A very cool write-up and breakdown of Signal’s expenses
Most of the cost from not moving from requiring phone to be connected to people’s accounts and not desiring for the central server to federate with others.
According to the article, like most companies, it’s the people that are the most expensive part at $19M.
Yep in the last two or so years it should have become even more clear for people how important federation is.
As long as they continue to require a phone number they should stop pretending to care about users privacy.
And their bullshit excuse for dropping SMS support.
“It was too expensive from an engineering standpoint”. Nonsense, Android handled it, your app merely reads and writes to the SMS database via an API.
Or are you telling me the free SMS apps like Handcent, QuickSMS, etc, had a massive engineering team?
This is when I stopped using Signal, when this lie was so blatant, I can no longer trust them.
Old man yelling at clouds
SMS is a dead technology as it should be. It’s not private or secure in any way and the apps you listed probably just don’t give a fuck about implementing it in a way that is.
If Signal had just 1 person working on keeping it alive it would still be money that could be spent elsewhere. Like the username feature I had been patiently waiting for, which was delivered recently and is a great addition.
This is from one year ago. But not like they wouldn’t need money this year.
Perhaps if they didnt require phone numbers and reenabled federarion then they could offload some of that cost.
The longer they go without doing this the more i suspect they are a cia metadata/social graph honeypot. Didnt they also get money from In-Q-Tel or one of the other ones?
This is consipiracism-adjacent.
It’s E2E encryption and the source code is public. Uniquely, the E2EE includes the social graph.
They’ve got money from a bunch of people and organizations, That’s also all public. As for any organization, to have a wide variety of stakeholders with different interests is the best possible guarantee of independent.
But I agree that the ideal destination is to fully federate the protocol.
The point was not in the e2e aspect though, but rather in the metadata since everything goes through the same place.
Yes but the difference with every other messenger is that they can’t even see who your message is going to. Due to E2E encryption of contact data.
What remains is the phone number issue. Verifying a phone number is by far the simplest and most effective way to prevent abuse, which is obviously a major issue with any messenger. There’s no reason to disbelieve them when they this is the reason for it.
So: yes, they know who their users are individually. But they cannot know who is talking to who, let alone what is being said.
The client source code is public the messages are fine but the metadata is whats just as valuable. They do have an implementation of sealed sender but ive heard people say its not perfect against if the signal servers where malicious (btw said servers are not open source).
$1 from the cia funding it is $1 too much.
They could kill all the conspiracy theories instantly by federating and said theories will kill people adopting it. The longer they take the more sus it gets.
Or you could dev up your own perfect solution and show them how easy it is to get funding to do it, show us all
ive heard people say
So, literal hearsay.
its not perfect against if the signal servers where malicious (btw said servers are not open source).
The server is centralized so it’s irrelevant whether it’s open source or not, we have no means of checking.
$1 from the cia funding it is $1 too much.
Seems you’re referring to initial funding from the Open Technology Fund. That’s a US government body that promotes technologies that undermine authoritarian regimes. Signal fits the bill perfectly. In any case that was a decade ago. Since then there has been far more money from various do-gooding individuals and foundations. In particular the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which (I just checked) is vouched for by various whistleblowers including Edward Snowden. So, hardly a stooge of US imperialism.
Add on to that, their bullshit excuse for dropping SMS support.
When Meta acquired GIPHY
TIL…
Bye bye, Giphy.
