I laid it out elsewhere in this thread, but in short, costs grow non-linearly with scale: you can run thousands of users on a RPi, but a million users requires whole datacenters. Decentralization not only helps with not requiring "whole datacenters" in the first place, they also enable maximization of resources: if you have a NAS at home, or a RPi hanging around, a router idling somewhere, or an abandoned smartphone in a drawer, you can probably host enough accounts for all the people that you've ever met in your life. And there are hundred of thousands of such underused devices everywhere, which, put together, would be sufficient to host the whole world multiple times around.
The other issue is sustainability: with this centralization comes single point of failure. It's no big deal witnessing the disappearance of one or few providers of a federated network. Accounts and data can be migrated easily. For most users, it's invisible. Now compare this to Signal running into financial issues: you are contemplating million of users losing access to their account and their data, and having to re-bootstrap their whole social graph elsewhere. This is another level of "cost", or price to pay, for centralization.
Agreed. Not ideal vs. a federation, because Signal would still be in a position of total control over the network, but with less incentive to go against its users.
As I wrote elsewhere in this thread, XMPP would be my preference. It just works. In fact that's what the other messengers (at facebook, Google, …) already use, but chose to put behind a walled-garden.
What matters is that whatever comes next (or, from the past in the case of XMPP) is federated, so no single organization has a single-handed control/monopoly over the network. Matrix and SimpleX are federated alternatives to XMPP, but I don't see Matrix stabilizing any time soon, and SimpleX just isn't ready yet. XMPP can offer you today an experience that's comparable to WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram/…
Signal isn't a federated protocol, so even if they were incentivized to release all the server bits and pieces, it would not help. You could run your own, but wouldn't be able to reach-out to your friends running theirs.
Yup, it has a cost, but there's perhaps a one or two orders of magnitude cost difference between hosting instant messaging + calls with something like XMPP, and hosting mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin (or why I do the former but not the later, and why I'm ok to pay for the service, esp. considering that my instance's business model isn't, unlike Reddit, to re-sell influence and data).
...the costs and the risks: let's jump forward a few years into financing issues, at what point does Signal become a liability and start operating against their stated mission, if the alternative is that they cannot survive? We are witnessing enough contemporary examples of enshittification to know that it's a real possibility, and that all centralized providers, but in particular the ones not charging for service, are at risk.
Some would even argue that this has already started in the case of Signal with their crypto payments and blocking of 3rd party clients which are clearly user-hostile.
Those individuals would have to collect contributions from their respective communities.
Perhaps, or perhaps not. Running costs get exponential with scale. You can host 1000 users on a shoebox computer/raspberry pi, but delivering a service for millions requires datacenter-level infrastructure and tons of engineering know-how.
Most people into self hosting or having a NAS at home can already accommodate their families, friends and more, which means millions of potential users, without the problem of trust from a single organization
I haven't been able to trust them since the get go, to be honest. Their whole stance against federation is.. FUDdy to stay polite: https://gultsch.de/objection.html
No, I think they are merely working on user ids no longer mandating to be your phone number (so that it can be pseudonymous, e.g. tja@signal instead of +xx0123456@signal), I don't believe they hope to drop SMS verification at this point because of the spam issue getting worse otherwise
Without SMS verification, spam would be so much worse that they've been kind of obliged to keep it, even though it defeats/undoes most of the privacy features they like to advertise about
If those "normies" aren't turned away by the creation of an account (and if they can use Amazon, I doubt it's an issue), they can certainly use XMPP :)
A more accurate title could be "Privacy is Priceless, but Centralization is Expensive": with the era of cheap money coming to an end, grows a lot of uncertainty regarding the future of some large internet services. Signal is no exception and this emphasises the importance of federated alternatives (XMPP, fediverse, …) for the good health of the future internet.
Because that way people thought they were directly paying for the service they were using, instead of being the product of said platform, having their personal data harvested and sold to the highest bidder?
Are you saying that people perceived WhatsApp as better than SMS or better than Facebook?
As it happened, both.
The red flag is to look at a free meal and not wonder what the catch might be. Especially to this day, with all we learned about what the tech majors do with all the data.
That's not my point. My point is why would the majority of the world do this when they knew it was going to be paid.
Back then, the norm was to pay for a service. When it's good and the price is fair, people use it, especially when the alternative was feature-limited SMS paid by the message at inadequately high cost. And Facebook isn't free: you trade privacy and exposure to customized ads in exchange for access to the service, so your comparison is biased.
And I see you're still there too, waving your own takes under a pretence of knowledge and experience that inevitably more and more people can see as absent. Keep it up!
China's way of partnering is through domination, and under Xi it is no longer even a matter of opinion or interpretation. The Taiwanese know that well, while the rest of the world is readjusting after a half century of concessions and "trying to be good friends".
China doesn't believe in/wants/cares about a world order with all countries equal under the same international laws, and that's what I personally find to be the scariest for the world's stability in the long term (rather than the naive "democracies are good vs authoritarianisms are bad and hence we should align against CN/RU").
Are those games weighing Taiwan's defense capabilities versus China alone? In practice China would be up against the USA, and Korea, and Japan, and the Philippines and a plausible economic and logistics alliance of most countries in the region. I am not a military strategist but the sheer numbers alone are not in favor of China, and that is ignoring the tactical challenges at play.
I should spend the time to assemble my sources to oppose yours once I get on a computer, but one thing I found telling was that China's current landing capability for infantry is in the low thousands whereas they would need in the high hundred thousands for minimal strategic goals, and this is the easy part in terms of shipbuilding. If they expect to invade opposed, they would need a whole fleet with anti naval and air capabilities which they don't have and does take decades to build.
Sounds reasonable, even under very generous assumptions regarding the expansion of the Chinese army, there's no way they can take Taiwan within the next few decades (unless big, but unlikely, changes in alliances in the region), according to military strategists. And by that time, those generous assumptions might no longer be tolerable for the Chinese economy.
u_tamtam @ u_tamtam @programming.dev Posts 6Comments 454Joined 2 yr. ago
I laid it out elsewhere in this thread, but in short, costs grow non-linearly with scale: you can run thousands of users on a RPi, but a million users requires whole datacenters. Decentralization not only helps with not requiring "whole datacenters" in the first place, they also enable maximization of resources: if you have a NAS at home, or a RPi hanging around, a router idling somewhere, or an abandoned smartphone in a drawer, you can probably host enough accounts for all the people that you've ever met in your life. And there are hundred of thousands of such underused devices everywhere, which, put together, would be sufficient to host the whole world multiple times around.
The other issue is sustainability: with this centralization comes single point of failure. It's no big deal witnessing the disappearance of one or few providers of a federated network. Accounts and data can be migrated easily. For most users, it's invisible. Now compare this to Signal running into financial issues: you are contemplating million of users losing access to their account and their data, and having to re-bootstrap their whole social graph elsewhere. This is another level of "cost", or price to pay, for centralization.