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.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/18/whatsapp-...
[1] >>38117385
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.
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)
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.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360031949872-Do...
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.
I do fear they'll loose most tech un-savvy users because they don't know how to pay (safely).
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.
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.
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?
Source: https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/
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.
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.
Many of my family also dropped Signal.
It is now really only used by the hyper-privacy conscious.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
FB acquired them next year and if my memory is correct there were 19 in the team then.
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.
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 $148 are not related to the extra customer support we're discussing, but rather to the things that Signal is already doing
Costs and expenses in 2013:
Cost of revenue 53 (payment processing fees, infrastructure costs, SMS verification fees and employee compensation for part of operations team)
R&D 77 (engineering and technical teams who are responsible for the design, development, and testing of the features)
G&A 19
Indeed, the Wire messenger is done like this - it offers phone number, but has an option to not use them and only rely on the usernames (although I think you need to register in the web browser for that)
Besides, the original point was about huge$ from running a paid vs free app, which isn't the case
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.
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...
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.
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.