- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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.
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to do with a 1mb text file
God you must be like my wife and write fucking novels as text messages.
Lol I think they probably mean like an entire chat history (or page of one), but yeah that’s pretty big.
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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.
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And now here I am, nostalgic for the good old days of having one chat app that could connect you to everyone over XMPP/jabber.
Yeah you could even communicate between facebook and google easily. The world didn’t have to be full of walled gardens.
Pidgin exists
Please, don’t recommend pidgin, it’s a security hellhole, and a pretty terrible XMPP client at that. If you want something with a similar vibe, check-out https://dino.im/ or https://gajim.org/ if you are more on the “power-user” side of things :)
Indeed. Xmpp is lost as a general purpose chat app for everyone. I have many issues with matrix but it’s the best chance we have, particularly with bridges.
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.
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
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.
The license change is to a GPL variant from the Apache license. How does that affect the regular user? Wouldn’t it be better?
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.
I hear what youre saying, I don’t like the license exceptions. I just hope it doesnt go that route.
And don’t forget the CLA!
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:
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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)
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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 :)
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WhatsApp started is an XMPP client, but they use lots of proprietary extensions (doesn’t matter since they don’t federate). You can build very robust and scalable messengers with it if you want to.
The open source implementations are developed by like 1-2 guys in their spare time and they’re not far behind (and sometimes even ahead) other federated messengers which received tens of millions in venture capital funding.
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Nothing in the XMPP RFCs says you can’t do that. Go ahead.
Which xmpp clients have you used? Conversations and its forks seem far from janky. Movim is nice, Dino is looking good, Kaidan is looking pretty good. Prose could be interesting.
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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.
Ten years ago sure, the days I’d suggest matrix instead.
I assessed XMPP vs Matrix about 8 years ago, and strikingly, the basis on which it didn’t make the cut still applies today. Here’s what I responded to a sibling post: https://programming.dev/comment/5408356
In short, Matrix dug themselves into a complexity pit with an inadequate protocol, survived for a while on venture capital money (upscaling servers and marketing at all cost), all of it dried up, and now they are in financial trouble. Matrix won’t disappear overnight, but is definitely losing the means to run the managed instances and the client/server ecosystem.
Isn’t that why they built matrix 2? Or am I thinking of element 2?
Edit: it’s matrix
And Element X as client.
They are kinda shooting themselves in the foot with all their big rewrites though. Like Vector, Riot, Element, Element X (and I think before vector/riot there was another official client). And Synapse/dendrite… It feels like they spread their development over too many fronts.
If you read between the lines, Matrix 2 is practically about handing the client state over to the server (what they refer to as “sliding sync”). Realistically, this is an admission that the protocol is too complex to be handled efficiently on the user’s devices. I’m not saying there are not clear benefits (and new trade-offs) to the approach, just that in the grand scheme of things the complexity is shifted elsewhere (and admins foot a larger bill).
They’re supporting development of MLS for managing encryption for groups
Yup, like pretty much everyone else :) https://nlnet.nl/project/XMPP-MLS/
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.
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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?
A MitM sniffer would be able to see the source and destination IP addresses, not just the person you’re chatting with. Even if the data is encrypted, P2P is still vulnerable to a layer 3 attack.
Will the same apply if you’re in a lot of open group chats though?
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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?
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XMPP maybe. Matrix is a bloated protocol which costs a lot more to host.
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.
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.
Wouldn’t you still need a server in between to temporarily store the messages if the other person isn’t available?
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Wouldn’t that mean both have to have a connection at the same time? What if one is offline?
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They could save a lot on infrastructure costs if they decentralised their network and stopped using phone numbers as unique identifiers.
November 9th, the verge: Signal tests usernames so you can avoid sharing your phone number
the phone number is still going to be required for making an account, you can just choose to not share it with others and give them your username instead.
How?
Quote from the blog post:
Registration Fees
Signal incurs expenses when people download Signal and sign up for an account, or when they re-register on a new device. We use third-party services to send a registration code via SMS or voice call in order to verify that the person in possession of a given phone number actually intended to sign up for a Signal account. This is a critical step in helping to prevent spam accounts from signing up for the service and rendering it completely unusable—a non-trivial problem for any popular messaging app.
SMS verification is expensive.
Obviously, running the infrastructure to support the entire user base is also expensive. Decentralized protocols like Matrix sidestep this problem by allowing anyone to host their own infrastructure to use the network. Even if the largest Matrix server shuts down, the network will live on, and people can migrate to another server or host their own. This distributes the costs and allows for different business models to support those costs – commercial, non-profit, cooperative, whatever. Corporations can (and do) host their own Matrix servers for their employees, for instance. I wouldn’t be surprised to see universities do the same, like they frequently do with email.
There’s an IETF internet standard for federated messaging called XMPP. Just be compatible with the standard. It also allows for extensions if you offer more than the core spec.
There’s a few forks that have done it. You could also look to Matrix to see how they’ve done it.
In total, around 50 full-time employees currently work on Signal
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When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year.
That’s 380k/employee on average. Even if half of that went to taxes and other expenses, on average they’re paying their employees around 190k/year.
Bro, as a European dev, that’s triple my salary! They could possibly double or triple their workforce if they hired from outside of the US.
When running a business, you need to budget 3x salary for actual TCO of a staff member:
1x covers their direct salary 2x covers retirement fund, electricity, office space, and infrastructure items unlike server and laptops for corporate use etc.
The 3x multiplier is for when you’re a services company, and that represents a possibly profit margin.
So for signal, your $380k becomes $190k which in my experience is average for a US tech sw dev at a mid to early senior level.
I donate to signal monthly and I have no problems with the costs they’re posting. I work in SV tech and I’ve seen 20x worse numbers.
I’m extremely curious where you get those numbers from, I operate businesses and that doesn’t pass the sniff test.
I’ve used the 3x multiplier for staff planning at services companies since the early 2000s.
Perhaps there are regional differences, but they’ve rung true for planning billable rates of return at every services company I’ve worked at in the last 20 years here in AU.
I realise that the services aspect isn’t relevant, but having the sum of indirect staff costs equivalent to staff salary cost when office space is involved isn’t a massive stretch in my experience. (Indirect costs would include office rent, utilities, infrastructure and a share of shared functions such as IT, HR, facilities etc…)
3x is too much tbh. It’s more like 2x in total, at least going by european points of view - I don’t know what would make the US more expensive though with even less welfare. And office space in these days is a diminishing cost of course with all the hybrid/remote options. Laptops cost is pretty negligible. I think Signal does have a lot of hosting costs though.
As an American dev, you should check out other silicon valley salaries. After hearing what some folks there make 190k doesn’t make me bat an eye.
True, but Signal is choosing to hire such people. There’s talent all over the world and all over the US. There’s absolutely no need to only hire people from one highly expensive region.
I wonder why FAANG companies don’t all do that.
I’m guessing because of the strong worker laws in Europe.
That is indeed a lot. They must have most of these in Silicon Valley.
However it is their choice to do so. They don’t have to be in the most expensive place in the world for developers.
I prefer sponsoring matrix though as it’s really open. Signal is just a slightly nicer walled garden. Also, Matrix doesn’t need to be linked to my mobile number which is a godsend because I tend to change those once in a while and it’s a real nightmare bringing all whatsapp contacts over.
Is it just me or is $19 million per year for 50 full-time employees insane?
Even for US salary standards.
My guess: People who can be as competent with security as they need are very expensive.
Role of thumb is an employee costs roughly twice their base salary, as the employee still needs to cover insurance, taxes, sick time, and other benefits.
That leaves an average salary of 190K for the 50 employees. That isn’t much for tech.
Not at all. That’s $380K per person if everyone is making the same. Engineers with a few years of experience at Meta make $400K+.
Don’t forget the employer taxes, insurance, recruitment costs and so on. It wouldn’t surprise me if the employees are earning on average half that.
Exactly.
Would be interesting to see how this compares to XMPP or Matrix. Obviously the development costs something for each of those, but the hosting costs are spread out across each of those hosting an instance.
Yup, that’s a big reason why centralized protocols aren’t sustainable. XMPP is 25 years old (which is older than almost anything else on the contemporary internet) and thriving. Unfortunately, judging by the cycle of messengers coming and dying, and people still being eagerly part of that, this isn’t something that people value very much.
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Forgive the ignorance but does xmpp have the same features as signal, particularly around e2e encryption?
They should do a charity stream event or something. Do Q&A stuff, get interest of more people, and raise money?
Are decentralised apps like element much less expensive ?
The costs are distributed as there is not one single instance. Just like with Lemmy.
Although there is one huge instance on matrix (matrix.org), a bit like lemmy.ml here. But it doesn’t have to be like that, they can close signups or discourage them similar to the way lemmy.ml is doing that now.
The load distributes across more shoulders automatically.
If you only host a server for yourself and 10 friends it costs next to nothing, if you have a big operation it can get just as expensive, it depends on what you are willing to do.
With centralized systems there is no choice but for the one centralized host to host everything.
Then is it better to use element over signal as decentralised apps may be more sustainable for long term use ?
Element has the same costs as Signal. So far, Element has been lucky in being able to raise money by selling support contracts to governments or companies using Matrix, but even that isn’t enough, which is why Element has been raising money for the Matrix Foundation for almost a year now (with little success).
No but they do have commercial clients, even some government departments.
They’re also trying to sell Element One directly to end users which involved a few bridges like connection to whatsapp, signal and telegram. Not a bad deal for 5 bucks a month IMO, though I run mine myself because I want to.
There’s also beeper which sells a service with (a lot) more bridges than Element One but costs twice the price. Their company sponsors most of the bridge development as they employ the main bridge developer.
