
Personally, I prefer it over downloading yet another client, dealing with additional credentials, wondering about who can access my messages, and so on and so forth…
And all that just to message the handful of people that I know who use <popular in other country third party app>.
If I want discoverability, let me provide my phone number.
If I want privacy, just assign a random identifier.
The iOS application is called "Messages"; iMessage is the over-the-top Apple-exclusive messaging service.
- That's $338k/head on average. At face value for a nonprofit, I'd like these costs broke down as this seems excessive. There is far cheaper IT labor available outside SV.
I'd be happy to pay 10 bucks a year for Signal.
This is why it still has a stronghold as well…
In the US, that's effectively zero due to the US phone infrastructure largely using a shared-cost model, but in most other countries which use "sender pays", these fees can be significant.
- can't do personalized ads or geo-specific ads, so doing generic ads wouldn't drive a ton of revenue anyways
- can't require users payment because when payment (most forms, including bitcoin!) can be used to identify people
- No real benefit to themed group chats (like discord nitro) since it doesn't focus on community groups
I'd love for someone to figure this out, though, because a nonprofit structure for an app is not sustainable.
It's also not a great idea to make sign-ups for an instant messaging service contingent on having an account with another, competing service.
Funny, people around here in Germany say that about Telegram.
If you're not going to show how much money you get via donations, I'm not donating. I'm not going to donate more than you actually need, for example.
there’s just a bunch of nonprofit employees or personnel that play on the pauper perception because its convenient, but “nonprofit” and no money is not correlated to anything
so if those employee costs were excessive for any organization, saying non profit doesn’t make them more or less excessive
I think tech talent is undervalued and should at least compete directly with FAANG, for many organizations this is not possible, for organizations with other liquid assets they create (like Signal) it is possible. All employment hasnt risen with cost of living, I’m not familiar with other sectors.
That $19M/year was total employee costs which, as best I understand these things, can often work out to be double the raw salaries which would bring the average down to a slightly less excessive $170k/year.
Oh come on. Just because the organization is non-profit, meaning that it's not out to make a profit for shareholders, is no justification for the staff to be paid below their market worth. In fact, they could definitely earn more by quitting and working at for profit companies. And that is especially true for those who are getting the higher end of the compensation.
And say that staff number was like, $5m/year less? It doesn't change the fact that costs of running are substantial and more donation is needed from those who want it to remain viable.
How about they pull their socks up and use peer to peer technology instead? Messages are asynchronous so they need to be temporarily stored but routing real-time audio and video is a technology problem that they have chosen the expensive way to solve.
There is no room for monetization because of FB. In other words, you can't compete with a monopoly, even if you are in a different business. They simply take all
This is a product that solves some of the harder problems of engineering, and has a staff of 50. Cheaper isn’t going to get you the best. If you had a staff of 1000, you could make that argument. Besides that’s not a lot of money to begin with. 340k is a senior engineer salary and I am sure the people running the company are far more capable than senior engineers.
> drop those features
That’s a valid argument, but 1.7M for that 20PB of bandwidth is not a lot of money. Dropping or making the features paid, defeats the purpose. If you’re trying to be the privacy first app that competes with WhatsApp and others, this would make it harder to be a viable alternative.
> sms registration fees
Education is a harder problem to solve, but offloading some of the costs to users may make sense here.
It offers a way to configure a recurring donation for whatever amount and whatever schedule you want. $100/year for instance, but as you slide the slider or enter a number, it shows you if that number leaves Signal in deficit, covered, or surplus, if all other users who are currently paying anything paid this much.
Instead of just trying to suggest an amount with no explaination of what it means, is $5 still leaving them starving? is $5 5x more generous than needed? You still get to use it for free. But if you are of a mind to be one of the ones chipping in to keep it alive, you see exactly what is the right amount.
When 10k people are paying for 10m other people, that "covered" amount may be pretty high, apparently 5x what the average donater is currently paying. (article says it's 20% of total)
But with that little bit of non-repulsive non-abusive game theory, just honest information but presented in an immediate way, a lot of those other 10m users would start to chip in, and the covered amount would come down. Some users will say, well, I can swallow 5x what I was paying, and others can just leave their donation level in the red. But I think a lot more people would go from 0 to a few bucks if they could see exactly what it means and know that it wasn't a waste.
Maybe the donate function could even have a setting track the current covered value automatically so that your bill automatically comes down as other people start adding to the pool.
Also have it display the 3% or more transaction fee overhead going to the debit card and other payment processors, to show right there graphically how much you're wasting by paying a small amount monthly vs a large amount yearly. Everyone always hides that but I say show it prominently.
Someone with that level of expertise is going to be expensive.
How did you compute this? 19/5 is 3.8
Given the choice between SMS and a service that provides the same functionality is free, superior in most ways, borderless, etc. the choice to use whatsapp is obvious.
https://signal.org/blog/sms-removal-android/
edit: wording, forgot the word remove
According to Signal's 990, it's paying multiple employees over $700k. That's above-market for corporate compensation, and it's way above market for non-profit compensation, to the point where it could be considered private inurement.
> Service A => User: Please Enter Your Phone Number and Email
> Service A => Clearinghouse: Please verify phone number XXX wants to sign up for an account with us
> Clearinghouse => User (SMS): Please respond with the Email you used at signup to confirm you want an account with Service A
Later...
> Service B => User: Please Enter Your phone number and Email
> Service B => Clearinghouse: Please verify phone number XXX wants to sign up for an account with us
> Clearinghouse => User (Email): Please verify you want an account with Service B
Not saying it's great (providing email twice is annoying), but it's something.
You could even automate the bans by banning anyone who gets blocked by more than two people they sent messages to, which anybody can avoid by not sending messages to people who would block them, and if it happens to someone innocent, it's still only another $10 to reactivate your account.
Can't say I've ever gotten any psycho responses from it though.
But hey, they still want your whole address book, and announce you're on signal to everyone else on signal.
The whole "secure" thing is a joke. Its all linked to your identity via your phone#.
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.
And that's all without even considering the significant overhead of collecting low-value payments internationally.
1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...
- If you lose your phone or it no longer boots, all your messages are irretrievably lost. There's no way to create backups on iOS. Why the hell can't I enable iCloud backups? I know it breaks privacy in some ways but let me choose the trade off. Put a giant warning if you have to.
- The desktop app is awful and requires signing in again all the time. See the Telegram Desktop app for how to do it better. In my opinion it should be the gold standard for desktop messaging apps
- Desktop app keeps losing message history
As long as Signal treats all messages as if they're so important that even super spies should not be able to read them, and as a result, goofing usability in a way that standard features don't work, I 100% understand that the majority of people won't use it.
Hard disagree. If you charge, the number of people who will use it shrinks by several magnitudes, and then you lose your network effect, you lose the ability to get your less technically inclined friends to install it.
More layers of encryption doesn't really solve those problems.
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 most markets. Twitter still has to maintain that infrastructure, because they didn't get rid of SMS 2FA - they just restricted it to Twitter Blue users, so the overhead is still the same.
Almost nobody else who delivers SMS today has that infrastructure, because it doesn't make sense for most services to build.
The only place where Twitter was paying significant amounts for SMS was due to SMS pump schemes, which is a consequence of Twitter gutting its anti-spam detection, resulting in them paying for SMS pumping which was previously blocked.
Absolutely they are. Most of my friends and family are Pixel users and we all communicate using RCS. If Apple would just support the modern replacement for SMS (which includes end to end encryption), iPhone users would be much safer and would have a better experience.
> As a small nonprofit organization, we cannot afford to purchase all of the physical computers that are necessary to support everyone who relies on Signal while also placing them in independent data centers around the world. Only a select few of the very largest companies globally are still capable of doing this.
Signal may be “small,” but they’re spending plenty on this. Registration is expensive and hard to do without using one of the large expensive providers. But there’s $7M for servers, storage and bandwidth. These are comparatively easy: servers and storage (especially for a service like this where availability for the substantial majority of the data is not terribly important) come in nice pre-manufactured boxes that can easily saturate 10Gbps and can store quite a few TB at very very high IOPS. [0]. And the forwarding model isn’t very latency sensitive - several hundred ms for most users is fine, and sending media via Signal is quite slow regardless. So having many points of presence doesn’t seem terribly important. I bet that two small colocated facilities could cover all of North America quite nicely.
Bandwidth costs outside the cloud world, at least in North America, are comically cheap compared to the major clouds.
[0] A service like Signal ought to need relatively little processing compared to bandwidth and storage for the data plane. AWS and the like may not have a particular good match in their catalog for this use case.
Bullies will bully. Targeting the articles of bullying versus the source is fruitless; the former is unlimited.
Yes, indeed, how backwards. I wish I only used software that spied on me, or permitted others to spy on me, for those features.
Nobody wants this. Universal access means universal access for spammers. iMessage won over SMS because of cost and spam filtering.
RCS is an open standard that any carrier/OS/messaging app can support, unlike iMessage, which is exclusive to iPhones.
To give one example of a (not that cheap) market, outside of London average developer salaries are probably under $50k in the UK. Even accounting for additional costs like taxation and equipment, that's likely to be under $100k fully loaded.
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.
Sending mass email is still difficult. Its probably easier to pay a provider than set up and establish reputation for yourself. But they don't charge near the rates. Last time I compared rates it was something like 10x-100x to send an sms compared to an email, but it has been a while.
In the meantime, the added complexity adds new places for errors.
The loaded costs should have the numbers run.
It would be a fascination under the covers look with signal.
It apparently just doesn't work with dual-SIM phones, requires a phone number and an active plan with a supported operator (at least iMessage lets me use an email address!), the multi-device story is non-existent, to just name a few.
Telephone numbers are fundamentally incompatible with privacy. Signal's leadership knows this, but they don't appear to care.
There is also a third alternative: Threema (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.threema.app...) is a privacy-focused messenger app that tries to cover its costs by *gasp* asking for money for the app! But of course those notoriously financially-conservative Swiss can't hold a candle to Signal, who first decided to give away their app, same as those other messenger-making companies flush with cash, and then found out that supporting all those users who download your free app actually costs money...
Using my phone number as an identifier and authentication factor for so many things these days is bad enough; I really don't want the messaging layer itself to touch my phone provider at all.
I was happy to note this about employee compensation since paying them well is a good thing apart from their personal motivation to work on this (even at a comparatively lower pay than in other companies/projects):
> When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year.
> We are proud to pay people well. Our goal is to compensate our staff at as close to industry wages as possible within the boundaries of a nonprofit organization.
That said, I really dislike Signal for a few reasons. The first is what many people have already talked about very often — forcing to use a phone number to register. Since the SMS or call costs are quite high, Signal could adopt the iMessage approach to verification, which is having the user send an SMS to the service (this will cost the user some money depending on which country the SMS is sent to). This could be decided based on the country code so that the current SMS OTP model can coexist.
Signal is obstinately user unfriendly on a few aspects on user experience, more so on iOS/iPadOS. Firstly, it refuses to provide a data backup mechanism for iOS/iPadOS. If someone loses their devices, there is no way to restore older messages. Even setting up a new device requires the old device to be in physical proximity to transfer the data. Signal does integrate with CallKit (to act like a phone app) and with Apple’s notification services, but refuses to allow the user to backup the data with a password to encrypt it.
Secondly, I found this paragraph in this post to be disingenuous:
> Such practices are often accompanied by “growth hacking” and engagement maximization techniques that leverage dark patterns to keep people glued to feeds and notifications. While Signal is also free to use, we reject this kind of manipulation, focusing instead on creating a straightforward interpersonal communications app. We also reject business models that incentivize such practices.
Signal on iOS/iPadOS wants the user to enable notifications and to share contacts. If notifications are disallowed and if contacts upload is disallowed, it will pester every few days about it. One might think this is a silly mistake that Signal isn’t aware of. But it was reported some years ago and Signal responded that it will not fix it because it believes this is the only way. [1] Not even an option where this is a toggle for those who want no notifications or don’t want to share contacts (Signal does have a toggle for contact joining notifications).
Signal is also not that reliable in delivering messages in a timely manner compared to other apps (the GitHub repo has many repetitive issues on this topic over all these years).
Finally, since Signal has poorer UX in general, which isn’t an easy or cheap thing to handle, I use it only with less than a handful of people who I know and who use it.
I’d donate occasionally so that Signal can continue to exist, but I don’t feel like supporting it every month with all these issues, some of which look like Signal ignoring the user and UX issues completely.
Edit: Removed some hard words.
[1]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/4590#issue-72...
$7m Twilio
$4m Microsoft
$3m AWS
$1.3m Google
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
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 Twitter is not a telecom and is still at the mercy of whoever is that "last mile" for actually delivering the SMS to your phone, so I don't understand how they have no marginal cost here. Happy to be proven wrong.
I mean, to donate to them I'd have to use it. I don't need another WhatsApp.
Not nobody.
> iMessage won over SMS because of cost and spam filtering.
Really? I've never used imessage.
I'm not mad at all if somebody prefers using their phone number and not having a password for a service – just give me the option to use my email address and/or a username.
There are too many "phone number only" services out there these days.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/18/whatsapp-...
My preference would be that Apple drop SMS support from Messages all-together and market it as an iOS only communication method. People with iPhones would then have to pick some alternative, perhaps they would use Signal or perhaps something else.
I already have to install a handful of applications to talk to all of my friends and co-workers, at least I wouldn't have to continue to use SMS.
1. Open Signal and click on your user icon in the upper left.
2. Go to "Settings" --> "Donate to Signal".
3. Click "Donate", select your donation options, and pay with Apple Pay.
RCS is exactly what it says on the box: A modern successor to SMS. That does not make it a good modern instant messenger.
They can't really do that, it deters adoption of something with a network effect.
The real issue here is that direct connections have privacy implications (maybe you don't want the other party to know your IP address), so they relay everything. If they could solve that they could save a lot of money.
For example, detect if the user is connected via a known VPN service (which is likely given Signal's user base) and then let the VPN hide the user's IP address instead of Signal having to pay for it. Or make a deal with popular VPNs to put the relay servers in their data centers, which gives a similar advantage and they might be able to get better pricing from them in general because the VPNs already have a lot of bandwidth, are sympathetic to what Signal does and could use it as PR.
So sending 1 costs the same as sending a 10 million. It isn't that they are free to send, its that they are charged for access to the system, but aren't charged per message.
This is not the only case where Signal has decided that users should not be in control of their own data. For example an Apple Store or authorised repair shop may need to reset the phone, or an OS upgrade goes badly and needs a restore will also lead to data loss even if there is a full local encrypted backup made.
It is really orthogonal to the much of what Signal claims to stand for them to so boneheadedly insist that users should not be allowed to own and control their own data.
[1] >>38117385
No one wants to support it. Even telecoms don't want to support it.
(via >>38291490 , but we merged the comments hither)
Actually it does usually. Because when people see real meaning in their work, as opposed to find yet another way to manipulate people on other peoples behalf, then you don't have to buy their consciousness as well.
So sure, it is awesome, that signals employers get to have meaning and money. But I would bet, you would find competent people working for less. (And maybe somewhere else)
But .. they do have a working app and organisation right now and drastic changes could destroy that.
As for registration fees, it sounds like they should use authenticator instead of SMS... and stop requiring a phone number to sign up. That is why I left Signal (went with Matrix). I don't see why anyone would want to tie their Signal to a phone. If you value privacy, why would you do that?
Servers cost seems excessive as well. I don't believe you need that many servers, even if you served a boat load of requests.
As for bandwidth.. okay, that may be the case. I am not sure how you can get that cost down.
(And even Google doesn’t really have any love for RCS, they crawled back to it as a fallback plan with their tail between their legs when their own proprietary lock-in messaging apps didn’t work out. Which makes their attempts to shame Apple into adopting it pretty hilariously disingenuous.)
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.
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) Remove media texting until both users allow a p2p connection. 4) Remove no contact list message hosting for non donating users.
Lot of unpleasant trade offs there. But I would rank having a text based private messaging app as the top feature. Everything else is a "very" nice to have. I applaud what they are doing and the sacrifices that have been made so far.
Within the scope of messaging network effects, nobody.
> Really?
Yes. iMessage spam is rare and stamped out fast. Open protocols tend to have spam problems the moment they begin scaling.
In curious Googling to see if there was an explanation for how their structure works, I stumbled on this interesting Glassdoor review:
> The bonus structure promised up to a 100% match with salary, but in practice the system was set up so that nobody got more than 50%, if that. Had I understood this I probably would have taken a competing offer that ultimately would have had much higher comp.
> The quarterly cliff on the bonus system, where a feature failing to ship within the quarter specified (even if just by a single day) was counted as if you hadn't done it at all. This led to death marches each quarter as everyone scrambled to try to finish unrealistic goals. It wasn't possible to get help from anyone else at these times since of course they too had the same problem.
> Nominally, the quarterly goals were set in a collaborative process. In practice it was a 2 day full day meeting where we were told what Moxie had decided we were going to do - our input wasn't really considered at all, including if it was even viable to complete in a quarter. I'm fine with top down control, that's how most corps work, but I disliked the false patina that this was some democratic process.
> Internal communications are a disaster, because Signal uses Signal for everything, including things Signal isn't at all designed for or good at. Bug tracking is literally done in a giant group chat. I have a newfound appreciation for JIRA.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Signal-Messenger-Reviews-E...
You can push Java very far.
Of course you can also write horribly ugly code in it.
Why is the security a joke? The data is e2e encrypted, and isn't related to a phone number in any way after registration. Do you know of a better way of combining privacy and anti-abuse measures? If you don't offload identity checks to telecom providers during registration some bad actor will immediately create a million accounts and send millions of spam messages and destroy the slim chance of this type of app to exist for free.
Now add the cost of providing support (it's a paid product now!), payment handling on their end (in a privacy-preserving way, which excludes most common payment methods), and top it off with the immense damage to the network effect by excluding all the users that can't or simply don't want to pay $1/year...
Donations seem like the much better option here.
I would much prefer the Wikipedia endowment model of non-profit orgs. They have a standard operating procedure with a predictable budget, and endowment that let's them run indefinitely, and we just have to suffer through pledge drives. I just block them with ublock filters. I gave them 6 dollars back in 2012, and according to their marketing that is enough for life.
Also preferably clearing differentiating username and phone number messages.
For top-notch security developers, I call bullshit. Signal would be worthless if it started offshoring development to nickel and dime.
Dramatic exaggeration and attribution of evil intent is counterproductive and disingenuous.
For the sms verification, I feel like forcing the requester to do some bitcoin mining for you could potentially pay for itself.
So, you can't trust the address in the "From" on an SMS or the "From" of a phone call.
That means a voice call to Signal would not work to validate phone numbers.
I worked on an automated SMS marketing system back in the day so I have seen this in action, at scale. This would be stuff like "text LAKERS to 12345 for Lakers updates"- we didn't handle the Lakers but we did handle many sports teams. Though I wasn't privvy to the financial side, I got the sense that the per-text cost ended up being manageable at scale, but this is because we were one organization who would apply the rules onto our own customers, and if we failed to do so properly we risked losing the interconnects to the various carriers. We typically used a single contracted "aggregator" service which provided a unified API for the carriers. When I left, we were using OpenMarket.
When you have a self-service SaaS offering such as Twilio, the per-text costs are going to go up because the barriers for sending unwanted texts (or fail to follow the rest of the rules mandated by the TCPA) is so much lower, and Twilio has to address that organizationally which adds cost.
Additionally, Twilio does not purchase short codes (ie 12345) which means its harder for the carriers to track bad behavior across their network. There is an initial cost (fairly high) to acquiring a short code, though you can also share short codes across customers in some cases. Acquiring a single short code and sending all messages from that short code would likely reduce costs.
I would love to see more detail from Signal about what sort of SMS interconnection they are using, because directly connecting with an aggregator instead of a SaaS offering (if they haven't already) could save a lot of money, and they are definitely at the scale that would allow for it. And given that they only use it for account verification and are a non-profit, it seems likely they could get a good deal since the risk of TCPA violations is effectively zero.
Easy google , but no it doesn't
Some of these will be willing and able to pay $1/month to Twilio for a workaround, but most probably won't.
My carrier charges an arm and a leg for international texting, and if distinguishing between texts and iMessages wasn't as easy as it is, I would probably have to pay hundreds in carrier bills at least once.
I supported a marketing platform for a while, and it was so much easier to send an email than an sms.
Attempts to decentralize or federate Signal are met with hostility. The Signal Foundation tells us that this is the only possible way; "the ecosystem is moving", and we must exist in competition with commercial offerings, rather than build something small, sustainable, and decentralized. This is great, until the AWS bill is due.
... legacy telecom operators have realized that SMS messages are now used primarily for app registration and two-factor authentication in many places, as people switch to calling and texting services that rely on network data. In response to increased verification traffic from apps like Signal, and decreased SMS revenue from their own customers, these service providers have significantly raised their SMS rates in many locations, assuming (correctly) that tech companies will have to pay anyway.
...
These costs vary dramatically from month to month, and the rates that we pay are sometimes inflated due to “toll fraud”—a practice where some network operators split revenue with fraudulent actors to drive increased volumes of SMS and calling traffic on their network. The telephony providers that apps like Signal rely on to send verification codes during the registration process still charge their own customers for this make-believe traffic, which can increase registration costs in ways that are often unpredictable.
- Using similar services from cheaper cloud providers
- Renting VMs
- Renting whole servers
- Renting rack space + power
- Renting larger spaces (many racks, or part or all of a whole floor)
It's possible that they were only enforcing it in some regions, though.
All pricing was entirely optional
Here's one reference to a different price (can't find lifetime except for people complaining that Facebook didn't honor it on original ToS)
This is not how SMS pricing works in many, if not, most countries.
Here is more information about what I meant when I used the term "bundled".
First, we have three distinct client teams, one for each platform (Android, Desktop, and iOS). These teams are constantly working: adjusting to operating system updates, building new features, and making sure the app works on a wide variety of devices and hardware configurations. We also have dedicated engineering teams that handle the development and maintenance of the Signal Server and all of its infrastructure, our calling libraries like RingRTC, and core libraries like libsignal. These also need constant development and monitoring.
Product and design teams help shape the future of the app and determine how it will look and function, while our localization team coordinates translation efforts across more than sixty languages. We even have a full-time, in-house support group that interfaces with people who use Signal and provides detailed technical feedback and real-time troubleshooting information to every other team. This is an essential function, particularly at Signal, because we don’t collect analytics or telemetry data about how people are using Signal.
--------
How many people does it take to perform all that?
In total, around 50 full-time employees currently work on Signal ...
!
I was on the support side, so I just saw when it went wrong, which was a lot.
Intentionally ignoring the fact that Signal splatters your phone number to everyone else is a humongous problem. And you can even put your phone number block in your address book, and it'll tell you everyone who has Signal. This happens all the time, with Signal servers leaking all of this metadata.
And doing "engagement promotion" is what companies do to sell more shit. So, exactly what are they "selling"?
>Why is the security a joke?
Metadata, pertaining to communication patters and to whom matters just as much as what's being said.
And that metadata, like "your phone number" and "contact's phone number", and "when data is being sent to/from" is that metadata.
> The data is e2e encrypted,
> and isn't related to a phone number in any way after registration.
Bullshit. I see new people hopping on signal fairly regularly. If that was true, it'd be a simple verify-once-and-delete. It aint.
> Do you know of a better way of combining privacy and anti-abuse measures?
I reject your claim of "privacy", with regards to metadata.
Secondly, Tox has an alternate way to handle this, by allowing any number of accounts not tied to anything. Sure, it's a SHA256 id, but who cares. There, its secure AND anonymous.
Basically, I look at Signal as "better than SMS, but not much". It's basically a way to keep the phone company from scanning messages.
Any chance at all it has something to do with the fact that they've acquired an RCS infrastructure provider that they can sell to telcos?
May not be the best thread to say this in, but Signal isn’t as good as Telegram and WhatsApp on features. People can be persuaded to switch, but may have different expectations than what Signal can satisfy.
The clearing house verifies you only once, or once a year, instead of every time. If the clearing house were to be a nonprofit, perhaps even set up by Signal themselves to spread costs with similar services, that has to be cheaper.
It also gives users confidence that only a randomized user ID was shared, so it won't be used for cross-service correlation and tracking, if the service didn't actually need your phone number but only some identifier.
For what it's worth, they've worked tirelessly to ensure their failure.
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 built a sizable user base) and they can no longer just outspend the competition, suddenly they remind you of TANSTAAFL and are asking you to cough up the cash.
It is the same shitty playbook used by VC-funded companies, except that is now dressed as some virtuous thing of "looked at how much it cost to build all this..." It makes some emotional appeal but it tries to hide from the audience that these costs are solely due to them insisting on controlling everything.
If it is so expensive to run Signal, then open it up to let other people run their own servers instead of trying to control everything. Don't give me this bullshit of "we are a non-profit but we are in the same lane of big tech corporations". You are there because it served you. You can not have it both ways.
You don't need to provide support, even much more expensive consumer services live without a proper one, so being explicit about the fact that you only pay for infrastructure could suffice
Not sure why payment privacy has to be so strict for everyone
The network effect damage is real, but maybe it could be limited with donations :)
So what you've leaked is the information that you have an interest in private conversations. This might be a problem in some countries, but I think it's fair to ask folks in affluent countries with working (sorta) democracies to shoulder that burden. I.e. you don't donate if there's elevated threat to your safety, there are enough people who aren't under elevated threat.
There's also the possibility of using a donation mixer like Silent Donor, though I'd evaluate that very carefully. (There's a record of the transfer in, and the mixer needs to keep temporary records for transferring out. There's also the question how you verify the mixer doesn't skim.)
Some donation mixers accept crypto currency, so for maximum paranoia, I suppose crypto->crypto mixer->donation mixer->charity might be workable. Or hand cash to a friend who donates in your stead.
As always, the best path is to set aside paranoia and build a threat model instead to see what the actual risks are.
Signal is trying to compete with the richest companies in the world; including for talent. And considering Signal's origins and motivations, they're not going to lower salaries or decrease benefits because some people believe that working for a non-profit automatically means lower compensation.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360031949872-Do...
The details are there in this post, but I can offer a few guesses. Users may be using multiple devices. And the service has to deliver to all the linked devices before ejecting the message from its storage. The time limit for storing and waiting for linked devices to come online is about a month. With tens of millions of users, this could add up.
That is a non-starter specifically in the context of vetting privacy-enabling software. Anyone got a list of privacy celebrities with enough spare time to vet reddit content?
But I remember other people started to en masse switch to other messengers like Viber(?). And Whatsapp had to stop enforcing the fee.
Just ignoring customer complaints and selling the service "as-is" is usually not an option.
The Signal Protocol already is an industry standard. What other Signal development - either the components, the code, or the concepts - are used by others?
Anyway, considering usernames required an extensive redesign of how Signal works, it's not surprising it took 5 years (3 years of full time)
The last one available is from 2020, though. They tend to lag a few years behind. They're required to report key employees plus top-five compensated who aren't "key." Brian Acton and Meredith Whittaker both earn no salary at all. Their COO got $290 in 2020. Moxie Marlinspike and their top five developers/managers were all in the 400-600 range.
I'm sure they pay well (don't have much choice if you're going to be based in San Francisco), but I highly doubt 400 is an average salary. The expense being reported is total cost of employment, which includes FICA taxes paid by the employer, 401k matches, and probably most notably healthcare, but all benefits and in-kind compensation.
Should we also force luxury brands to offer stipends so that teenagers whose parents can't afford them (or simply don't want to participate in that nonsense) don't feel stigmatized?
It would be a completely different story if Apple were to ban third-party messaging apps on their platform, but as restrictive as they are in other areas, they aren't doing that.
It literally only takes a free app download to get a cross-platform messaging experience at least on par with iMessage (and in my personal view superior in many regards).
At on demand prices, yeah. But companies of sufficient demand can enter into volume discount programmes.
I have no experience directly with foreign telecoms, so I was simply explaining how something with no marginal cost could still be a very expensive system.
As I have to explain about open source, 'Free is only free if your time is worth nothing.' (And I use a lot of FOSS, it just not always the solution.)
That’s a very bold statement from an app that still requires a phone number using a broken protocol (gsm) to “verify” your identity and authenticate it, sim swap attacks can be carried out by kids these days. Also, don’t expect privacy when you are using a proprietary OS like iOS or one full of Google services that also have proprietary firmware drivers, they (the adversaries) don’t need to even decrypt these “privacy apps” when it’s easier to access the backdoor-ed OS or hardware, but enjoy the illusion in the meantime.
They actual costs are apparently about 1 USD per year per user. I usually at least double (usually more) my incurred cost when the donation is optional, to cover for those who can't or won't pay, but paying 240× the cost price seems wasteful as well when there are other nonprofits that can do more good with every dollar you give them (be it solving poverty, climate change, whatever you find valuable) rather than one which has mostly fixed fees
I do fear they'll loose most tech un-savvy users because they don't know how to pay (safely).
Not to mention that half of your comment is non-issues.
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.
Even an AppImage would be lovely.
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.
In Brazil, businesses use Whatsapp to communicate with consumers. You order pizza and book doctor appointments over whatsapp
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.
To be fair, that wasn't Google's plan, that was the GSMA's plan. GSMA created the RCS spec, failed to get more than a handful of their members to use it, and kind of abandoned it to the wolves. For reasons I don't quite understand, Google decided it'd be a good idea to take it up, and then push it harder than any of their previous messaging services; but it's not like they came up with it.
There are other platforms that are working on federated e2ee services (it's not easy. matrix was completely broken a year ago).
It's a bit too late for that. They undermined their reputation when they started permanently keeping sensitive user data in the cloud (like a list of every person you contact), and then again when they refused to update their privacy policy which lies to users about their data collection practices, and then again when they killed off the ability to get both "secure" communications and unsecured SMS, and then again when they started adding weird cryptoshit nobody asked for. Signal seems to be telling people as loudly as they can not to use/trust them.
Twilio offers short codes, but short codes are country specific, and the costs for sending to the US are low anyway < ~ $0.01/message for most services, lower with volume; IIRC, short code messaging costs were half, but then you've got some overseas destinations where it's $0.10/message and that's real money.
Directory integration, as in, importing a vcard with everyone's phone number into your device such that you can tap on anyone's name and message them on Signal if they've got Signal installed?
It's like brute forcing, we just want something where we'd be surprised if someone could accomplish it within the lifetime of the universe though technically it is possible for them to get it on the very first try if they are very very lucky. Which is an extreme understatement. It's far more likely that you could walk up to a random door, put the wrong key in, have the door's lock fall out of place, and open it to find a bear, a methhead, and a Rabbi sitting around a table drinking tea, playing cards, and the Rabbi has a full house. I'll take my odds on 256 bit encryption.
Signal has not been good. The absolute least we should expect from any "privacy oriented company" is that they're honest and fully transparent about the data they collect and store, and Signal is none of that. Since they started collecting and forever storing sensitive user data in the cloud they've refused to update their privacy policy to alert people to that data collection.
If you advertise your service to human rights activists, journalists, and whistleblowers whose freedom and/or lives are on the line you owe it to them to be extremely clear about what their risks are by using your service, but Signal outright lies to them in the very first line of their privacy policy.
This isn't "perfect being the enemy of good" this is either a massive dead canary warning people not to use/trust Signal, or it's completely immoral and irresponsible.
that said I stopped using Signal years ago because of basic deliverability being less reliable than SMS.. I switched back to SMS so I could communicate reliably with a loved one during an emergency when Signal randomly stopped letting me respond to messages, and I won't pay the social cost twice of trying to convince contacts to use it after having to abandon the service when I really needed it.
Actually between Element and Signal and the differences between their usability as advertised versus the reality of using them with non-technical users, I've used up all of my social capital for convincing people to use "better" networks and mostly just use SMS/RCS now.
This is incorrect, reportable compensation on a 990 is the amount in box 5 of the employee's W-2, which does not include health insurance, taxes, etc.
https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/exempt-organizatio...
It reminds me of the "Blue eyes/Brown eyes" exercise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott) so let's say this was a real psychology experiment. Middle-schoolers and high-schoolers are encouraged to communicate via a chat application with rich multimedia functionality. But any conversation that includes even a single individual who belongs to an arbitrarily-defined "out-group" has its functionality degraded and the application highlights who the out-group member(s) are. After a year you compare the mental, social, physical, and academic well-being of both groups. Would your university's IRB approve such an experiment?
I initially gave Apple the benefit of the doubt that this was simply a technical limitation. And of course kids will always bully each other about something. But at this point it does indeed seem like a billion-dollar company is intentionally amplifying and leveraging this sort of bullying to drive marketshare. If you don't find this immoral then I'm not sure what to say.
Now, even if stars align, your SMS ends up on a route where nobody is mitm-ing or hijacking it, the telco systems work and it gets delivered, it is STILL not a guarantee of identity. It simply verifies that you have somehow got access to a particular phone number.
Either way, that seems quite good to me.
To have self-hosted chat services, you either need a niche enough service that you'll never have two parties that would want to talk to each other while being on different servers, or federation. Signal chose the former, so here I am with eight communication apps on my phone.
Maybe the next best thing could be to support multiple servers, like how email clients let you fetch data from more than one email provider, if they're so worried about federation inhibiting their ability to control the ecosystem that they plainly won't go there and hold speeches about how harmful that situation would be. Then we could have self hosting and also Signal wouldn't have to care about federating with my self-hosted server.
Edit: Not sure why people downvoted this. Boss, is that you? I'm increasing my donation.
Screw "convenience". It's a poison pill. "Convenience" should never be put above "resilience" (not to mention "freedom") in a value scale. The American obsession with "convenience" is turning us all into cattle and it's getting harder and harder to get the rest of society to function without being controlled by some corporate overlord.
I do agree about being linked to your phone number - doing it that way means not considering a lot of people's valid threat models. They are working on moving to usernames, though. It's in beta now.
And you'll need to maintain ingress numbers in all the countries you support, and maybe numbers per carrier, depending, and you'll need to tell the user the right number to text to ... it's a lot, and it might not work well or might not save much money.
WhatsApp instead makes tons of money from this kind of metadata.
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 more than enough for most users, though, and it should be quite affordable for most countries.
https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-secu...
If you're a Signal user and this is the first time you're hearing about this, that should tell you everything you need to know about how trustworthy Signal is.
Besides, even now they're not ignoring all the complaints, the do fix bugs?
Maybe to be more specific, how much did it cost WhatsApp when they had $1 price and a tiny team? How does it compare to the cost of SMS?
From a footnote of the article. Maybe this is why they've stayed with "infinite scale, infinite costs" (commonly known as "cloud") so long? Surely at some point this is worth considering though, I would also be curious where that point lies
Virtually anyone, also when spending only 100 euros/month on server providers, can save a large percentage of costs by taking it in-house. There might be a gap where you need dedicated personnel and it's briefly cheaper to outsource before you grow and it inverts again, but generally if you've got a stable service then this is nearly always worth it
Maybe a hybrid, where new users onboard onto cloud and they buy hardware for expected loads (i.e. current users), would be the most cost effective. I wonder how hard that is to combine the two worlds, but anything that requires more than one server already has that sort of communication going on so there shouldn't be any real blockers. Maybe the two types of infra add costs/risks again and that's why one rarely sees this setup?
Thanks for answering though, it really bugged me, and I couldn't find anything on it.
Thanks for that, I did a one off 300 euro donation back in '21 during the bubble market; Meredith has been doing the rounds [0] and she hits on lots of good points, and even went to the UK over their now failed bill during the Summer.
I don't think there's industry numbers for that set of people in the UK, as it's not a big enough set. However I'd be surprised if they were 150K plus though, that's a very rare salary in the UK.
Also there are cheaper countries than the UK who have great devs.
Given that Signal is free as a service, supporting federation only increases their expenses.
If the data leaks somehow, telephone number as ID sounds very bad.
It feels good supporting something worthwhile.
They are stuck with SMS though because it's a costly... signal that prevents spam.
(Sounds like an opportunity ??)
But then this might solve the funding issue for them, but being tied to most payment systems would only somewhat improve the situation for the users.
I understand now why they dabbled with cryptocurrencies (Monero having proved that these can be anonymous short of having NSA levels of computing power ?). I haven't been keeping up, how did that work out ?
Google has made some proprietary extensions to RCS to support end to end encryption but this is not the same thing.
And how are you going to convince others to pay for Signal when there are many free alternatives, including WhatsApp, which most people already have and while not as privacy focused as Signal, does have end-to-end encryption. If Signal makes people pay for voice calls, they will simply use WhatsApp, regular phone calls, or whatever is free and popular at the moment.
The success of Signal came from being very low friction, privacy is the "nice to have" feature, at least for most users. But add friction and they will look elsewhere, Signal is not WhatsApp, it doesn't have enough of a critical mass to keep users on its network.
All that will remain will be a small core of cypherpunks and people who really have something to hide. This is bad because one strength of Signal is that it is a mainstream app, making it hard to single out "interesting" people compared to those who just use it because their geek friend told them to and they like the shade of blue.
RCS is better than SMS no doubt but lets not pretend it is on the same level as iMessage. Lack of end to end encryption alone makes RCS a dated standard
Element can do it for their Matrix servers. Process.one can do it for ejabberd. Prosody as well. Why can't Signal?
Problem: A system that enforces a monetary penalty to prevent sign up abuse while also not tying a users identity to said system.
Without doing some pain in the a crypto stuff it seems like there are no easy solutions other than the #
Source: https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/
Do you think $SECRET_POLICE will care that they can't decrypt my messages when they know I have exchanged said messages with a known dissident's phone number?
$SECRET_POLICE doesn't do innocent until proven guilty.
But I think it's pretty clear by now that this is a feature for FVEY IC, not a bug. FFS, they burned development resources on stickers, but abjectly refuse to offer alternative account identifiers. The standard apologist response is, "but phone numbers make adoption easier". Sure, but nobody is asking to replace the identifiers, or even to make them nondefault. We're just asking for the option. It could be hidden behind a developer mode for all I care, but it should be there.
The fact that they abjectly refuse to do it is enough to tell you about what their true motivations likely are.
https://www.techradar.com/phones/iphone/breaking-apple-will-...
No. They are meant to manipulate me personally, as well as other persons I care about. I will take them personally.
More broadly, I don't have to excuse bad behavior just because somebody's making money off it or because it makes some too-narrow metric go up. Yes, it's a complex and imperfect world. But to me that's a reason to work harder to make things better, not a reason for people to say, "fuck it" and make the world worse.
You can still buy a SIM, a prepaid PIN, and a phone with cash, but you'd need to pay a non-correlated person to be seen on CCTV to do it, at a non-correlated time, and hope they don't just take your money and leave you nothing at the dead drop.
Then there's the hassle of setting up the account in a way that's not correlated with your location, normal waking hours, etc.
All of this could just be avoided if Signal did the right thing.
But they won't. Ask yourself why.
The people behind Signal pioneered end-to-end encryption, and as is pointed out in the blog post, there's still a lot of novel cryptography development involved in building a privacy-first messenger. You can't do that without top-notch talent.
Because it's not perfect yet?
The point of Wikipedia is not to have some servers ticking over. The project has a vision: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge."
I agree it's not ok for them to lie, and am bothered enough by their dubious fundraising tactics that I stopped donating. But that's a totally separate concern than whether Wikipedia's mission is complete.
This, absolutely! they play on people's psyche and mental cabling by trying to guilt you in the same way your parent would ; it's manipulative, and I have an absolute hatred for these tactics.
I ran the engineering side of carrier integrations at WhatsApp. Carriers wanted to sell data plans with special pricing for data with WA and use WA branding in advertising, because it attracted customers that might later convert to a bigger general purpose data plan. As part of that, we would ask for zero rated SMS to their customers for verification. When it was available, it was generally faster and higher success vs sending messages through an aggregator.
We also had some, usually small, carriers approach us asking us to set up direct routes to them for verification, because their customers would not always receive our messages when we sent through an aggregator. Early in my career at WA, we would just send these carriers to our aggregator contacts, and often things would get linked up and then we'd still pay $/message but it would work better. As we got a little bigger and built support for direct routes anyway, it was usually not too hard to set up a direct connection and then there'd be no cost for that carrier. Messing around with IPSEC VPNs and SMPP isn't fun and the GSMA SOAP messaging APIs are way worse, but once you get the first couple implementations done, it becomes cookie cutter (and FB had built way better tools for this, and a 24/7 support team, so I never had to be up, on the phone with telco peeps at 3 am kicking racoon or whatever ipsec daemon we were running until it finally connected)
Also, dissidents aren't the only (and definitely not the primary) intended users for Signal
I'll just say Session had to meet a lot of criteria merely to have a wikipedia entry that Signal's entry did not meet at the time.
To this day Session's hard-won wikipedia entry is saddled with a "limitations" entry best summarized as "Session is not Signal".
Your payment info is not connected to your account.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360031949872-Do...
If someone broke down what the timeline was, what new info is being stored that wasn't before, how that is known, and how Signal has responded, etc, then that would be useful.
I'll admit it doesn't seem great. Phone number I understand, but name and contacts are more concerning.
It's not someone's fault if they happen to live in a particular economic climate.
The real root cause isn't the engineering or infrastructure cost.
It is about people paying their fair share myself included.
Notably Signal employees do not get equity, so the salary must be higher to remain competitive.
Signal is probably the hardest class of product to build. Name an optimization/distributed systems problem, they probably have it. And quite literally, a Signal bug could jeopardize an activist/journalist’s life.
So for a <$200k salary and no equity, how many world-class engineers do you think you could hire?
I simply wouldn’t trust the product, if it had mediocre engineers.
When it’s people who are running a worldwide communications network on the cheap without getting hacked all the time? Absolute pros.
I don’t downvote, let alone flag, but I hate this comment.
shrugs
Then what I can recommend is installing the desktop client on a server somewhere and reading its sqlite-like (but with some flaky encryption extension) messages database
Many of my family also dropped Signal.
It is now really only used by the hyper-privacy conscious.
You've named several products that share your values. Perhaps those would be a better fit if you were to donate.
Note that the "solution" of disabling pins mentioned at the end of the article was later shown to not prevent the collection and storage of user data. It was just giving users a false sense of security. To this day there is no way to opt out of the data collection.
There's a lot more information about it in various places, but Signal went out of their way to be as confusing as possible in their communications so it caused a lot of people to get the wrong idea (see for example https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/htmzrr/psa_disablin...)
The forums were in an uproar for months asking Signal to not start collecting data or at least give people a means to opt out. Here's a good thread with links to a bunch of the conversations people were having at the time: https://community.signalusers.org/t/mandatory-pin-is-signal-...
A lot of those SV talents are not american but migrated from europe or elsewhere - there are still talented people in EU who just simply don't want to move to USA these days even if salaries are at least 2x. You wouldn't have a problem finding real talent in eastern europe for 150k.
I say this as a person that regularly and successfully hires devs from low COL areas. I know the common pitfalls of it and know it’s completely possible to manage and get high quality outcomes. It requires a management approach that’s slightly different than having 100% top tier talent from high COL areas but it’s possible all the same.
This is different than what is currently going on with venture backed services like reddit and youtube. I would argue that we should block ads there too, but there it is an arms race where we have to consider ways to protect ourselves from encroaching privacy violations. It's much ruder, and that is something we should actually be mad at.
What’s the game plan if the donations stops coming in ?
I don't take them personally, of course, but they do encourage me to avoid forking over any money.
It still seems like a lot of money to spend on simple, old technology, but from the PoW perspective, making it cheaper would defeat its purpose.
*Which is why many sites reject Google Voice numbers, for example, for SMS verification.
Particularly when the phone requirement is the biggest weakness in Signal.
Getting rid of it will make it substantially cheaper to operate and much more private. Win-win.
Sorry everyone for this off-topic, I just think it’s needed to be addressed, but I have no idea what to do here.
How hard would it be to use a different signal server?
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
There was (and still is, so far as I know) no upfront warning to users that if they don't first sync with a desktop client, and their phone gets lost or stolen, their iTunes backups do not (unlike most iPhone applications) contain their Signal chats. And furthermore, there's no way to export those chats in backup format from an old phone.
(You can transfer, but the transfer deletes the data from the original source, which is extremely foolish and dangerous IMO, and anyways isn't a proper export accessible from other applications. Furthermore, so far as I know there's no support for transferring from very old versions of the Signal client.)
This has been a critical bug for years [1], it's one of the most complained about issues, and Signal has done (and intends to do) absolutely nothing to fix it. It is absolutely unacceptable to have our own data held hostage by them in this way, especially without any upfront warning.
[1] https://community.signalusers.org/t/ios-backup-keeping-messa...
I'm not following. Signal gets stung for the registration SMS costs because they send the SMS to the user. They don't pay when one user sends an SMS to another user. If you send an SMS, you're the one who pays.
(I didn't realise they were moving away from phone numbers. Don't they they stay mandatory when PNP comes along?)
I'd like a signal daemon on all my servers for alerting which could message me via Signal. This is worth a monthly fee to me.
I know people running small businesses who would really like to have a business Signal account: an ability to send Signal messages as a business identity without tying it to some specific phone number. This would be worth a subscription even if they had to get their customers to install Signal.
Signal need to figure out what product they sell that's going to fund the privacy objective: because there's plenty and they're worth having.
There are a couple other options of course, but I am not sure they are better:
* Fully federate this, a la Matrix or XMPP. I really wish this was a practical option, but without legislation I doubt any company wants to go willingly in this direction. Even if they did, it'd be difficult to contain spam at scale. It also creates 'first contact' issues; love it or hate it, the general public seem attached to the idea of phone numbers and it seems to work relatively well and unambiguously. It is also the most technically complicated and most brittle and unpredictable for users.
* Phone / OS maker operates it for their devices. You don't seem to want Google running things, so this seems markedly worse than what they have actually done which is give you options (most people can at least choose a carrier, and carriers can choose implementations). It's unclear how operating costs are recouped here, especially for low-end devices. Does this lead to feature stratification? I hope not, but probably. It's a global single point of failure, both from a technical point of view as well as a policy/jurisdiction one (can $country LE subpoena my records because the company operating the service is ${country}an - or perhaps merely operates in $country, for example?). Also unclear how users are 'found', but maybe it's a bit easier than in a fully federated system.
* Phone / OS maker partners operate the service, giving users a few choices. Not really sure why anyone would go in for this, but it's basically the same as if the phone maker operates it.
None of these are great options, but I think the carrier is probably the least-bad one. You have an agreement with them. You have the legal protections offered in your home jurisdiction, with clear jurisdiction over the whole thing. They already have a ton of data on you and access to your traffic. You have a neck to wring if the service doesn't work properly.
They really should have standardized E2EE though, not including it is ridiculous.
That’s more than even I believe. I just think nobody in the OSS space has put the work in to figure it out yet.
> I could get my parents who are nearing their 70s to use Element (Matrix) and it took them less than 10 minutes, even with me asking them to register to a non-default homeserver.
Well in that case Element would be the solution we’re looking for, except that not everyone’s parents have someone like you to help them.
And as for the desire for convenience, it’s hard to imagine you seriously believe that only Americans value convenience over resilience. If that were true, the rest of the world would be using Element rather than WhatsApp.
Simply railing against people’s needs doesn’t change them.
But if they don’t want to provide that, then:
1) Why does the Android app support this?
2) They should warn users of this BEFORE holding their data hostage, and not market Signal like it’s the right solution for everyone.
They already do some of these, and some are less popular than others, but the key is to keep the essential features free and easy.
On Discord for instance, a free account is enough to cover all of most people needs, but you get a little extra by paying a subscription, and it is enough for Discord to be worth billions. Maybe not the perfect example since Discord has a critical mass, but no one wants to leave just because they don't have premium features (larger uploads, higher resolution streaming, flashy emoji) for free.
For Signal, it seems like just calling for donations is enough. They have a good image, so they can do that. It can actually be a solid business plan, look at Wikipedia, they get more than $100M a year doing that despite the controversy.
- There were times (e.g. during the introduction of MobileCoin) when the Github repositories hadn't seen any update for months, while they were still releasing new app versions on a regular basis. Heck, last time I checked there were not even public changelogs for any of the apps. Calling Signal "open-source" is a stretch at best.
- The Signal team time and again has failed to react to criticism of the usage of Intel SGX, or of how they completely messed up the introduction of the Signal PIN. And let's not talk about MobileCoin. Yes, being "open-source" or "nonprofit" doesn't imply they need to ask their users for permission or respond to every complaint. However, a minimum amount of openness and debating critical features in public would go a long way here.
- I would like to see some transparency regarding the overall foundation and corporate structure, beyond just silently filing form 990 years with significant delay. For instance, it seems Brian Acton can elect and dissolve the entire board just by himself[0, 1]?
Long story short, before donating to Signal I'd like to see a proper and continuous commitment to transparency, not just a once-in-time blog post.
[0]: (German) https://www.spektrum.de/news/mythos-signal-licht-und-schatte...
[1]: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
Just sign up with a Twilio number (using voice call) and you can make your own bot.
Signal is an awesome project but some of their decisions annoy many users. E.g. Signal does not allow to automatically save all pictures in the gallery. It's a privacy feature, but it's inconvenient since it forces me remember to download each image seperately.
edit: it was called MobileCoin right
edit2: they do
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360057625692-In...
is that generating any revenue?
Funny how email, being from the 70s, is actually better.
It doesn't say how it works. If Alice's phone can tell whether her contact Bob uses Signal without Alice and Bob doing any sort of a priori cryptographic exchange, why couldn't Signal itself do whatever Alice's phone is doing?
Privacy tools can make you stand out. Unless methods are used to obfuscate your data.
I just put my money toward people who don't do that crap, and I want the manipulators to see that I'm giving money to their non-manipulating competitors.
you literally don't. It's a fully encrypted service. The literal purpose of encryption is to move data securely through insecure or even adversarial channels. Which you can verify, it's audited and open source.
They refuse to build the app in a decentralized way because decentralization is an ideological obsession that is useless in this context, and because centralized organizations can actually ship polished software that works for normal people and move quickly.
They've given Signal quite the fork.
But yes, I agree it’s not the right choice for me and many others who want to have full ownership over our data, and they should make that clear in advance.
I also view most apps/tech as not very novel. It’s largely the same engineering “problems” that are known and well documented. A lot of it can be done by average developers and “top tier” talent isn’t usually needed other than probably the cryptographic components in Signal’s case. Scale is certainly a concern, but that is a familiar problem that’s has a lot of documentation solutions and approaches.
I could be wrong. Maybe they’re already doing this and it just happens most of their expense is going to a couple high paid execs. Could be that I’m underestimating the complexity as well. But I find my statements to be true in many cases. I can even point to the number of times I’ve talked to consultants and top tier devs about building things for me. What they would charge $1m for I can often piece together for less than $50k by hiring a few folks in low COL areas and then just spending a little effort refactoring their code to be as pretty as I like it to be; sometimes I outsource that too but the point is having a whole company of top tier talent isn’t usually necessary, it’s a choice. Just like believing that top tier talent only exists in the high cost tech hub cities is a choice more so than the truth.
Sure, I don't mind if they ask for my phone number if they think that's a better default onboarding flow, but allow users to bypass it.
With all that said, I don't think it's really only about user friction.
I buy all of my anonymous prepaid SIMs with cash at retail myself, and they are still anonymous.
The only time you’d need to stay off CCTV is if you were using them to commit crimes and expected a significant investigation to be undertaken.
Your casual assertion of malice on the part of Signal is not supported by any facts.
Most likely this is just one of the walls of the walled garden.
I hope that they make it so you can register WITHOUT a phone number. Perfectly fine if it's not the default. This is post is currently implying that is not currently the case.
I hate that. I use signal to chat with my friends. We trade pictures of our cats. I am not a whistleblower who needs my data deleted instantly for safety. I provide the noise that acts as cover for those people. And I would have a LOT easier time bringing onto the network if they were able to keep that chat history. (I take a backup on Android and export it and clean my Signal install periodically because it gets large and starts taking up too much space on my device.)
I love Signal. I want it to succeed. I think they have a little bit of problem understanding who their users actually are though, or perhaps just a disconnect with telling us who the users they want to have are...
They can use their pick of SGX exploits to undermine the weak metadata protections and they (or apple/google) could, if pressured, ship tweaked versions of their centrally compiled apps to select targets that use "42" as the random number generator. No one would be the wiser.
Signal is a money pit with a pile of single points of failure for no reason.
Matrix is already proving federated end to end encryption can scale, particularly when users are free to pay for hosting their own servers as they like, which can also generate income.
The whole point of Signal is you have full ownership of your data. You said you can transfer the data to another device, right? I get that inability to export cleanly is an annoying bug, but technically you have full control over your data the whole time. It seems to me that it's easier to guarantee no one else can get your data (at the expense of data export friction), than it is to provide "do anything you might want with your data" while still guaranteeing privacy.
It's still shitty, even if it's a shitty "standard practice" and not a shitty thing being done to me particularly.
Honestly, it seems like Wikipedia's goodwill is seen as an exploitable resource, that people in Wikimedia are using to do other, unnecessary things (probably building little personal fiefdoms).
Sort of like Mozilla, actually. IIRC, they literally won't let you give them money to fund Firefox development, and any donations you give them go to fiefdoms almost certainty entirely unrelated to why you gave them money.
It results in decisions like this:
1. MobileCoin premines 250m coins
2. Moxie is paid for being on their board
3. Moxie directs non-profit Signal to integrate MobileCoin
4. MobileCoin offers 50% of their premine for sale.
5. Signal/Mobilecoin news spikes price to $60
This is why we need decentralization.
Nobody would accept a check here anyway as they're not guaranteed. These days I pay with my watch or phone everywhere (Samsung Pay). I don't even use the chip on my card anymore. And payments between people happen digitally too (a system called Bizum here in Spain).
There must have been some kind of venture backing because there was no money coming in at all from users for a long time.
I don't think they ever confirmed that this was why they stopped updating, or did a postmortem on how poorly that launch went. I vaguely recall there was also an unexplained spike in MobileCoin trading shortly before the public launch that looked quite a bit like insider trading, though right now the stories I can turn up about it here are about similarly disconcerting and unexplained issues in its provenance: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
It's hard to take this fundraising plea seriously when this financial disaster is never even mentioned. I hope I've just missed whatever Signal has done to try to repair trust after the, but the fact that they haven't even removed it from the app is not promising. Can anyone share updates?
For instance, 1.3$ million per year for storage??? Apparently, they have 40 million users, so 1 MB per user (seems reasonable for Signal) means 40TB. You can buy a 4TB SSD for $200, which means you need $2000 one-time for 1MB per user.
How they get from $2000 to 1.3$ million is a mystery.
As for SMS registration, if they are spending 6 million, maybe they should find some way of doing it for free, e.g. Google might be offering it with Firebase, Twitter used to have it, etc. It's not great for privacy, but if they care about that they should just stop using phone numbers.
Routing video calls through a server to obscure IP address seems totally pointless while you are revealing the phone number anyway. And again there might be a way to do this for free, e.g. perhaps using one of free WebRTC STUN/TURN servers that e.g. Google seems to run.
As for bandwidth, a very conservative estimate seems 100 MB per month for each of 40 million users, giving 4 PB per month (though I guess the real usage is 1/10 that at most). Hetzner charges $1/TB, so that gives $4000 per month or $40k per year, overestimated.
Again a mystery how they get from $40k per month to $2.7 million.
Maybe the problem is that they use AWS/GCP/Azure/etc.? They have to be real idiots to use them since everyone knows they are insanely overpriced and should never be used unless a large corporation or deep-pocketed investors are footing the bills or they is no other possible solution.
Perhaps they need to consider stopping dumping money down the drain before asking for donations.
Usage numbers are not possible because Signal doesn’t include spyware in the app. There is no indication which transactions on chain came from the Signal app or any other app.
Signal builds on Android have been reproducible for over seven years now. That's not to mention the myriad of other ways that people could detect this particular attack even without build reproducibility.
Cheap is also a relative concept. I have a guy on full time that I pay $1500 a month. It’s more than twice than he’s ever made in his life and he’s an excellent dev. If I needed to, I could find 50 more like him. Sure if I was FAANG scale trying to hire 30,000 of these people it might get tough. But, I could probably create an entire training program and just apprentice people for less than they paid new grads out of 2-4 schools they normally hire from.
It’s in the realm of “64KB of RAM should be more than enough for any computer”
Maybe the problem is that the Signal app doesn't eagerly download messages upon notification? They should start doing that given the money issues.
But if you have Desktop client(s) registered, then they need to hold onto those messages until you open your client(s).
That is why they have a 30 day login limit on Desktop clients. If they didn't they'd potentially have to hold onto messages forever.
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/4730 https://community.signalusers.org/t/dont-unlink-devices-afte...
Photos are generally <1MB in size and I think have a single photo sent but not received on average per user seems reasonable (most users probably almost never use Signal, and of those that do probably most only use text, and those that use photos probably most don't send more than one or a few per day).
Videos are probably relatively rare and if not maybe they should do something about them, like not storing overly large ones them on servers and requiring both phones to be online to transfer.
There's a 500x margin between the estimate and their costs anyway.
You'll be proper mad when you realize how much money that other company, whom you regularly pay for access to their services, has in the bank.
There's a difference between "donate if you appreciate this website" and "donate if you appreciate this website because we will have to shut down otherwise (not really though)"
But the solution seems to be to have the desktop client request data from the phone.
In fact I'm not sure how it can possibly work otherwise (what if someone just uses their phone for years and then opens the desktop client for the first time ever? does that not show any old messages? seems a terrible design).
If they are able to take the journalist's sim card which is linked to their Signal account and then are able to recover the chat logs the journalist would be done for.
Of course the supposed journalist we're speaking of is already in a bad spot if they're interred. However, they might have plausible deniability with respect to their phone if there's no compromising chat logs to recover.
To your point about exporting, it would be nice. Ultimately, why can't we have both worlds by way of toggling the function?
Very few people are going "No apple pay? No donation."
What if that provider stop Signal to access to their services from whatever reson? It's not very independent service then.
Decentralised, federated Matrix.org has more sense and looks more future-proof to me.
$1.3M seems excessive, but your calculation is really, really naive.
Storage for a business doesn't really compare to buying a 4TB SSD for your personal use.
I feel the same way about the entire telephone system at this point.
It's probably more than just storing it in s3. Given their list of
> 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.
"Storage" probably also includes the cost to host it on their databases or some queuing/redis etc...
Fwiw, in America I use my phone to pay for everything too. But there are edge cases and tools like these often have utilities in domains that might not be common to the average person but are to specific groups. For example, these are often used in situations where cash is preferable but you wouldn't want to cary that around, like real estate down payments and buying a car. Some settings are sensitive to the exchange times (though that money looks like it is in your account instantly, it isn't).
I just wouldn't be so quick to make such a conclusion because it's pretty likely that your experience is not general. Despite America treating corporations like people, I'm pretty confident you aren't a corporation.
> Nobody would accept a check here anyway as they're not guaranteed.
Btw, a cashier's check is. Like I said, it is as good as cash.
Moxie made it very clear he never wants third parties like f-droid -actually- reproducing and signing packages for distribution to de-googled signature-enforcing android distros etc. Providing side-loadable apks as an alternative a joke.
Third party builds and distribution would serve as public canary and be better for privacy forbidden. He argued the tracking advantages of centralized development and distribution outweighed any wins of allowing third party clients.
In reality a build published with a breaking change and a subtle crypto backdoor omitted from public sources may not be discovered for days or longer. Long enough to decrypt most every convo on the planet.
Maybe I'll find the time...
But, like everyone else is saying, putting things in a datacenter in a resilient way for a high profile, high bandwidth, multi-national app is not the same as buying some ssd, or even running a hetzner instance.
If authorities do acquire login access to the device, they can scroll through your chats and make screenshots, with or without an export feature. It’s true that exports make it slightly more convenient for them, but if you’re a serious target they’ll do it the hard way.
If Signal wants to provide some opt-in to disable exports, which can’t be retroactively reversed for old chats (otherwise it’s pointless), I have no problem with that. But if you’re worried about authorities with login access to your device, you shouldn’t be storing logs at all.
This means that the pay packages are likely not based on comparable market wages, which is an actual legal requirement for highly compensated employees for U.S. charities.
FB acquired them next year and if my memory is correct there were 19 in the team then.
Open source != open to contributions. Signal has made it pretty clear that their motivations for open source are visibility and verifiability, not to get people to do work for them for free. It seems like the action item to update the CONTRIBUTING.md to make those expectations more clear is a reasonable one.
[1]: It was a copy of this cat video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8Ud1Cr76j8s
> 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.
When the PR was thoughtfully created long after it was clear that they wouldn't be honoring their own announcement, they said (approximately a year ago) that they would review and implement it with credit. After 6 months of darkness and petitioning, it was dismissed as being harder to review than to implement while disingenuously counting things like SVGs and license text as LOC. When some specific concerns were finally provided, the author responded point-by-point in how they were already researched and addressed, with a polite request for evidence so that they could correct any misunderstandings. The subsequent response ignored everything in that but the suggestion to update the contribution guide to align with their previously-unstated intent.
Serially mishandled. I'm not moving off of that position.
1: https://signal.org/blog/giphy-experiment/ 2: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/1862 3: https://community.signalusers.org/t/add-gif-search-giphy-to-... 4: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/4841
- signal for family and some techy friends
- whatsapp cuz some friends dont really get signal
- imessage cuz some friends dont get whatsapp nor signal
- viber cuz family across seas and that's whats popular there
- slack with some friends cuz it's nice to have focused discussions in channels
- discord cuz its better for gaming
- ig messaging cuz i stay in touch with less close acquaintances and some friends that way, comment on their stories and chat about whats going on in the moment
It seems that with uBlock origin enabled in Firefox, I was unable to fill out either of the 2 donation forms on the page. It wouldn't let me fill in my Name in the first form, nor would it let me enter a custom amount in the 2nd form.
Disabling uBlock origin seems to resolve.
IMO Signal need to figure out what they sell to people with the money to say "yes, this service helps me make money" so they fulfill the big mission statement. That's true viability.
Within that bucket there's some real obvious ones: server monitoring and alerting (I have Signal, let my severs have Signal so they can talk to me, maybe at an agreed reduced throughput rate so someone doesn't just try to run TCP/IP over it), and letting businesses have a secure multimedia messaging channel to their clients for notifications.
They don't know you; they don't know me. I'm a nobody, just like you.
In most of the world, SMS is billed per-message, so it's basically no extra effort on the Telecoms side at all. In fact, Telecoms' online charging systems are fast enough to calculate users' data usage by seconds in real time, so they don't even blink at counting SMS.
That's not their vision. Not only do they require entries to be notable, they'll remove information from articles that are, in their editorial judgment, too long. Neither action is compatible with the goal of sharing the sum of all knowledge.
43% additional impact.
Does Apple have any records connecting your recurring Apple Pay payment to your iPhone's phone number?
There's nothing that requires tech companies to use SMS for registration or for 2FA. The normal way to do it is by email, which continues to be free. For Signal, there is no need to do 2FA registration at all.
Signal is ideologically committed to publicizing your phone number, and apparently they'd rather pay $6 million to hold to their commitment than just... not do that.
I tried Element. UI felt slow, I was unable to find notifications in scrollback. Clicking the notification button would take me to random messages.
The most comparable system to Tor that has practical properties I can think of is maybe ipfs, but nobody will store your encrypted chat blobs for you out of the goodness of their hearts. Ipfs also tends to have high latency. A slow system of uncooperative nodes isn't what you want your messaging app built on.
A federated messaging system looks a lot more like Matrix. The obvious problems are that splitting users up over multiple nodes mean encrypted data doesn't live on your instance, it lives everywhere the people are you chat with. Another problem is what you see with bsky, where identifiers come with a domain name (like an email).
IRC is also federated (sort of), and there's a long list of tired, age-old problems. The most common one is simple: different servers have different features, so you can't reliably "just use it" like you can with Signal.
Compensation Key Employees and Officers Base Related Other
Jim O'leary (Vp, Engineering) $666,909 $0 $33,343
Ehren Kret (Chief Technology Officer) $665,909 $0 $8,557
Aruna Harder (Chief Operating Officer) $444,606 $0 $20,500
Graeme Connell (Software Developer) $444,606 $0 $35,208
Greyson Parrelli (Software Developer) $422,972 $0 $35,668
Jonathan Chambers (Software Developer) $420,595 $0 $28,346
Meredith Whittaker (Director / Pres Of Signal Messenger) $191,229 $0 $6,032
Moxie Marlinspike (Dir / Ceo Of Sig Msgr Through 2/2022) $80,567 $0 $1,104
Brian Acton (Pres/Sec/Tr/Ceo Sig Msgr As Of 2/2022) $0 $0 $0
I also think SMS and phone numbers are core, but they must provide a way to communicate without use of phone numbers being kept completely separate from phone numbers even when registration is needed using phone numbers.
Seems almost mundane, as if they’re running a very effective foundation that’s actively achieving their goals. See the recent Cambridge study that explored how their governance has been effective at promoting moderate discourse while suppressing misinformation and hateful content: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...
Parental manipulation works because it's completely reasonable given the relationship for it to be effective. It's a betrayal of trust.
If a company tries that tactic and it "works" too well, that's an opportunity to evaluate your psyche, not get mad at them.
Short timeline of events from my side:
- Signal announces/endorses mobilecoin support, as their new and only cryptocurrency option
- I figure I'll get on it early this time after missing out on Bitcoin, despite Signal only supporting this in the UK (for now)
- Mobilecoin and Signal websites both mention FTX as being the only exchange where you can currently buy mobilecoin, never used it before but I go ahead, transfer $1000 worth (at the time) of bitcoin to buy mobilecoin
- There are currently no other wallets for mobilecoin (except maybe some difficult to use or obscure ones that looked sketchy? don't like leaving money on the exchange but didn't really have other options)
- Mobilecoin spiked on ftx, sold and bought back a few times, at the right time with some good luck, now have $20,000 of mobilecoin
- Signal finally adds support for mobilecoin in my country, proceed to try and withdraw it
- However, my country just announced legislation to require ID in order to buy/sell cryptocurrency, but it's not planned to go into effect for at least another 6 months or so, but FTX decided to start requiring it immediately and wouldn't let me withdraw without it (I could see they were still willing to take more deposits from me without it though!)
- FTX had trouble verifying ID, I already suspected what was about to happen, tried my best to get my crypto out but they kept having excuses, the ftx fall out and everything became known some months later
[1]: https://themarkup.org/pixel-hunt/2022/11/22/tax-filing-websi... [2]: https://github.com/the-markup/meta-pixel-taxes
In general, pricing varies widely by destination (country and sometimes carrier), US and some other places are < $0.01, up to $0.10/message isn't uncommon, and some places are $0.20-$0.30/message. Voice calling was usually mor expensive (Twilio should have a price list somewhere for that too; if you can get 6 or 1 second billing, assume a voice verification call is about 30 seconds, but you might have to pay for a whole minute even if you don't use a whole minute).
Those SMTP -> SMS gateways sometimes work in the US, but they don't work much in other countries, and they're not good enough to rely on if your product requires an SMS during the new user flow. SMS costs are real and it's frustrating, but if it costs too much, you need to use something other than phone numbers for ids; I don't think skirting by with email gateways is going to work. But, if you build dynamic routing, I guess you could try.
Also, you've got the use the right email gateway for the user's carrier, and a carrier lookup is on the order of $0.01, unless you have tons of volume, so for the US, you might as well pay for the SMS.
[1] https://assets.cdn.prod.twilio.com/pricing-csv/SMSPricing.cs...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=WhatsApp&oldid=11...
(Small difference is that WhatsApp had a profitability of –93 %.)
With just a bit more effort you can see that most of those $148 are not related to the extra customer support we're discussing, but rather to the things that Signal is already doing
Costs and expenses in 2013:
Cost of revenue 53 (payment processing fees, infrastructure costs, SMS verification fees and employee compensation for part of operations team)
R&D 77 (engineering and technical teams who are responsible for the design, development, and testing of the features)
G&A 19
This is the worst take in technology. The main value of FOSS is freedom, not time or money savings. For many people freedom is more valuable than either.
Also, FOSS and managed aren't mutually exclusive.
Indeed, the Wire messenger is done like this - it offers phone number, but has an option to not use them and only rely on the usernames (although I think you need to register in the web browser for that)
So you only aped in because you were hoping to get rich without doing any work, and then you fraudulently opened up an account on a shady ass centralized exchange when you knew you couldn't KYC, and got your pretend money stuck, and then when FTX fell over it turns out it was never really there.
Cryptocurrencies are awesome. Greedy people who can't do research and complain loudly when their "get rich quick" schemes blow up in their face make everyone look bad :-/
> Cryptocurrencies are awesome. Greedy people who can't do research and complain loudly when their "get rich quick" schemes blow up in their face make everyone look bad :-/
Normally I wouldn't acknowledge this, but I find your assumptions and accusations about me quite rude, for someone who has been on HN for at least 12 years you should know the rules. I simply stated the timeline of events as is, because there is no denying the connection between Signal and FTX through mobilecoin, and I only spent what I could afford to lose, I was well aware of the risks.
Fair warning: It will...bloat. It usually keeps 3-4 copies of most recent backups in the folders you select and if you send a lot of photos, imagine it eating tens of gigabytes of storage just for backup.
(My current backups are 9.75 gigs each, approx 3 of them)
How many? There's some news about it being recommended for use by BLM protesters, and about it being blocked in China, Iran, etc. Where is this info about it being used in "overthrowing dictatorial governments"?
edit They do do a lot of good work in marking actual hate groups though, so I suppose it's a net positive still even if they miss a few strikes.
Why does an organization with about 50 employees need 4 C-level executives, totalling about 2M compensation per year? Or perhaps it's 7 C-level executives (3 hiding under the "Software developer" title) totalling about 3,7M compensation per year?
I'm absolutely not donating money to such a thing without an answer to this question. As a counterpoint, I am a member of a local (Finnish) non-profit organization, one of whose many services is Matrix. This costs me 40 euros per year and none of that money goes to C-level executives.
I'm donating more than my costs deliberately because I fully understand that most users are not going to contribute money, full stop. I need those users though, because they are the people I want to privately communicate with. So the obvious thing to do is pay for as many other users as I can. If there's 50M monthly active users, and if 1% of them are like me and highly value Signal, then each of us 1% users can pay $20/month and cover the entire operation. Then the contributions of the super rich donors can be saved to rebuild the war chest.
$20/month is nothing to me considering the value I get. I understand that most won't feel that way, which is why I'm only appealing to those who do feel as I do to just get that recurring donation going now.
They can ship it, because they got a fuckton of money. But apparently they can not maintain it, because now they are crying about how expensive it is to run it.
Signal is acting like a sprint runner who signed up for a Marathon and wants to be carried out to the finish line after showing how much faster he was in the first mile. That's what I think is dishonest here.
Plenty of people are, and for good reasons.
Second, are you hedging your bets and supporting Matrix or XMPP as well, or will you only encourage people to "donate" to the platform that you happen to have picked already?
> We use third-party services to send a registration code via SMS or voice call in order to verify that the person in possession of a given phone number actually intended to sign up for a Signal account. Simple solution, go distributed.
6M $ for that. Stop doing that. What do dictators control? Mobile phone networks and other infrastructure. And, yes, they really do go after people any way they can.
This "cost" puts people into danger. Coupling identity and operator infrastructure is a critical privacy flaw. And a costly one too apparently. If your #1 goal is to be the most private solution, this cannot be tolerated to continue to be the case. Get rid of it. Your identity should be your cryptographic key.
I worry a lot more about not having one single actor responsible in dealing for the communication of millions of people than about "quantum-resistant encryption".
it's possible to run this from, let's say, Andalusia, and hire competent folks for a fraction of this.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007060632-Wh...
Using signal without verifying contacts is like bit like using HTTPS without verifying certificates. It prevents passive monitoring.
Messaging operations are expensive because they need servers to route your traffic. They need to route your traffic to navigate around the restrictions of IPv4 NAT. In a world of IPv6 there is no NAT (but firewall restrictions still apply).
I have created a relationship model that solves for privacy without need for third party servers and then routes messages based upon that model, but it’s limited by IPv4.
Are they? These salaries are much lower than most tech competitors. I know we like to call out "high" salaries when a useful service is struggling - but they'll struggle even more if they can't retain good talent because their pay is too low. There's a reason tech skill in government is generally lower than that in industry, for instance.
I'm a lifetime member of my university's alumni association. This means I routinely get physical mail with headlines like, "YOUR OFFER INSIDE," and then the "offer" is to give them more money.
Sigh.
I also use Matrix. Element has been pretty good for a few years now, but it's still not smooth enough for mainstream use. (Encryption state in chats gets messed up sometimes, for example. It feels like Signal 10 years ago, and it's had security issues in its client also)
The Matrix protocol is also inferior to Signal in that all metadata is stored in cleartext on the server. You get to choose or run a server, but the protocol still leaks the user info to whoever runs the home server and to any foreign server that has a user in the same channel if you are using it in a federated context. Signal manages all of this by peer to peer messages where cleartext is only available to clients, which is really slick.
XMPP is just dead. Forget about XMPP. Matrix is the clear leader in the federated messaging system category. I'd like to see Matrix displace things like Telegram, Discord, and Slack. I may donate to Matrix affiliated projects in the future, as I also donate to other open source projects from time to time, but I'm not going to promote any of those things in this thread.
20 petabytes per year is around 5000 Mbps only for audio and video calling. So 5000 HD video calls all year round.
Signal is known for the large bandwidth needed for calling but that sounds too much and not really scalable in the future.
Its mission is not just "hosting" - actually creating an encyclopedia is much more than paying for the server costs.
Wikimedia produced many very useful projects which often integrate into Wikipedia, but work well standalone as well, and work towards the stated mission - projects like Commons, WikiData, WikiSource. Some projects are more useful than others, but that's just normal.
Day-to-day/People is why they keep the registration process familiar to other platforms like WhatsApp/Telegram. "Most" is why they try to compete with Telegram/WhatsApp on features to drive adoption (see Stories and Announcement Groups).
Besides, the original point was about huge$ from running a paid vs free app, which isn't the case
And from the link: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
- Other Salaries and Wages $9,665,761 - Executive Compensation $744,037
So about $10,400,000 a year in compensation and wages, or about 21% of their running costs.
That really depends on the location these people are working from. In most of the world, those are insanely high salaries.
A company like this doesn't need to be based in SV.
Communick is not "a chat program". Communick is a service provider, which promotes and works only with truly open protocols. There is no custom client or lock-in based feature that I have. This means that if you are my customer and you want to move out you are absolutely free to get your things and move to a different place instantly.
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 focused on gay marriage... so they need a new cause to fight for.
> To sustain our ongoing development efforts, about half of Signal’s overall operating budget goes towards recruiting, compensating, and retaining the people who build and care for Signal. When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year.
Wikimedia? No, they're a money black hole and will eat whatever you give them.
Signal and XMPP (via Quickly) have a simple phone number based signup workflow that my family have grown used to.
My family are not happy on having to remember/use passwords/keys. That's a shame, but is ultimately a constraint I have to deal with when persuading them to install/use an IM app.
> Well in that case Element would be the solution we’re looking for, except that not everyone’s parents have someone like you to help them.
Yet they manage just fine to get a sales rep from Best Buy to help them setup FaceTime on their shiny iPhones that they get to buy every two years. Why can't that Best Buy rep be trained to setup Element instead?
Because you are (consciously or not) creating a self-fulfilling prophecy for one champion over the others. Worse still, you are asking everyone else to devote resources to your preferred champion when we have no reason to believe that this is long-term sustainable.
> The Matrix protocol is also inferior to Signal in that all metadata is stored in cleartext on the server.
As I said in another thread: I honestly care less about the security guarantees from one protocol over the other than I care about the fact that pushing for Signal would mean that everyone's communication would be tied to one single provider. This is a systemic risk that no amount of "you don't need to trust us, you just need to trust math" can ever mitigate.
I don’t think I got you wrong at all - you’ve just reiterated that it isn’t as convenient, and can’t be made so.
> Why can't that Best Buy rep be trained to setup Element instead?
No reason. If some organization was willing to pay Best Buy to do that, I’m expect they would.
A federated network with multiple strong client and server implementations that are able to be built, reproduced, and distributed by multiple independent parties. Like Matrix.
Matrix is far from perfect yet but it is miles beyond Signal in being a sustainable solution that can survive any single point of failure.
Varies heavily by region. The shop opposite my house has ~50 SIM cards on the shelf, for £0.99/ea.
also, if you want to peddle your stuff, make your own announcements or something.
It can in principle, but not in practice. To become something attainable in practice we would have to start supporting the companies that are focused on the more important things first until they are mature enough to be able to dedicate time and resources to optimize for convenience. The problem is that when we prize convenience above other things and we end up with stupid things like customers arguing about the color of their speech bubbles.
Whether Communick exists or not, even if I close it down next week (because if we are being honest it is nothing but a money pit which I keep running out of spite and stubbornness, and unlike Signal I'm not panhandling for donations) my criticism of centralized messaging platforms would still stand: whether it's Signal, or WhatsApp, or FaceTime or Telegram... we should not be supporting any platform that centralizes all communications in one single place, no matter how "well intentioned" or even how "provably secure" it is.
This only makes sense if you ignore the world outside the Bay area and assume it's a talentless wasteland. Bay area salaries are vastly inflated in terms of value for money.
There is lots of talent elsewhere of course. I live in Europe. Lots of smart people here. I think I personally know quite a few people that could do at least as good a job as Signal has at building a messenger app + platform. No offense, but this isn't exactly rocket science.
And of course the elephant in the room here is that money is running out because this organization has a cost problem. Inflated salaries, insane cost for things that they should arguably get rid off (like the SMS bills), etc. That's a leadership problem. They aren't even getting value for money despite those salaries.
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.
Little of the new stuff is for wikipedia and what's there is of questionable value.
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-...
What is required at the moment is any phone number, not your phone number. You can use a phone booth even.
I'm sure there are some costs that they could theoretically cut without consequence. Because the same holds for any other product I buy.
What you mean with pay to compete? The goal of Signal to exist is to offer a privacy oriented chat app. Non-profit companies serve a propose, and people not aligned with that, shouldn't be working there in the first place. If you join a non-profit to make money, you are doing it wrong.
Kind of Exaggeration to say that the other popular messaging apps don't respect your privacy.. all of them do, some more, other less, just not all of them have it as their main feature.
Also the salary seems to be high for a nonprofit , I get paid much higher than their VP but would happily take that job than my current one.
They are building a secure communicator that a normal person can reasonably use - and succeeding. Something nobody else before them managed to pull off. If this isn't rocket science I don't know what is. Not to mention that they pioneer cryptographic protocols in this area, which other messengers later use.
>This only makes sense if you ignore the world outside the Bay area and assume it's a talentless wasteland.
I'm also from Europe (and love it, despite its flaws) but this comes off like whining. If it's really so easy, maybe the smart people here should create their own Signal and reap that overinflated salaries, what do you think?
Or maybe smart people are not enough and you also need VCs, reasonable taxes, laws... Oh btw, did you hear about those plans of EU to get rid of E2E encryption?
Why didn't this start from say Mexico? Or Singapore or Vietnam? Or at least Germany which has a good record of freedom conscious tech scene .
My bet is in something related to the "maslow pyramid": people in SV have so much money that have everything solved in their lives, so they have the luxury of spending their time in this sort of problems.
What happened to open source?
> The problem is that when we prize convenience above other things and we end up with stupid things like customers arguing about the color of their speech bubbles.
That’s a fair point, in that if consumers prioritized open infrastructure over convenience, a commercial enterprise would too. However this is back to the earlier point - there is no point railing about that. It’s just a fact that most people want to just buy the nicest thing they can with their money.
Then I tried to get people to use Telegram, but hey never implemented encryption by default, instead implementing things like chatrooms with millions of people... then I signed up for Signal, but waited to see what would happen -- and they started doing some weird crypto thing. Thankfully that all seems to have not been an issue, so I might actually start recommending Signal.
Can you please change Signal to not require a phone number? Requiring a phone number makes me question Signal's privacy. Looks like it can save $6 million dollars.
Bandwidth: I took at quick look and see that chat.signal.org resolves to AWS. If they are paying AWS for a lot of bandwidth, that is very expensive. Let's take a quick look:
They say they use 20PB per year of bandwidth for voice calls alone, this costs them $1.7M a year.
According to AWS pricing for great customers (suckers) of over 150TB per month, the cost per GB goes waaaay down to $0.05, yay. 1.6PB per month is 1600000GBs, that's $80K a month and therefore $960K a year.
Very roughly, a 10Gbp/s link to the Internet, from a Tier-1 provider will be around $800 (eight hundred dollars, you're reading this right) a month in a low-bandwidth-cost country like the US, possibly double that in say Asia.
A 10Gbps link fully utilized (minus some overheads), translates roughly to 3 Petabytes per month, that's 36 petabytes per year, almost double their advertized amount of bandwidth needed for calls per year.
So we have ~$10K a year (negotiable) for 36PB which is double their bandwidth needs but let's not forget that AWS graciously (geniously) charges for egess only, this means that their actual bandwidth needs are 40PB per year for whatever they are reporting. So we have $10K for 36PB a year vs $960K a year for 20PB (actually 40PB) of bandwidth from dear Amazon.
1. Not sure why they are saying the cost is $1.7M per year.
2. Even at 960K it's daylight robbery.
3. AWS makes an absolute killing on bandwidth costs. Best. Business. Model. Ever.
4. Don't these guys have a Devops pro at $300K+ a year? weird :)
Takeaways: - Storage is something you should buy and maintain (Thanks B!), you swap out old/dying storage devices. See Backblaze.
- Bandwidth, compute and storage costs at your favorite CSP are absolutely f'ing *outrageous*
- If you care about your money, your bottom line, do things differently than the *insane* mainstream way of clickity-click on some UIs to provision services without understanding what's really happening under the hood (not saying Signal doesn't understand that part, I'm sure they do), or caring about the added costs of whatever gets so easily "added" to your "infrastructure".
- By having your stuff on a CSP you don't even have "infrastructure", but that's juts me.
Signal, mail me at m aaaat zynk.it if you'd like to talk.
They know this, but it's likely a precondition of not getting Joe Nacchio'ed. It's a feature, not a bug. Signal's partners* in FVEY IC/LE have given them a lot of latitude in developing a very solid e2e cryptographic protocol and application as long as the users themselves are identifiable.
The pigs don't need to backdoor the protocol or the keys as long as there is more than one party to a conversation and each party is identifiable. The prisoner's dilemma, in real life, almost always gives the pigs a defection.
My pet conspiracy theory is not that Signal is evil, but that Signal is being allowed to operate by the pigs as long as account identifiers are very difficult to anonymize. They are likely very good people with good intentions, but when the FBI or NSA makes you an offer you can't refuse, you do the best you can.
*: I'm not suggesting Signal is in bed with IC. Just that if you operate a communications service of any scale, IC/LE will be your partners whether you want them or not.
Sorry to break it to you, but if it was only a matter of preference, I would've been fine with Signal or even WhatsApp.
Open source is not magic fairy dust that can solve everything. You still need funding for developers, you still need to acquire customers to provide a feedback cycle, you still need device makers making it easy to install your app, etc.
But personally I actually would prefer a federated alternative like matrix.
I understand this is napkin math, but shouldn't we consider that the load isn't evenly distributed? - in which case 50% average utilization seems extremely high
Signal foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3). It is literally and legally a charity.
100k a year for 100GBps, leaving it up to you to calculate how many petabytes per year you can pass with that.
Controlling the platform allows them to continue to evolve it while maintaining the convenient and spam-free user experience that users enjoy.
But the secret of JVM existing as an option is eventually learned by most who scale.
The knowledge of how to do this has forever been lost. Hopefully archaeologists can reconstruct it one day.
Then again, instant C2C and C2B digital payments using mobile phones is growing extremely fast in most of the global south.
[1] https://www.app.com.pk/national/pta-introduces-9999-sms-code...
What is their mission, exactly? Why does it require one single entity as the single pipeline for all global communications?
How many times will we have to go through the same cycle of building centralized Leviathans and see them turning against us, to understand that this is the Road to Hell?
IMHO, RCS isn't a solution to anything since it still requires phone carriers to adopt it. A quick check of the internet indicates that many of these phone carriers are actually charging more to send RCS messages than SMS, making it a non-starter all around.
Maybe Google could create an iMessage-like (internet only) alternative for Android... Although it still wouldn't work with the actual Apple iMessage protocol unless Apple adopted it. IMHO they'd have better luck getting companies like Apple to interoperate if it was pre-installed and worked on all Android phones.
> talented leaders.
In Bay Area? I'm quite sure you get great people all around the World, or in USA, by much less.
We are talking about C*, Engineer Manager, getting almost 700k/year. Not developers.
And I would argue that the language used implies Google created RCS themselves (it was their idea): "RCS is Google's idea of a solution"
But yeah, I hear you. It would be nice if it had a official bot interface where maybe all the bot's receipients have to be whitelisted so that it's easy to use for stuff like server monitoring but not easy to use for spamming.
Eastern Europe. For a non-profit privacy focused company. You're joking right?
Retrieving from the phone would be a better idea I agree.
They've talked about this, a lot.
I'm glad you worry about this. Me and other people have other priorities.
You're putting an awful lot of effort into projecting your values onto other people, which is a bit weird.
Perhaps they should try with a p2p approach, where every client provides bandwidth, storage, compute, in exchange for using the app.
The internet would be a lot more efficient and able to evolve if we just had it controlled by one single entity like Google or Microsoft. Do you think is a good idea to do that?
The economy would be a lot more efficient and allocation of resources could be a lot more fair if we could put it all in the hands of one single corporation or government. Do you think it's a good idea to do that?
Agricultural output would improve significantly if all crops used the exact same genetic strain and if all soil was artificially managed. Do you think it's a good idea to do that?
In case you are wondering, "ability to quickly roll out post-quantum key exchange" is waaaaay down the list of my worries compared to "facing a catastrophic Black Swan affecting all of the world's communications".
Did you watch "The Big Short"? You are sounding like one of those jocks-turned-real-estate agents that are bragging about how easy it is to make money and thinking the analysts were idiots.
> You're putting an awful lot of effort into projecting your values onto other people.
We live in a world where people are bullied for not using iPhones and showing up with different bubble colors on the chat apps and family members will refuse to call you on the phone and only accept you if you use WhatsApp.
All I am saying is "please let's not collectively put ourselves in the hands of any single entity". Are you sure I'm the one projecting values, here?
In fact, I would consider it transphobic to not call out organizations with ulterior motives.
It's the Microsoft 90's playbook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Edit: check out https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/Krispy_Kreme XD
I'd prefer a JSON dump but something's better than nothing.
I've literally no idea what this means. Who thinks who's an idiot in this analogy?
> All I am saying is "please let's not collectively put ourselves in the hands of any single entity". Are you sure I'm the one projecting values, here?
I don't care what messaging platform you use. You appear to deeply care what other people use, and therefore what should be important to them. Yes, I'm pretty sure.
There's plenty of diversity in the messaging space. Decide your values, choose your compromises, pick your platform. Simple.
• Telegram - Founded: Russia, Headquartered: Dubai, Users: 500M+
• WeChat - Founded: China, Headquartered: Shenzhen, Users: 1.2B+
• LINE - Founded: Japan, Headquartered: Tokyo, Users: 84M (Japan)
• Viber - Founded: Israel, Headquartered: Luxembourg, Users: 1B+
• KakaoTalk - Founded: South Korea, Headquartered: Jeju City, Users: 52M+
• Zalo - Founded: Vietnam, Headquartered: Ho Chi Minh City, Users: 100M+
• ICQ - Founded: Israel, Headquartered: Cyprus, used to have big market share
• Skype - Founded: Estonia, Headquartered: Luxembourg/USA, Users: 40M daily
Old enough that the «honemyoon» period is over, say... a decade ?
Non profit employees aren’t monks, they don’t need to be talking vows of poverty.
One just have to get over the feeling that I'm donating to a charity of people who make 50x more money than I do with a comparable skill set.
These days I use Signal mainly. But also WhatsApp. And Messenger. And SMS for folks who don't have any of the others.
And my iPhone friends complain about how terrible it is to text Android-users, because iMessage.
Oh I should add that it seems that college students these days have standardized on messaging through ... instagram.
2. It's probably a matter of Venture capitalists. Even if you aren't from SV, you may strive to go there to get funding for a pitch or find talent. Similar to your prospective actor that moves to Hollywood. Go where the crowds are.
Now, we can ponder why SV became a tech hub, but current market forces makes it ripe for tech startups.
But it's hard to compare EU and US salaries directly. You got taxed way more and your health care isn't bound to your job.
It's also how and why long ago they tried to outsource a lot of engineering. They still do try. But that's not an easy transition either.
Non-profit simply means that every bit of revenue made goes back into the company instead of given out to shareholders. Which includes paying your labor.
It being a non-profit is exactly why we can view the operating expenses and salaries of the public facing executives. For accountability.
What is the problem of managers of a non-profit company earning around 700k/year and the company is writing blog posts complaining that the the company operation is too expensive? I think if you read it aloud, you will understand it.
But sure. What do you think is a fair salary or totalccomp for a founder and CEO of a popular, privacy focused app?
From a company living from donations... It is illusion (probably a California thing), to think that you are going to compete salary wise with FAANG. The time will tell (well their complaining about money, is already hinting it)...
I don't even work at a FAANG and I was making almost as much as the director there who lists 200k or so total comp. Probably with 20 years less experience to boot. I don't live in SF either; High CoL area but not SF.
That's why I asked you what's a "reasonable" salary. I'm wondering what your POV here is in terms of compensation.