I really wish the EU would put up funds for open source software, like signal, it seems to be something they could get behind for the greater good. My previous job involved creating a graphical programming language for the generation of GPU shaders, which the EU partly funded. I knew it was going nowhere, and it made me slightly sad tax payer money was being used on something I knew, despite my best efforts, would not work.
Signal isnt federated or self-hostable. As long as its not, I dont see it as completely open source software because we still have to depend on their servers to use Signal.
I feel public money should only be donated to them once people are able to setup their own signal instances, like Matrix.
France for example uses Matrix for their internal communications. They don't use the public homeserver, rather, they use their own.
I know you mean well, and I understand the feeling, but how can you say in the same breath that the EU funds useless software and that you wish they funded more software?
Why would the newly-funded software be the useful kind instead of the useless kind?
What you’re wishing for is to force your fellow man to donate to a cause you deem worthy. EU funds don’t come from nowhere - they are taken from citizens.
You go donate an hours wage a week instead; that’s virtuous.
I wisth they do not put up funds to signal. It is closed ecosystem. Even traditional phone calls are more open (having federated independent operators and interoperable implementations).
I mean, isn't that sort of the fundamental problem with government funding? They're not very good at picking winners, and when they make winners by picking, sometimes it still turns out to be a mistake (e.g. diesel in Europe).
Still, it does seem something infrastructure/utility-ish like Signal would be a good candidate for at least some support.
Not as impactful as a realtime donation but I recently changed my Amazon Smile charity to the Signal Foundation after a few years with my previous selection. I was surprised to learn they were an available option.
I also installed a browser extension to automatically bring me to smile.amazon when buying anything on Amazon - so far it has had no weird glitchiness when not buying something and works exactly as advertised. Highly recommend looking into this option if you're forgetful like me - so far it has helped me donate 4 times that I would have otherwise forgotten.
I was jumping through similar hoops for a while to get Amazon smile donations, but then I looked at their numbers for how much gets donated and it was a pretty trivial amount. I don't remember what I found (anyone have any stats on Amazon smile donation percentages?) but I decided it wasn't worth my effort compared to adding an extra few dollars to my direct donations.
All my friends are in Signal. One of my favorite group chats is in Signal. My mom is using Signal, I just sent her a message I might need to leave WhatsApp, so she immediately installed Signal all by herself. Now we have video chats that have been working really well.
I mean, this is the first time the mobile app gives trouble. I'd wish the desktop app would be better, like it's been the biggest problem between me and Signal. Otherwise it's an amazing tool and I'm happy to donate for it to be even better.
They could easily add an optional badge to avatars showing that you donated $1 that year via an optional in-app purchase. The subtle social pressure in a lot of group chats would be pretty effective, and it would help raise awareness that it is run by a non-profit foundation.
This sounds good on first pass, but consider the implication of allowing donations (and thus, payment method information) to be tied to a Signal users account. I specifically _wouldn't_ want this.
One of my friends who just jumped ship to Signal this week said in his first Signal message to me that he wished he’d “bought some shares” in Signal when I first told him about it...
The first challenge is getting people to join the platform.
The second challenge is educating them on how it’s actually funded... (ie NOT by pimping out your personal data for shareholder benefit).
"...As of June 2020, Signal had more than 32.4 million total downloads, and the app had approximately 20 million monthly active users as of December 2020...." [0]
"...The initial $50M in funding was a loan, not a donation, from Brian Acton to the new nonprofit Signal Technology Foundation. By the end of 2018, the loan had increased to $105,000,400, which is due to be repaid on February 28, 2068. The loan is unsecured and at 0% interest..." [1]
What happens when they add 50M or 100M more users?
Why is this structured as a loan? It sounds like it's structured in such a way that he isn't interested in getting paid back. Is it so he can exercise control in a weird scenario like a buyout? Is it some weird tax thing?
This is one of the most frictionless donation buttons ever. I love it.
Patreon, Paypal, SEPA transfer, all those are a hassle, comparatively.
This donation thing used by Signal works exactly as it should be. Enter numbers, hit enter, done. No "please cookie us", no 20 times transfer to other domains, no account creation, and they also don't require stuff like MasterCard 3D secure (which IMNSHO really is useless for donations).
I don't think the problem is money, at least for now. They are either running in a datacenter and can't add capacity fast enough, or have a scale bottlenech in their design, and just weren't designed for this scale.
me too. just donated. please comment below if you also donated. let's keep this thing running! Its personal interest now, because I moved bunch of groups from whatsapp and its not working now! but at the same I love these guys for what they do.
Signal is being used by at least 10 well-paid medical professionals (group chat) that I know of, and one of them proclaimed today that Signal is owned by Elon Musk (probably because he tweeted about it). I did not care to educate them. And this is in a first world country with a rather wealthy population.
Why am I saying this? Users don't give a damn, they expect free things, and they expect things which work. They have been taught to use appstores on their phones where tapping on a button installs an app and everything just works with zero effort on their end, while completely ignoring the work that someone put into creating the very app they depend on. Majority will never, ever, even think about it, let alone click on the developers website to find out who created the miracle they use.
This practice needs to end. I believe that it is time to stop making free products. Developers should unite in this and finally start to value their hard work.
Very good point. People will happily pay 50 pounds a month for an IPhone and thinking nothing of it. But then really struggle to pay a penny for an app that runs in that iPhone. There’s some funny psychology going on.
"Free" isn't a model you should pick if you're going to care you aren't guaranteed to get compensated it's a model you should pick when you want to give a cool idea a chance to take off for the good of everyone without risk of being turned into something else if it is successful.
Problem is that the largest of the free products aren't free. They are surveillanceware. "Free" is used as a gimmick to get them onto as many phones as possible to surveil people. Those players have zero incentive to change that, and will be more than happy to use "free" to edge out any paid competition. This is how paid apps became almost non-existent outside of professional niches.
What happens when a whistleblower or dissident wants to use Signal? Should they be forced to cough up a payment with a traceable credit card or app store account in order to use it?
For that reason alone I think it's important for the service to be free. Though I would perhaps support some reasonable free usage limits if needed to prevent abuse.
This is all probably correct, and should change in the long term. In the short term, I hope you've donated to Signal, and it would also help if you'd dispel the misinformation when you hear it.
The world would be better if the world were better, but until it is, would you mind helping out a bit?
I think it is acceptable, in this day and age, for people to expect instant messaging apps that are gratis and "just work". Technology and society should be at a state where - assuming you have network connectivity at all - that should be the case.
At the same time, I agree that there is practically criminal negligence of the education of people about what makes those techno-social institutions which "just work", work:
* Commercial interests and the role and nature of large corporations in tech and elsewhere;
* The massive amount of hard work, expertise, and good will invested by people in public-benefit work (which could be writing FOSS or volunteering in retiree caregiving etc.)
* What the machinery of government - and its myriad branches and institutions - does, beyond the political horse race shown on the evening news;
and through that, the realization that free lunches get made by someone, and its very important who and how they get made.
> Majority will never, ever, even think about it
It is a challenge for us to educate people around us about this fact.
> I believe that it is time to stop making free products.
Software is free by its very nature. It is only state coercion via threats of incarceration and violence that we are deterred from copying software.
I'm always surprised anew how unworldly people here can be.
Are you even aware that most people are not your "well-paid" medical professionals? Where is this offensive ignorance coming from? How do you even dare to say something like that? We're talking about a non-profit who brings a good and secure messenger even to 3rd world countries. How about you shut your mouth about everybody on the planet and use it to convince your "well-paid professionals" to pay instead? The general population does already pay for too much. They don't need a arrogant Schweizer Goldjunge to drag even more money out of them.
Oh and, you're not getting enough recognition and praise from your customers? Maybe you should make something which would really justify it? I'd recommend a FREE APP which helps poor people! Jesus, you run a page which rips off content other people provided you for FREE...unbelievable...
It’s an interesting dichotomy: many say they want to make the world a better place but also (1) have a personal philosophy of “the regular user is always wrong”, and (2) will do their damndest to argue how developers and IT corporations are always right and virtuous (FB just wanted to connect people; people didn’t vote with their wallets so now they spy on people just to make ends meet).
I don't think the practice of people easily downloading/installing apps through app stores is going to end. In my network I'm not alone in paying for free apps to support development if they're value-added.
for changing amazon smile: is it "Signal Technology Foundation - Location: Mountain View, CA"? no description available unfortunately. seem to be a bunch with the name signal and that was the closest in name to what seems to be the signal foundation
> I just donated to Signal after seeing the error banner in the app.
I've tried to donate, but none of my 3 cards worked, I got "card rejected error" without any info why and none of banking apps notified me about new transactions.
don't forget that you can use the Signal protocol in Skype with Skype Private Conversations and delete your own call metadata afterwards as well.
edit : which presumably drives licensing income from Microsoft to The Signal Foundation, which I am presuming is better than nothing and if like me you can start using Signal protocol for calling your family elders via Skype without friction, and I simultaneously create widespread adoption of the Signal protocol, I can't see any downside myself anyhow.
if you can please consider making a regular recurring payment of a few bucks every month rather than a one-shot lump sum. this is because it's easier for a company to budget and plan with recurring revenue than a one-off donation.
Recurring and steady incoming is certainly useful for any company, but I would advise against doing tiny monthly donations over a larger yearly one! Processing fees are going to take away a significant chunk of your total donation relatively speaking if your individual donations are small.
Let's do some math: In signal's case, since they use Donorbox, there is a 2.9% + 30¢ fee for credit card transactions going via Stripe (in addition to another percentage that goes to donor box). If you were to donate $24 once per year, Signal would end up with just over $23 after processing fees had been deducted. If you donated $2 per month, they would end up with $19.7 per year, an additional $3 being spent on fees!
Edit: unless they have some special lower cost stripe rate of course, in which case you can ignore my comment altogether ;)
I've been using Signal for a couple years now. Finally deleted WhatsApp this week. This is the first outage of Signal that I noticed. It's a shame, but growing pains do happen.
I don't know what options show up depending on the route you use to donate, but the link on the Android app [0] takes you to a page that does allow recurring contributions.
Adding more servers to support more users, also means more bandwidth. Those are increasing costs at a rate that they had not planned. Their spend rate has to be insane now to keep things running on top of their rents, utlities, opex. They have to be needing more money than they planned for.
If you talk about Brian Acton, he sold WhatsApp to Facebook and btw made a big gift to the FreeBSD foundation and is the founder of the Signal Foundation.
We have no info as to how much money they need or how much they currently have. For all we know, this was just an area of oversight and not related to funding at all.
I’d prefer to pay yearly than to feel the spectre of guilt for using a “free” app.
"We have been adding new servers and extra capacity at a record pace every single day this week nonstop, but today exceeded even our most optimistic projections. Millions upon millions of new users are sending a message that privacy matters. We appreciate your patience."
can't wait for the post mortem : o really wondering why there's an outage. I assume the SGX stuff quickly became a bottleneck, or the message forwarding server wasn't made to scale out very efficiently. In any case, they should have been able to have a very large queue in front of these components and just have a very slow system, probably something blew up due to the sudden peak of users.
Does anyone outside Signal Foundation know how's their architecture? There are a lot of references to AWS, GCP, and Azure in the source code hosted in GitHub so they probably use them all in one way or another. It would be super interesting know more details about the infrastructure.
This is not good. I've moved so many people over in the last week. For purposes of getting them invested, this is a truly inopportune moment for an extended outage.
But it’s par for the course for newly popular services. Some don’t survive the popularity and some thrive in spite of the degraded service. Signal will figure it out. All the best to the engineering team at Signal right now!
>But it’s par for the course for newly popular services.
It is, but most consumers don't care, they just what their stuff to work 100% of the time as frictionless as possible, and, on top of all things, for free. Otherwise they just run back to the usual free surveilanceware.
I've tried and failed to convince some young, highly educated zoomer friends with good incomes to move away from WhatsApp and Facebook and even when I told them "Look, they're basically spying on you" they just brush it off and say "I don't care, it's fun, easy to use and all my friends are already there".
Ironically, it was easier to convince my boomer parents to move to Signal and they also understand and agree with the tradeoffs and extra friction for the sake of free privacy but younger people just want to be where their friends are and not feel left out (remember the blue vs green bubble stigma on iMessage).
(Even if I personally mostly use Telegram and hope for Matrix to "win", Signal is a fantastic piece of software as far as I can see, both as an extremely secure (I think) messaging client in its own right and also as an inspiration for other messaging platforms.)
Thousands of people are joining Signal after hearing about the Whatsapp privacy policy changes, but the irony is that a significant portion of these people (if not the majority) still use Facebook, upload photos and stuff, chat on messenger, with that app, installed on their phones alongside Signal. Most people don't actually realize why should they be worried about corporations collecting their data. I wonder what fraction of these people will stick to Signal. Signal is adding new servers, lets hope they dont need to retire these in the coming days.
Yup, and it's not like Signal should be surprised with it. The influx has been happening for a while now and it seems like they were incapable of handling it. I have no idea how I'm going to defend them against all my family members I somehow managed to convert from WhatsApp to stay on this platform.
I'm not sure a 5x+ growth in under a week is really "for a while now". If anything I'm surprised they've kept it together this long. The growth looks more like an exponential function too, so that's even more difficult.
I haven't moved any friends in the last week, but I've gotten lots of notifications in Signal of many friends joining this week. Hopefully it just requires some simple modifications of some parts of their infra that they didn't realize were scaling bottlenecks.
Based on my friends, mostly foreigners and English-speaking locals here in Hong Kong, Signal has grown about 20% in the past week.
Signal grew 5x in one day[1]. A week before Musk amplified the WhatsApp story with his "Use Signal"[2] tweet. It then did the rounds on MSM. WhatsApp shoots itself in the foot (though IMO it's a blip in their stats). Parler (thankfully) has been kicked off AWS. All good news for alternative messaging technology.
I'm a new Signal user myself (maybe six weeks or so). In the past week there's been a huge influx of my contacts joining Signal.
I will continue to use iMessages for my iOS contacts. For SMS people I will gently nudge (hey, have you tried Signal? and then let the convo go where it does) and then use Signal as the primary for those people.
I"m not saying this is what happened this time, but I would suspect we'll see a lot more outages of encrypted centralized chat like this as nation states try to prevent general society from moving away from the social media websites almost solely designed for mass surveillance.
> The result was a mass migration that, if it lasts, could weaken the power of Facebook and other big tech companies. On Tuesday, Telegram said it added more than 25 million users over the previous three days, pushing it to over 500 million users. Signal added nearly 1.3 million users on Monday alone, after averaging just 50,000 downloads a day last year, according to estimates from Apptopia, an app-data firm.
> “We’ve had surges of downloads before,” said Pavel Durov, Telegram’s chief executive, in a message on the app on Tuesday. “But this time is different.”
As someone who semi-fondly remembers the Twitter failwhale, I really don't think a more conspiratorial theory than "a few million people suddenly tried to jump on" is required here.
I read the message differently. It looks like there have been so many people wanting to switch, that Signal was overwhelmed by the new demand.
I don't know if it is true, but for your peers it certainly is a different story to tell them about all the people who are switching than just about a service who had an outage. Hopefully, the next days will bring some light to the cause of the outage.
Same here. I moved a lot of my contacts and several groups over to Signal. And this happened. I'm fine with the down time, I don't have any urgent communication needs and if I did, there are other ways to contact people (SMS, email, WhatsApp, etc.). But I feel like I owe these people an explanation about this. An explanation where I say, "Hey look, there are no guarantees this won't happen in the future, but should still stick to this one". I'm not very good at writing and hoping to find something that I can use :)
Last night a friend from India popped up on signal. I told him "Welcome!" and he said "You finally wore me down, I've left WhatsApp and I'm trying to move my family off of it..."
Same here I had a group of about 15 ex colleagues I keep in touch with and managed quite easily to convince all of them to get Signal about 2 weeks ago. They’re all back chatting on Facebook and some are claiming that WhatsApp won’t be sharing data because of some European court case. AKA rationalising their negligent behaviour with regards to their private data.
These are all people who have completely abandoned Facebook for WhatsApp and Instagram.
I agree. This happened with Pokemon GO, at launch, but the reasoning is the same: "we didn't think there'd be that many users." Took almost a month to become stable. Hopefully Open Whisper Systems will get on it faster (I have confidence, for whatever that's worth).
It's great! Everyone I 'converted' is now thinking about the implications - from many different angles. Any outage for a few weeks is a win for humans and a huuuuge kick in the nuts for the twats.
Or that you can use that money for a Matrix server instead of supporting centralization.
Element is less polished than Signal app but they've been catching up quite fast. If you and your friends aren't locked into the Signal ecosystem yet, might be worth considering, especially if you're techies.
Matrix comes up a lot but even Signal is often called not polished enough. And for matrix onboarding is hard for techies and I've had zero chance for the general public. Fine to push it towards techies, but my grandma can't figure it out but she can Signal. Push matrix when it's more polished but right now it just feels silly to push it.
There are opportunities that are rare or unique, and it doesn't matter that you're "catching up" - either you're good enough when the opportunity arises, or you've missed that window.
You might get a second chance later, but this opportunity is lost, and the options aren't "Signal or Matrix", the options are "Signal or frustrate people, get them to go back to Whatsapp, and be even more reluctant to switch later".
And even if through some magic Element was polished right now: Signal has been polished for years now, and as a result, has built up a brand and user base.
I'm not going to be able to switch all my already switch-reluctant friends to something they haven't heard about and that nobody uses; I am going to be able to switch them to Signal, because they've already been pestered about it by several people, have heard about it in the news, and (except for today, which is a huge problem for adoption/switching people over), it works.
At least on Android, Element is simply not suitable for end users. I'm not talking about some poorly formatted UI, I'm talking about confusing/broken UX and features that don't properly work.
So I put my tech elitism away and do what works, because otherwise we'll be stuck with Facebook.
Edit: Forgot the biggest problem: Matrix has no chance because it doesn't use phone numbers as a forced default. With Signal, if your friends have already installed it, you can just start using it with them. With Matrix, you can't. This is one of the hard choices that Moxie made that is a bit of a dick move but was absolutely necessary.
To be fair: I've been pleasantly impressed with Element actually from what I've seen of Mozilla's set-up. I can format my text, I can run it in my browser and it starts up very quickly.
I'm already having mild trouble to convince everyone to use signal, there is no chance I could get them to use and keep using Element. Element is terrible.
You pose this as centralization vs decentralization. This is actually Facebook vs Open Source, and for every feature that isn’t at parity with the existing solution, you lose users.
Is now the time to be dogmatic about decentralization?
I'm afraid Signal really dropped the ball on this one. I'd be surprised if any of the new 50M users stick around after this fiasco. Also, this doesn't seem to actually be a scaling/hardware issue like they claim. They're running on AWS so they should be able to throw more hardware at it in a matter of minutes, hours tops. As of now, they've been down for 14 hours! Not sure what's going on but it's the absolute worst time to have this happen :/
Edit: worth noting that I've been a Signal user since ~2015, and I've stood by them through multiple amateur-hour mistakes (including one where the iOS app would simply crash on boot for about a week, rendering it unusable to me and every other iOS user). The app was just starting to get into a non-insanely-buggy state that I was quite happy with, so it's upsetting to know that these sorts of mistakes are still being made.
I also would have expected a better communication of the outage at least a bit more regularly (at least 1h since it seems to be an extremely large outage).
Additionally, the status page, IMO, lacks of some information e.g. what services are up, historical view etc. Anyway, thrilled to see how it will change after this incident.
In the meantime, best of luck to the signal sre team.
The client entry point (api.directory.signal.org) seems to be pointing exclusively to Azure and IBM Cloud depending on geography. It looks like just DNS, the website, and maybe some backend stuff are on AWS.
> should be able to throw more hardware at it in a matter of minutes, hours tops
Who exactly is going to pay for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in cloud spend you propose they turn up?
Judging from their jobs page they are just hiring in US time zones, so it’s understandable that they might run out of steam after an incident going on into the middle of the night.
HugOps!
Hope they get it fully running soon. Maybe they’ll provide a good, public root cause analysis and I hope that they rethink hiring in order to get more TZ coverage.
At least they tell you about it - there's a banner on the top of the app. Last time WhatsApp was having issues, it didn't give any indication - messages just weren't being delivered (but as a user, there's no way to distinguish between "no messages" and "messages not being delivered").
I don't see a banner on the top of my app. I only found out when the desktop client kept timing out with 502 errors and after asking on Twitter, found other people were having issues too.
Last time WhatsApp was having issues, a “Connecting” banner was shown permanently on the app and all outgoing messages displayed a clock instead of a tick, showing that they weren’t reaching the server.
I'm not getting a banner on iOS either, however when I try to send a message it fails with a red exclamation mark in a circle saying "Request failed: service unavailable (503)"
Edit: A few minutes after the message failed to send I got a yellow banner stating that the service was experience interruptions.
However the banner disappeared shortly afterward, so it would have been easy to miss.
heavy user of whatsapp and I can't recall having any issues with whatsapp ever. I'm a heavy user of signal as well and... it's a bit crap honestly. I actually needed to transfer a file to a client today and was strongly relying on signal for that...
I use the Signal app as my default for everything because of this feature (secure communication with Signal users and insecure SMS with non-Signal users)
For all of you saying we should switch to Matrix, please outline the user sign up flow in your comment. Be detailed. Your audience is your 50 something aunt who calls her iPad her Facebook.
Wow I just had to reset my password and am stunned how broken this process is.
1. Click reset password
2. You enter your email and new password (already here!)
3. A password reset request has been received for your Matrix account. If this was you, please click the link below to confirm resetting your password: [link] If this was not you, do not click the link above and instead contact your server administrator. Thank you.
4. Text page with the sentence "You have requested to reset your Matrix account password" but a button saying "Confirm changing my password"
5. Button clicked, password is set to the one entered in step 2.
This just absolutely is waiting for abuse. Every other site asks you to enter the new password after you have clicked the link. Here it's before you have clicked and there is no option to see or confirm the password entered initially. There is no indication that that is what's happening. In addition the word 'reset' is confused with 'change'.
Super easy for anyone - even the most techie user - to be fooled by this workflow. Someone else initiates the request and enters a new password, grandma gets the reset link and clicks it, password is changed and the other party can login and change also the email.
Don’t worry. I already gave up on the sign-up flow when I entered my preferred username and password, then tapped register in the top right corner, only to be confronted with a prompt to —- again enter a username and password of my choice.
I would have to spend hours getting my family signed up for this thing.
https://app.element.io/ -> click "create account" -> create account. The default is for a matrix.org account which is totally fine for anyone who can't/won't dig deeper.
I tapped this link on my iPhone. There’s nothing that says create account. It says I have to download an app called Element. But you said it was called Matrix.
This is the level of technical ability that you need to be targeting.
This is the second opportunity Matrix has to win over users (the first one was when Signal decided to lock everyone out until they agree to their SGX-based cloud storage scheme), and I predict that they'll miss this one just like they missed their last one due to not being ready yet.
we’ve been working a lot on onboarding on Element, just as Signal have. it’s not perfect, but empirically it’s good enough for many non-technical users. comments like this are likely based on stale data (eg from when we forced e2ee setup during registration).
Compared to installing the Signal app and verifying your phone number over SMS, the difference is quite remarkable. Signal has had smooth and frictionless onboarding as part of the design.
But also, comparing Matrix to Signal is a bit like comparing apples to oranges IMO.
This is definitely the weakest point of Matrix. There are clients that have a nice setup flow (like FluffyChat) but the are missing some pretty important (to me) features such as sending images and video calling.
My mum is such an aunt, she makes no secret of often being baffled by her smart phone, she doesn't know all the right words, but she's curious, she tries, and really appreciates apps that are easy to use, with her in mind.
Readit News
I realised I was more than happy to pay WhatsApp's yearly charge back in the pre-Facebook days (think it was 70p or so?).
Figured I could give Signal a few quid every now and then, maybe keep a server up for a few seconds :)
Donation link should anyone be interested: https://signal.org/donate/
Oh well...
They do https://hexus.net/tech/news/software/125747-14-open-source-p...
I feel public money should only be donated to them once people are able to setup their own signal instances, like Matrix.
France for example uses Matrix for their internal communications. They don't use the public homeserver, rather, they use their own.
Why would the newly-funded software be the useful kind instead of the useless kind?
You go donate an hours wage a week instead; that’s virtuous.
Still, it does seem something infrastructure/utility-ish like Signal would be a good candidate for at least some support.
I also installed a browser extension to automatically bring me to smile.amazon when buying anything on Amazon - so far it has had no weird glitchiness when not buying something and works exactly as advertised. Highly recommend looking into this option if you're forgetful like me - so far it has helped me donate 4 times that I would have otherwise forgotten.
All my friends are in Signal. One of my favorite group chats is in Signal. My mom is using Signal, I just sent her a message I might need to leave WhatsApp, so she immediately installed Signal all by herself. Now we have video chats that have been working really well.
I mean, this is the first time the mobile app gives trouble. I'd wish the desktop app would be better, like it's been the biggest problem between me and Signal. Otherwise it's an amazing tool and I'm happy to donate for it to be even better.
One of my friends who just jumped ship to Signal this week said in his first Signal message to me that he wished he’d “bought some shares” in Signal when I first told him about it...
The first challenge is getting people to join the platform.
The second challenge is educating them on how it’s actually funded... (ie NOT by pimping out your personal data for shareholder benefit).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdLPe7XjdKc
"...The initial $50M in funding was a loan, not a donation, from Brian Acton to the new nonprofit Signal Technology Foundation. By the end of 2018, the loan had increased to $105,000,400, which is due to be repaid on February 28, 2068. The loan is unsecured and at 0% interest..." [1]
What happens when they add 50M or 100M more users?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_%28software%29 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Foundation
This is one of the most frictionless donation buttons ever. I love it.
Patreon, Paypal, SEPA transfer, all those are a hassle, comparatively.
This donation thing used by Signal works exactly as it should be. Enter numbers, hit enter, done. No "please cookie us", no 20 times transfer to other domains, no account creation, and they also don't require stuff like MasterCard 3D secure (which IMNSHO really is useless for donations).
Zero hassle, 100% great, and with a nice UX.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleaebeling/2020/12/22/new-bi...
Remember: regular donations are better because they help with long term planning.
Why am I saying this? Users don't give a damn, they expect free things, and they expect things which work. They have been taught to use appstores on their phones where tapping on a button installs an app and everything just works with zero effort on their end, while completely ignoring the work that someone put into creating the very app they depend on. Majority will never, ever, even think about it, let alone click on the developers website to find out who created the miracle they use.
This practice needs to end. I believe that it is time to stop making free products. Developers should unite in this and finally start to value their hard work.
here is another one (with an insane amount of likes/retweets for something so wrong):
"Signal is owned by Twitter and monitored. While open source it is not as secure as they say. Use telegram." -- https://twitter.com/RebelOutlaw1990/status/13471653380777000...
For that reason alone I think it's important for the service to be free. Though I would perhaps support some reasonable free usage limits if needed to prevent abuse.
The world would be better if the world were better, but until it is, would you mind helping out a bit?
At the same time, I agree that there is practically criminal negligence of the education of people about what makes those techno-social institutions which "just work", work:
* Commercial interests and the role and nature of large corporations in tech and elsewhere;
* The massive amount of hard work, expertise, and good will invested by people in public-benefit work (which could be writing FOSS or volunteering in retiree caregiving etc.)
* What the machinery of government - and its myriad branches and institutions - does, beyond the political horse race shown on the evening news;
and through that, the realization that free lunches get made by someone, and its very important who and how they get made.
> Majority will never, ever, even think about it
It is a challenge for us to educate people around us about this fact.
> I believe that it is time to stop making free products.
Software is free by its very nature. It is only state coercion via threats of incarceration and violence that we are deterred from copying software.
Oh and, you're not getting enough recognition and praise from your customers? Maybe you should make something which would really justify it? I'd recommend a FREE APP which helps poor people! Jesus, you run a page which rips off content other people provided you for FREE...unbelievable...
A better world for whom?
It's always someone else's job to change the world, eh?
You can't stop someone trying to make a free to use product
Donate to them so they can buy more servers https://signal.org/donate/
* If you work in the US, many corporations will match your donation. Easy double of your donation
* Set https://smile.amazon.com to Signal, so your purchases on Amazon go to Signal
* Use services like Paypal to donate, that sends 100% of the money to the foundation
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I've tried to donate, but none of my 3 cards worked, I got "card rejected error" without any info why and none of banking apps notified me about new transactions.
They aren't on liberapay as far as I can see.
Right now is the time for us to invest in Signal to help see it through this groundswell of adoption.
edit : which presumably drives licensing income from Microsoft to The Signal Foundation, which I am presuming is better than nothing and if like me you can start using Signal protocol for calling your family elders via Skype without friction, and I simultaneously create widespread adoption of the Signal protocol, I can't see any downside myself anyhow.
https://az705183.vo.msecnd.net/onlinesupportmedia/onlinesupp...
Let's do some math: In signal's case, since they use Donorbox, there is a 2.9% + 30¢ fee for credit card transactions going via Stripe (in addition to another percentage that goes to donor box). If you were to donate $24 once per year, Signal would end up with just over $23 after processing fees had been deducted. If you donated $2 per month, they would end up with $19.7 per year, an additional $3 being spent on fees!
Edit: unless they have some special lower cost stripe rate of course, in which case you can ignore my comment altogether ;)
I've been using Signal for a couple years now. Finally deleted WhatsApp this week. This is the first outage of Signal that I noticed. It's a shame, but growing pains do happen.
[0](https://signal.org/donate/)
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Everyone around me starts switching suddenly and I want to keep them on Signal.
Donated.
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If you talk about Brian Acton, he sold WhatsApp to Facebook and btw made a big gift to the FreeBSD foundation and is the founder of the Signal Foundation.
https://signalfoundation.org/
Learn to inform yourself, this is not a place for fake information.
I’d prefer to pay yearly than to feel the spectre of guilt for using a “free” app.
https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1350165610936766464
https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1350185818527211521
Awesome
No autoscaling?
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It is, but most consumers don't care, they just what their stuff to work 100% of the time as frictionless as possible, and, on top of all things, for free. Otherwise they just run back to the usual free surveilanceware.
I've tried and failed to convince some young, highly educated zoomer friends with good incomes to move away from WhatsApp and Facebook and even when I told them "Look, they're basically spying on you" they just brush it off and say "I don't care, it's fun, easy to use and all my friends are already there".
Ironically, it was easier to convince my boomer parents to move to Signal and they also understand and agree with the tradeoffs and extra friction for the sake of free privacy but younger people just want to be where their friends are and not feel left out (remember the blue vs green bubble stigma on iMessage).
I too wish Signal engineers good luck!
(Even if I personally mostly use Telegram and hope for Matrix to "win", Signal is a fantastic piece of software as far as I can see, both as an extremely secure (I think) messaging client in its own right and also as an inspiration for other messaging platforms.)
Good luck Signal team!
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Based on my friends, mostly foreigners and English-speaking locals here in Hong Kong, Signal has grown about 20% in the past week.
https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1349577579091566592
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1347165127036977153
edit: as daniel_sk points out this is not a x5 increase but crossing the threshold from 10+ to the next 50+ mm downloads.
I will continue to use iMessages for my iOS contacts. For SMS people I will gently nudge (hey, have you tried Signal? and then let the convo go where it does) and then use Signal as the primary for those people.
> The result was a mass migration that, if it lasts, could weaken the power of Facebook and other big tech companies. On Tuesday, Telegram said it added more than 25 million users over the previous three days, pushing it to over 500 million users. Signal added nearly 1.3 million users on Monday alone, after averaging just 50,000 downloads a day last year, according to estimates from Apptopia, an app-data firm.
> “We’ve had surges of downloads before,” said Pavel Durov, Telegram’s chief executive, in a message on the app on Tuesday. “But this time is different.”
As someone who semi-fondly remembers the Twitter failwhale, I really don't think a more conspiratorial theory than "a few million people suddenly tried to jump on" is required here.
I don't know if it is true, but for your peers it certainly is a different story to tell them about all the people who are switching than just about a service who had an outage. Hopefully, the next days will bring some light to the cause of the outage.
Last night a friend from India popped up on signal. I told him "Welcome!" and he said "You finally wore me down, I've left WhatsApp and I'm trying to move my family off of it..."
These are all people who have completely abandoned Facebook for WhatsApp and Instagram.
Please stop moving people to centralized services.
EDIT: We know it was a joke. Maybe you are downvoted because of your username.
Element is less polished than Signal app but they've been catching up quite fast. If you and your friends aren't locked into the Signal ecosystem yet, might be worth considering, especially if you're techies.
Exactly, which means that it lost.
There are opportunities that are rare or unique, and it doesn't matter that you're "catching up" - either you're good enough when the opportunity arises, or you've missed that window.
You might get a second chance later, but this opportunity is lost, and the options aren't "Signal or Matrix", the options are "Signal or frustrate people, get them to go back to Whatsapp, and be even more reluctant to switch later".
And even if through some magic Element was polished right now: Signal has been polished for years now, and as a result, has built up a brand and user base.
I'm not going to be able to switch all my already switch-reluctant friends to something they haven't heard about and that nobody uses; I am going to be able to switch them to Signal, because they've already been pestered about it by several people, have heard about it in the news, and (except for today, which is a huge problem for adoption/switching people over), it works.
At least on Android, Element is simply not suitable for end users. I'm not talking about some poorly formatted UI, I'm talking about confusing/broken UX and features that don't properly work.
So I put my tech elitism away and do what works, because otherwise we'll be stuck with Facebook.
Edit: Forgot the biggest problem: Matrix has no chance because it doesn't use phone numbers as a forced default. With Signal, if your friends have already installed it, you can just start using it with them. With Matrix, you can't. This is one of the hard choices that Moxie made that is a bit of a dick move but was absolutely necessary.
Once nice thing about the Matrix protocol is that you can build your own client following the specs (unlike Signal).
If you want something closing to the average instant messaging client, you can look here https://matrix.org/clients/
I personally find FluffyChat a great casual client. https://fluffychat.im
To be fair: I've been pleasantly impressed with Element actually from what I've seen of Mozilla's set-up. I can format my text, I can run it in my browser and it starts up very quickly.
Is now the time to be dogmatic about decentralization?
Edit: worth noting that I've been a Signal user since ~2015, and I've stood by them through multiple amateur-hour mistakes (including one where the iOS app would simply crash on boot for about a week, rendering it unusable to me and every other iOS user). The app was just starting to get into a non-insanely-buggy state that I was quite happy with, so it's upsetting to know that these sorts of mistakes are still being made.
Additionally, the status page, IMO, lacks of some information e.g. what services are up, historical view etc. Anyway, thrilled to see how it will change after this incident.
In the meantime, best of luck to the signal sre team.
The client entry point (api.directory.signal.org) seems to be pointing exclusively to Azure and IBM Cloud depending on geography. It looks like just DNS, the website, and maybe some backend stuff are on AWS.
> should be able to throw more hardware at it in a matter of minutes, hours tops
Who exactly is going to pay for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in cloud spend you propose they turn up?
Their 100M+ loan they got from Acton
Judging from their jobs page they are just hiring in US time zones, so it’s understandable that they might run out of steam after an incident going on into the middle of the night.
HugOps!
Hope they get it fully running soon. Maybe they’ll provide a good, public root cause analysis and I hope that they rethink hiring in order to get more TZ coverage.
It's there on https://status.signal.org/ though.
I am not vouching for WhatsApp. I just don't think we should pretend that Signal is more reliable than it is.
Edit: A few minutes after the message failed to send I got a yellow banner stating that the service was experience interruptions.
However the banner disappeared shortly afterward, so it would have been easy to miss.
My internet's fine.
I can understand not having 100% uptime, but going on 10 hours now and this is really not leaving me with a good impression.
I can count on SMS; I can't count on this.
[EDIT]Now I'm not even getting that specific error; my messages are simply failing to send (ios, desktop/windows)
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007321171-Ca...
You'll keep all your message history in Signal that way. Good to know when your contact don't have an Internet connection, too.
The NSA will have a copy too, just in case you lose yours!
They should offer a paid subscription service for data retrieval, in case we do lose our copy!
1. Click reset password 2. You enter your email and new password (already here!) 3. A password reset request has been received for your Matrix account. If this was you, please click the link below to confirm resetting your password: [link] If this was not you, do not click the link above and instead contact your server administrator. Thank you. 4. Text page with the sentence "You have requested to reset your Matrix account password" but a button saying "Confirm changing my password" 5. Button clicked, password is set to the one entered in step 2.
This just absolutely is waiting for abuse. Every other site asks you to enter the new password after you have clicked the link. Here it's before you have clicked and there is no option to see or confirm the password entered initially. There is no indication that that is what's happening. In addition the word 'reset' is confused with 'change'.
Super easy for anyone - even the most techie user - to be fooled by this workflow. Someone else initiates the request and enters a new password, grandma gets the reset link and clicks it, password is changed and the other party can login and change also the email.
I would have to spend hours getting my family signed up for this thing.
> Cannot reach homeserver > Ensure you have a stable internet connection, or get in touch with the server admin
wise prediction of yours ;)
This is the level of technical ability that you need to be targeting.
Compared to installing the Signal app and verifying your phone number over SMS, the difference is quite remarkable. Signal has had smooth and frictionless onboarding as part of the design.
But also, comparing Matrix to Signal is a bit like comparing apples to oranges IMO.
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