On November 16th, Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal, published a detailed breakdown of the popular encrypted messaging app’s running costs for the very first time. The unprecedented disclosure’s motivation was simple - the platform is rapidly running out of money, and in dire need of donations to stay afloat. Unmentioned by Whittaker, this budget shortfall results in large part due to the US intelligence community, which lavishly financed Signal’s creation and maintenance over several years, severing its support for the app.
  • kpw@kbin.social
    54·
    10 months ago

    This article may be bullshit, but people are still wasting their time on walled gardens like Signal. Organizations like Signal can easily disappear because they run out of money or, arguably worse, sellout because there is no other way to stay afloat. I wouldn’t use any messenger not compatible with the XMPP internet standard at this point.

    • ExpensiveConstant@kbin.social
      3·
      10 months ago

      Isn’t signal open source though? I know being open source doesn’t magically make it interoperable with other services but even if Signal or Whisper systems sell out, someone could just fork the projects

      • ZickZack@fedia.io
        3·
        10 months ago

        You cannot run Signal without “Signal - the company” existing. All of their systems are designed to be attached to one specific backend, namely the signal-run backend, meaning without re-engineering the existing infrastructure you cannot simply swap over.

        As @kpw already mentioned, “Signal - the company” dying would involve a functional reset of everything: No contacts, no servers, no infrastructure. COULD you fork the thing and build you own system? Sure, but it would be functionally unusable since no one else would be using it, since everything relies on specifically the signal servers to function. A post-signal system could re-use some of their code (if it runs outside signal corp - “works on my machine” could be present in this project as well), but would need to rebuild the actual network.

        This is in contrast to something like the matrix protocol: If a specific matrix instance goes kaput, you still have the overall network working. This means that even if an instance implodes, you would have an easy migration path since the matrix network itself persists.

      • kpw@kbin.social
        21·
        10 months ago

        All your contacts will still be gone when their servers shut down.

          • kpw@kbin.social
            11·
            10 months ago

            Now everyone is using WhatsApp again and all energy that went towards convincing everyone to use Signal is lost. A better use of that energy would have been be to promote provider independent internet standards.

          • kpw@kbin.social
            1·
            10 months ago

            Using the current server distribution of my contacts, I would never loose more than 13% of my contacts if a single server shuts down. Federated systems are much more resilient against providers shutting down as well as takeovers. Think Reddit vs Lemmy, Twitter vs Mastodon, Signal vs XMPP.

    • vext01@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      I tried XMPP. It was a nightmare.

      Finding clients for all the platforms that support all of the extensions that make it a viable alternative to something like WhatsApp or Signal…

      • kpw@kbin.social
        2·
        10 months ago

        Here is what I found works pretty good

        Android: Conversations
Linux: Dino
Apple: Monal
Windows: Gajim