Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

Crazy how decentralization improves both, but they are vehemently against that. I trust them in terms of privacy, but their insistence on centralization, blocking third party apps, removing SMS, and refusal to support fdroid, I'm not a fan of the direction they've gone recently.

A more accurate title could be "Privacy is Priceless, but Centralization is Expensive": with the era of cheap money coming to an end, grows a lot of uncertainty regarding the future of some large internet services. Signal is no exception and this emphasises the importance of federated alternatives (XMPP, fediverse, …) for the good health of the future internet.

The cost of these registration services for verifying phone numbers when people first install Signal, or when they re-register on a new device, currently averages around $6 million dollars per year.

That's pretty crazy. Wonder which third party providers they are using. Maybe the identity verification methods we have today is due for some significant changes?

I would never have guessed that an app like signal would spend almost 20 million in salaries. I wonder what is the salary of the executives.

Step 1. Make it federative Step 2. Stop fucking hosting your shit on Amazon servers. Step 3. Profit

I kind of liked WhatsApp’s initial monetization model. It was free for the first year and then $1 per year after that. With 400 million users, that’s a good chunk of change. Assuming only 25% of people would pay, that’s still a good chunk of change. I think Signal should adopt something similar.

They should post a average price per user so we'll know what's the minimum to donate (probably 5$ which is the minimum in the app IIRC)

Make the server open source maybe?

Ehhhh

Signal lost a lot of my love when they removed SMS support

What is a better alternative than signal?

Ended my donations to Signal after discovering they choose Google Hosting Services over open source and privacy respecting alternatives.

Use Session instead. Open source, E2E encrypted, onion routed, no phone numbers. https://getsession.org/

Audited too. https://blog.quarkslab.com/resources/2021-05-04_audit-of-session-secure-messaging-application/20-08-Oxen-REP-v1.4.pdf

20M USD for 50 employees? ~400+k per employee is nuts!

There are European engineers working at private companies for less 20% (1/5th) of that - if even that! They aren't worse than their American counterparts. Signal could increase their team sizes by at least 30%, maybe even 50% if they hired engineers and other employees from Europe.

If signal paid 100k for European engineers to work on opensource software, mate, they'd have absolute no problems retaining them. I personally don't know a single engineer earning 100k on the European mainland. Not one.

Edit: seriously, wtf. I'm all for paying employees well and it's great that Signal has a dedicated workforce, but 400k? I'm fine canceling my donation. My jaw is still on the floor.

waaahh centralizing millions of slightly-privacy-aware people's metadata on Amazon's servers costs a lot of money, waaah

Signal is a lie.