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.

  • fer0n@lemm.eeOP
    13·
    10 months 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?

    • helenslunch@feddit.nl
      10·
      10 months ago

      I’m assuming all this would do is distribute the cost, but otherwise be the same?

      Exactly. I can locally process the 1-3 messages/day I send on my device rather than having billions of messages processed on a single server.

      I can even host my own Matrix or XMPP encrypted server on a $100 machine consuming ~7W and host several hundred users easily.

      • kpw@kbin.social
        3·
        10 months ago

        XMPP maybe. Matrix is a bloated protocol which costs a lot more to host.

    • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
      8·
      10 months 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@kbin.social
      6·
      10 months 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.

      • fer0n@lemm.eeOP
        5·
        10 months ago

        Wouldn’t you still need a server in between to temporarily store the messages if the other person isn’t available?

          • fer0n@lemm.eeOP
            11·
            10 months ago

            Wouldn’t that mean both have to have a connection at the same time? What if one is offline?

            • helenslunch@feddit.nl
              2·
              10 months ago

              Wouldn’t that mean both have to have a connection at the same time?

              Yes.

              What if one is offline?

              How do you think you’re going to receive messages offline?

              How much time does your phone spend offline?

              One device can send a receipt when received. If the other device doesn’t receive that receipt it can just keep pinging periodically until it receives it.

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

              For more info on how this currently works you can check out Keet.io