This sounds pretty reasonable, I would definitely pay for this service if it fit my usecase!
@epoberezkin Could SimpleX have a paid feature like this?
7 Likes
I hope that Signal will still allow local backup and that it will allow you to have a number of GB in the cloud free of charge, because if you want to back up more than 3 GB in the cloud, you’ll have to pay.
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Stuff like this and MobileCoin is throwing me off a bit about Signal, I know the court orders show they don’t collect much data (just Unix timestamps I believe), and that encryption happens locally, but some parts of the server being closed-source and some questionable aforementioned decisions don’t sit right with me.
I have no reasonable suspicion though, and all evidence points to Signal still being a very secure and private service, so it has remained my personal choice for private messaging. It’s easy to use, looks beautiful, and its easy to get people on it because its pretty popular (perhaps mainstream) at this point.
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I’m in favor of this, though I personally would not use it.
Signal needs something to help sustain itself, long-term, without simply using donations. I kind of doubt that donations are good enough for their rising recurring payments. Hell, I’d be in favor of something like a “business tier,” where business-oriented users could pay for certain features (like those call links, as that seems particularly useful for such a use case).
Really would not prefer them bought out by a larger tech company down the line…
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I never noticed but apparently this was known to be rumoured since at least October of last year. Good for them, so long as they don’t strip away pre-existing free functionality, Signal should make money wherever they can.
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Signal Company is dead, the same reason, mozilla is dead.
free money makes ppl incompetant.
The fact they are not improving the UX in any fundamental way and the desktop vulenerability being known for a long long time and not fixed, and CEO not giving public apology.
The nerves i tell you.
libsignal is nice though.
simpleX has bad UX too, too much client memory usage, slowww
Mod edit: removed self-promotion
Why would the Signal company have died, for what reasons, the company receives quite a few donations from what I’ve been able to understand.
I hope they will “upgrade” local backup functionality to incremental backup when their cloud backup launches.
I don’t see a problem with this (in theory), it’s a healthy way to generate revenue to keep development running. Handouts from Brian Acton and asking users to donate at random won’t keep Signal afloat forever and they need another way.
In practice, we should still keep a close eye on it, because if improperly implemented, it will increase attack surface. Fingers crossed. Thanks for the headsup!
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Good work, was long awaited. People in privacy community are just misinformed about things they do not understand, since most of them know nothing about what costs are, and are mostly freeloaders (with corporations, ironically, being the biggest supporter of sustainable FOSS projects via donated engineering time (All of FAANG, companies like slack, tailscale, etc. and others that hire foss developers), free resources (just look at github), or financial support, while the freeloaders call “calls for donation” as beggingware and any monetization as enshittification). Signal tried donations, and not enough people donated. I would rather this than the only actual e2ee and usable messenger being Whatsapp (compared to shitty half baked stuff like matrix).
This has to be satire. Surely Signal (the leader in e2ee accessible privacy preserving messenger) is not comparable to Mozilla. As for apologies from signal for an oversight? Go check the bugs and design mistakes with whatever hand crafted messenger you like and ask them to apologize for critical encryption mistakes (matrix), shitty file parsing (All of them), etc. first before asking the only sane mass messaging application for an apology because they did not do what you think is important. So funny…
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This works fine for me as long as local backups still function as expected.
Why would it matter if parts of the server are closed-source? You can’t personally verify what’s actually running on the server anyway—not that it matters much, since the important stuff happens client-side, where you can inspect the code yourself. As far as I know, Signal can only collect whether your phone number is registered, when you created your account, and when you last connected to the servers.
TBH, it costs $50M to run (2023 figure), and cost should rise every year, I can’t really see how user donation could pull off.
It would be achievable if we only use 1 or 2 FOSS, but in reality we use dozens if not hundreds of FOSS everyday (directly or indirectly).
I would love to see a platform that collect and tabulate the running cost and financial status (i.e. how much they got via one time donation / monthly donation / Org or Gov funding), so people can make good decisions about how they should allocate their donation budget.
Or even better, offer subscription like feature where I just pick a mix of orgs to support, so I don’t need to set up / manage multiple standing orders.
Edit: I found nlnet Foundation which supports a wide range of projects but they are all quite well established, and does not include smaller projects.
To be honest I think we’re still at a stage when any paid features would have higher costs to develop and to manage than the revenue they can bring - we have to focus on UX and reliability prior to that.
We have a solid path to sustainability that we are working towards - all based on large public groups and channels - so adding some features for the end users isn’t the current priority.
It may be possible in some remote future.
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Signal has to radically cut costs, or it won’t survive I think…
The recent media attention and mainstream adoption would normally have been great…if they were able to make money off these users.
This is nice assuming they keep local backup in tact. Finally a proper way to generate revenue! Hopefully.
I was thinking if Signal is going to go Apple iCloud+ style pricing with this where
Free is 2GB - 5GB
$0.99 for 50GB
$4.99 for 200GB
$9.99 for 500GB
or something like that.
That will probably make them lose money. I’m personally open to them providing no free cloud storage as long as there are local backups.
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it isn’t losing money.
and local should remain an option knowing signal.
(if you mean the 5 fair but I provided a range for a reason)