Signal is the world’s most widely used truly private messaging app, and our cryptographic technologies provide extra layers of privacy beyond the Signal app itself. Since launching in 2013, the Signal Protocol—our end-to-end encryption technology—has become the de facto standard for private commu...

We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.

    • u_tamtam ( u_tamtam@programming.dev ) 
      27·
      3 years ago

      If you are curious, you should give XMPP a shot, it’s equivalent to Signal in terms of encryption, but anyone can host their own. Signal is ideologically opposed to anyone but themselves being in control of your account, and because of that I don’t want to trust them.

          • kpw ( kpw@kbin.social ) 
            8·
            3 years ago

            XMPP is the IETF Internet Standard while Matrix is just another custom IM protocol managed by a venture capital funded startup which keeps losing money.

            • squeakycat ( squeakycat@lemmy.ml ) 
              3·
              3 years ago

              I don’t disagree with that statement; however, that doesn’t make it something the general public will embrace. Its mess of extensions are top little too late. That ship has long sailed. And I say this as someone that prefers using XMPP for 1:1 chats

          • u_tamtam ( u_tamtam@programming.dev ) 
            4·
            3 years ago

            Edit: Sorry, I responded to the wrong parent.

            I don’t believe Matrix is better positioned than XMPP to succeed. On a technical aspect, Matrix hasn’t managed to stabilize its protocol, and they’ve been a decade into it. This has resulted in only a single organization being in charge of the protocol, the client and the server implementations. This isn’t sound, this isn’t sustainable. And now, unsurprisingly, this organization is in a financial crisis, has lost important customers, has no budget secured to maintain its staff in the next years, and recently underwent a major licensing change that we can only interpret as a shift towards an opencore model at the detriment of the regular user.

              • u_tamtam ( u_tamtam@programming.dev ) 
                2·
                3 years ago

                I can’t pretend to know the future, but if you read between the lines and the justifications provided, this isn’t really about AGPL per se, but about Element brokering AGPL exceptions. Practically we can expect all kinds of forks with opencore options that might enshittify the user experience in different ways, and further solidification of Element’s single-handed control over Matrix (which had been a prime concern for many years). Matrix is by the day closer to the closed-source centralized silos it was first pretending to oppose.

        • u_tamtam ( u_tamtam@programming.dev ) 
          4·
          3 years ago

          Neither XMPP nor Matrix will ever become “the next WhatsApp”: the current internet has seen too much consolidation for the tech majors to permit it (and open and federated protocols can’t compete, do not have the marketing budget nor the platforms to promote their software, but I salute the EU’s Market Act attempt to shake-up the status quo).

          But that doesn’t really matter IMO. What (I believe) is important in the grand scheme of things is that such protocols remain alive, maintained and secure, so that:

          • small-scale instances can flourish and contribute to a more resilient/efficient internet (think of family-/district-level providers ; this is the kind of service I personally offer: family members and friends at large appreciate that the messages and data that we exchange aren’t shared over some cloud or facebook server for no good reason)

          • IM identities can persist over time: if you are a business or an individual, you may want to look into having a stable/lasting contact address, that will survive the inevitable collapse of facebook/whatsapp/instagram/… If you are old enough, your current email address probably existed before facebook. Why not your IM address?

          And yes, I hear you, this is rather niche, but what got me there (and on XMPP in particular) is having been long-enough on the internet to become tired of the never-ending cycle of migrations from service to service. More and more people will have a similar experience as time goes, so this niche will only grow :)

        • kpw ( kpw@kbin.social ) 
          2·
          3 years ago

          If you need to convince your friends to use some app it might as well be XMPP compatible instead of another walled garden. If you can get your friends on board, you win, even if nobody else uses it.

    • GenderNeutralBro ( GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ) English
      20·
      3 years ago

      It’s difficult to maintain privacy in a P2P environment. In naive implementations, your IP address will be visible to all the peers you connect to. This is the case in e.g. BitTorrent.

      Signal has this issue with video/voice calls as well; by default they operate on a P2P basis for performance reasons, and they expose your IP address to the second party. Signal has an option in the settings to relay voice/video calls through their servers specifically to mitigate this.

      There are some workarounds for anonymizing P2P, like routing through Tor or I2P. Tor, however, has known exploits and is probably not suitable if you need to hide your activity from advanced adversaries like world governments (e.g. political dissidents, journalists, etc.)

      I2P sounds interesting but I’m not deeply familiar with it. I understand that I2P clients also act as relay nodes, which puts an additional bandwidth burden on users. I’m not sure if I2P is more resilient against government-level attacks than Tor. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who is more familiar with the protocol.

        • GenderNeutralBro ( GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ) English
          11·
          3 years ago

          If you’re using it for personal correspondence with people you know and trust, that’s probably fine. However, a secure and private communications platform should support more extreme use cases as well.

          If you’re a journalist, for example, you might need to communicate with people you do not know or trust. You could realistically be talking to someone who wants to kill you, or who is being monitored by people who want to kill you, particularly if you are covering high-profile political issues or working with whistleblowers (or are yourself a whistleblower). Even revealing information as broad as what city you’re in (which would be revealed by your IP address) could be a risk to your physical safety.

          Even though I do not personally face such high-level threats in my life, I feel better using services that allow for the possibility. Privacy is a habit, and who knows what tomorrow might bring?

    • fer0n ( fer0n@lemm.ee ) OP
      17·
      3 years ago

      I‘m not an expert on this topic, so someone correct me if I’m wrong. Signal is only storing stuff temporarily to pass it on, so I’m assuming you’d have the exact same costs even if it weren’t centralized. Maybe even more as it’s probably cheaper to have it managed in one place. I’m assuming all this would do is distribute the cost, but otherwise be the same?

      • Avid Amoeba ( avidamoeba@lemmy.ca ) 
        11·
        3 years ago

        You’re not wrong. Federation would have higher costs but distributed over more people. Even with pure P2P a-la BitTorrent things might not be significantly cheaper because you’d likely still need to host authentication centrally or federally. You’d only eliminate the message bandwidth costs.

        The thing is, we already have a way to distribute the costs - people subscribe to support Signal. Some pay more, others less. Whether I run a node that serves 100 people or subscribe for $10/month, it’s somewhat equivalent. So the practical takeaway should be - if you want for Signal to keep signalling - subscribe if you can afford it.

      • admiralteal ( admiralteal@kbin.social ) 
        7·
        3 years ago

        The difference is that there’s enough unused capacity on your personal device to handle all the traffic any typical user needs to handle in a day many times over, for simple messaging. Likely, that load is so little it won’t even affect your battery life.

                • Kaldo ( Kaldo@kbin.social ) 
                  11·
                  3 years ago

                  You can also just hook up any old phone or computer, install the app, and let it run as the server.

                  If you have a static IP address, if you want to bother with securing and maintaining it, if you’re willing to deal with downtime when something inevitably breaks, if you’re willing to deal with lost data or also maintaining a backup solution, if… a dozen other things that most people don’t want to deal with.

                  • admiralteal ( admiralteal@kbin.social ) 
                    1·
                    3 years ago

                    Sure, but you also just… don’t have to do that. None of that is necessary fore core functionality of a messaging service, IF you stipulate that both devices must be online at the same time to ping each other.

                    The only thing you need is some very basic addressing service so they can find each other, and there are entirely P2P solutions for this that already exist and work without issue. See: bittorrent.

                    The ONLY drawback of having no server, fundamentally, is that the two devices need synchronicity. If they both aren’t online at once, messages won’t get delivered. Which is not a big deal for a modern smartphone given that most of them are online close to all of the time.