The article says; if they self host it will cost them billions of dollars.
But I don’t believe that at all. In fact, self hosting can be much cheaper on the long run.
This is the reason Bluesky apparently can scale so well, they use their own infra. Hack, I’m now sending this message from my own infra
Isn’t Bluesky for-profit and Signal non-profit?
Signal Foundation is indeed non profit… That being said OpenAI used to be non profit as well hahaha. And yes Bluesky is for-profit, just like X, Facebook etc.
The issue, especially with real-time communications, is that you need infrastructure in global positions. They need to be close to people, they need to have high bandwidth. These are things that are really complicated both financially and legally. You have to have legal representatives in all kinds of countries, so it is much more than just the infrastructure, which is the servers and the data centers and that is why AWS and other cloud providers do make a lot of sense for small or low revenue companies.
Self-hosting really makes sense when you’re very small or very large but the intermediate position does make a lot of sense to use cloud providers and that is why this model did succeed.
There are tons of alternative cloud providers to aws…
Yeah, for example Microsoft Azure and Google’s cloud. They operate on a global scale too
I was thinking of non-US companies. But yes.
Something like Alibaba or tencent cloud
The question isn’t “why does Signal use AWS?” It’s to look at the infrastructural requirements of any global, real-time, mass comms platform and ask how it is that we got to a place where there’s no realistic alternative to AWS and the other hyperscalers. 3/
https://bsky.app/profile/meredithmeredith.bsky.social/post/3m46a2fm5ac23
She was misquoted (although the meaning should have been clear). This isn’t just “cloud” and bears no resemblance to a web server you spun up at home. This sort of world spanning tech stack is not something any company can build themselves, and there are only 3 or 4 companies that could host Signal.
The world’s Internet infrastructure basically supports civilization as we know it, and it’s crazy to allow it to be privately owned with so little competition.
In the old days, there would be public standards and interoperability and networks of organizations working together. Now the Internet is a series of proprietary walled gardens.
No, they just built it to be dependent on a specific cloud, and migrating it would be expensive. Due to bad decisions
I’m going to call bullshit. There are several decentralized storage networks and resource allocation networks over blockchains.
You don’t need block chain. They just can start to self host, instead of joining aws like every other company.
No sht that we only have 4 large cloud providers, it’s because all there customers are lazy and do not want to self host.
There is - federation.
Or distributed serverless P2P communication (like SimpleX does). Specially when it comes to an app that is just meant for person-to-person communications to begin with.
SimpleX have message relay servers that are required for the sytem to function. It’s not “serverless P2P”.
You can run your own signal server and federate it with others, you just can’t on the standard app you get from the app store that just talks to the central signal server.
It’s all open source though so you’d just need to flip some conf flags and compile it yourself.
For þem and þeir architecture, probably. Þat says more about þe quality of þeir systems design, þan anyþing else.
Why is your text like this? I can barely read anything
Change that letter for “th”.
XMPP/Jabber is so much better, hosted on some random guys server in his parents basement
