Makes sense., something as huge and expensive as Signal can't run entirely on donations.
neukenindekeuken@sh.itjust.works
on 06 Jun 14:26
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Sure it can, just look at Wikipedia. But it’s probably a good idea to have some alternate forms of revenue generation.
Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 06 Jun 16:31
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Wikipedia has way more donors, since it’s basically the only one of its kind. There is no Big Tech alternative to Wikipedia, so everyone just uses it by default. There are lots of other messengers though, so Signal isn’t the default choice.
Wikipedia has a lot more donors, but also their costs are probably cheaper than Signal. They mostly host text and decently compressed images, Signal uses way more bandwidth and people share high quality videos and other huge files. The servers are very expensive, there were articles estimating their cost to be around $50M per year.
witty_username@feddit.nl
on 05 Jun 15:40
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Would pay for
cAUzapNEAGLb@lemmy.world
on 05 Jun 15:44
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As long as they dont shove it down our throats, and then expand and expand and expand the features that are in their paid tier, and make you feel lesser for choosing their local only unpaid mode, and dont make the unpaid mode inconvenient with dark patterns.
Its happened too much, I’ve asked my friends to hop through so many different platforms over the years and decades
It always starts with something thats reasonable, and every time thus far, it expands into something I hate.
Outwit1294@lemmy.today
on 05 Jun 15:51
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I commented this in the other thread, sharing it here as well
I’ve been waiting for this feature for a while actually 😅
When I last saw people talking about it, there were rumors that there would be a reasonable free backup (ex. up to 1 Gb) with relatively cheap paid options above that. I scrolled through the GitHub link and couldn’t confirm or deny if this is still/actually the case.
Backups are the #1 pain point for friends that tried to switch to Signal, especially for those on iOS. I have a local backup + sync setup for my own phone, but it’s a lot to expect for the average casual user to set up.
Whatsapp has backups to Google Drive, which is better than nothing but not ideal. It’s time Signal had a reliable backup method for casual users
AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space
on 05 Jun 16:21
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Good to see they have some reasonable revenue streams lined up.
jivandabeast@lemmy.browntown.dev
on 05 Jun 16:32
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I have no issue with this, I personally wouldn’t use it but I get that they need to make money (which is why i have a recurrent donation every month).
If this helps them to do that, then so be it
timbuck2themoon@sh.itjust.works
on 05 Jun 17:56
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Excellent news honestly. Trying to get people to switch to something encrypted and the one thing I’ve thought of is that I want to know it can continue indefinitely. Everything else in life costs money- we just never think of it computer wise because we pay with our data and privacy.
This can join threema with a solid revenue stream. I back mine up locally but would pay for this anyhow.
dysprosium@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 05 Jun 19:32
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If it’s 1 euro a month, I’ll do it
Stomata@sh.itjust.works
on 05 Jun 19:40
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If this feature rolls out but you can’t pay for it. You can always use Molly (fork of signal).
If you can support the project than do it. But if you can’t than don’t force your self
Well, if you didn’t know, Molly is a soft fork of the Signal Android client.
But, I think both support making local backups of your chats.
I do so daily and keep two copies. These get synced in real time to my little NAS and/or my PC/Laptop
goldenquetzal@lemmy.world
on 06 Jun 15:59
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Thanks, I do use Molly but never occured to me to use Syncthing to make a local backup copy. Great idea.
Signal backups are an issue. They keep growing. I need to look into a solution sooner or later that isn’t just buying a phone with more space. I’d like to find ways to reduce the size and keep managing the backups myself, but that’s gonna take time. If they offer a secure, private, and affordable service, I’d prolly just redirect my donations to that.
ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
on 06 Jun 05:52
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honestly thats why I don’t like signal and simplex for people who send lots of images. something server-based is much more suitable for them, like Matrix. that is, if their apps were more stable. there’s also the security about metadata, but for most people that’s probably not a huge concern
It would be nice if the backups were split into time-indexed files so I could move the old parts to cheap external hard drives and only keep recent backups on my expensive phone storage.
Agreed. Would be great if we could save old backups on a server and search it from a client, instead of the current option of keeping everything in one local backup. The latter is a real problem after a while if you have contacts that like sending videos.
I imagine search of server backups would be pretty hard to do securely. Better management of locally stored media would be nice, but you can sort by size, export, and delete media from inside the settings.
Imagine having to pay with it with MobileCoin’s shitcoin ^^
rozlav@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 06 Jun 00:04
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Anyone knows about creating easily a signal account without smartphone ? Telegram does that and I have tremondous people that would use that instead of whatsapp/telegram and that don’t understand matrix or even Mattermost 😭
But you need a simcard with this emulator to connect to signal, here I’m talking about getting a text message and then still have a signal account, or even better : only having an account but wirh email or norhing. I think it’s not possible to have signal work the way you describe.
So you can have signal desktop on pc and activate it from there with a phone that only receives SMS ? I have a few people to tell so they can try then because this is a huge step for non-smartphone users. If anyone have a source on this btw I would be happy to read it !
I never said anything to that effect. The ancestor comment discussed running Signal for Android inside an Android emulator for account creation, after which it could be linked to Signal desktop.
Someone could presumably fork Signal desktop to allow the scenario you’re describing, but I’m not aware of any such efforts.
ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
on 06 Jun 05:49
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Telegram does that? how? you need a phone number, so essentially a smartphone too. or is it common in your community to use feature phones, so that the problem is no registration on PC?
Yes, and yes. But most of it’s because I’ve moved all communication over to it.
If I have anything that shouldn’t stick around it doesn’t stick around, If I need my grocery list from last month it’s there though.
That said, I really don’t have any interest in backups. It’s an ephemeral stream at best that is there when I need it. And there are parts of it disappear when they’re no longer needed.
The days where we presumed we could safely bitch about things to our friends over social media are clearly gone and privacy is of ultimate importance.
Pretend it’s 1984, and you won’t get yourself in trouble.
manuallybreathing@lemmy.ml
on 07 Jun 04:13
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My grocery list is its own signal group chat with other members of the household
I never set auto expiry and often search messages. Sometimes it’s because I want to find a specific fact or datum from two years ago; other times it’s just for a reminder of a memory. On occasion, if the history wasn’t there, people might remember something important differently.
In the GitHub commit it’s called Renew your Signal Backups subscription.
Core_of_Arden@lemmy.ml
on 06 Jun 09:15
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I don’t mind paying a fair price, for a service, so they should go for it. I use both Signal and Telegram, and I would pay for Telegram too, if the price was more fair…
No end-to-end encryption by default, you have to explicitly start a secret chat. That means that instead of it all being encrypted noise, secret chats stand out.
Servers are not open source (last time I checked). Why not? Seriously, why not?
Admittedly, not much of an issue any more, but in the beginning they had horrible security (so did WhatsApp until Facebook threw some competent engineers at the problem)
He said “no e2e by default” which is true. Straw man/missrepresentation
You post on the fediverse, which is decentral - why shouldn’t you want this for telegram too? Open source server would allow to check / trust code, host your own, be more resilient against central attacks/malicious intend. Also you just waved it away saying it is not a biggy - maybe to you.
Last time I checked telegram still has major trust issues for me. No way to know how much governments are involved, code is not independently checked for security (happy to be proven wrong on especially the last one)
Its totally fine that you like telegram, but you can do that while acknowledging others preferences
I have not said anything about what I want for Telegram. Are you trying to make a straw man here? Not that you want to interject yourself into this debate - then tell me, what is the big problem with the serverside not being OS? I did write it would be optimal, but what is the big issue for you? Try to answer without making another straw man about something I didn’t say… ;-)
I don’t care about your trust issues. Go deal with them…
So far, don’t you think that you really would know, if government was involved in any way that didn’t involve crime fighting? Do you prefer an app, where crime roam free? Is that your issue? That it doesn’t?
AFAIK it’s you and two others, who don’t acknowledge my preferences… So please consider following your own advice!
First of all, you injected yourself in my debate with another person. You do it by answering for that person, which mean, you lie by default, since you don’t know that persons answers. Then you say there are no end-to-end encryption by default, but that depends on what you use it for. Calls are encrypted by default.
But nice to know that you really didn’t have any serious red flags. Now it would be nice to hear from the person I was originally debating with…
Year according to a wiki page on the unofficial Signal wiki the backup will not be directly linked to the user “It appears that backups will not be directly linkable to a user. Authentication for operations against a given backup will use zero-knowledge proofs.”.
threaded - newest
At least this time they do it out in the open, not like with the MobileCoin integration.
As long as they leave the local backup option that sounds like a good idea to me.
Makes sense., something as huge and expensive as Signal can't run entirely on donations.
Sure it can, just look at Wikipedia. But it’s probably a good idea to have some alternate forms of revenue generation.
Wikipedia has way more donors, since it’s basically the only one of its kind. There is no Big Tech alternative to Wikipedia, so everyone just uses it by default. There are lots of other messengers though, so Signal isn’t the default choice.
Wikipedia has a lot more donors, but also their costs are probably cheaper than Signal. They mostly host text and decently compressed images, Signal uses way more bandwidth and people share high quality videos and other huge files. The servers are very expensive, there were articles estimating their cost to be around $50M per year.
Would pay for
As long as they dont shove it down our throats, and then expand and expand and expand the features that are in their paid tier, and make you feel lesser for choosing their local only unpaid mode, and dont make the unpaid mode inconvenient with dark patterns.
Its happened too much, I’ve asked my friends to hop through so many different platforms over the years and decades
It always starts with something thats reasonable, and every time thus far, it expands into something I hate.
Good initiative. They need money to work
I commented this in the other thread, sharing it here as well
Good to see they have some reasonable revenue streams lined up.
I have no issue with this, I personally wouldn’t use it but I get that they need to make money (which is why i have a recurrent donation every month).
If this helps them to do that, then so be it
Excellent news honestly. Trying to get people to switch to something encrypted and the one thing I’ve thought of is that I want to know it can continue indefinitely. Everything else in life costs money- we just never think of it computer wise because we pay with our data and privacy.
This can join threema with a solid revenue stream. I back mine up locally but would pay for this anyhow.
If it’s 1 euro a month, I’ll do it
If this feature rolls out but you can’t pay for it. You can always use Molly (fork of signal). If you can support the project than do it. But if you can’t than don’t force your self
Switching to Molly won’t necessarily give you free cloud backups. Someone will still need to pay for the storage costs.
I was saying local backup
Ah, misunderstood your post. I think regular Signal still supports local backup. Doubt they’ll remove it when they add this.
Maybe lets see what happens
Glad to see they are establishing useful streams of revenue
I, however, will continue using Molly in combination with Syncthing
Interesting, how do you use syncthing with molly?
Well, if you didn’t know, Molly is a soft fork of the Signal Android client.
But, I think both support making local backups of your chats.
I do so daily and keep two copies. These get synced in real time to my little NAS and/or my PC/Laptop
Thanks, I do use Molly but never occured to me to use Syncthing to make a local backup copy. Great idea.
Glad to be of help! I personally really like Syncthing, since it makes implementing a resilient decentralised backup strategy quite easy.
Though I would recommend you go with “Syncthing-Fork”, as iirc the “vanilla” app was put into maintenance mode or smth like that
And another good tip - thank you!
Signal backups are an issue. They keep growing. I need to look into a solution sooner or later that isn’t just buying a phone with more space. I’d like to find ways to reduce the size and keep managing the backups myself, but that’s gonna take time. If they offer a secure, private, and affordable service, I’d prolly just redirect my donations to that.
honestly thats why I don’t like signal and simplex for people who send lots of images. something server-based is much more suitable for them, like Matrix. that is, if their apps were more stable. there’s also the security about metadata, but for most people that’s probably not a huge concern
It would be nice if the backups were split into time-indexed files so I could move the old parts to cheap external hard drives and only keep recent backups on my expensive phone storage.
Agreed. Would be great if we could save old backups on a server and search it from a client, instead of the current option of keeping everything in one local backup. The latter is a real problem after a while if you have contacts that like sending videos.
I imagine search of server backups would be pretty hard to do securely. Better management of locally stored media would be nice, but you can sort by size, export, and delete media from inside the settings.
I was actually unaware of those features and thinking of an over engineered solution. Good lookin out!
Imagine having to pay with it with MobileCoin’s shitcoin ^^
Anyone knows about creating easily a signal account without smartphone ? Telegram does that and I have tremondous people that would use that instead of whatsapp/telegram and that don’t understand matrix or even Mattermost 😭
Assuming you have a computer to get on here, you could use an Android emulator like BlueStacks.
But you need a simcard with this emulator to connect to signal, here I’m talking about getting a text message and then still have a signal account, or even better : only having an account but wirh email or norhing. I think it’s not possible to have signal work the way you describe.
Telegram too requires that you verify your phone number, right? So I took that as a given.
A phone number that can receive SMS is required, but it doesn’t have to be associated with the device that’s running Signal last I checked.
So you can have signal desktop on pc and activate it from there with a phone that only receives SMS ? I have a few people to tell so they can try then because this is a huge step for non-smartphone users. If anyone have a source on this btw I would be happy to read it !
I never said anything to that effect. The ancestor comment discussed running Signal for Android inside an Android emulator for account creation, after which it could be linked to Signal desktop.
Someone could presumably fork Signal desktop to allow the scenario you’re describing, but I’m not aware of any such efforts.
Telegram does that? how? you need a phone number, so essentially a smartphone too. or is it common in your community to use feature phones, so that the problem is no registration on PC?
No Telegram can do registration with just a simple text message + pc, no need of smartphones just simple dumb phone
All of my signal conversations have auto expiry
Do people really use their conversation logs for things? Are you often searching your conversational logs?
Outside of corporate compliance issues I can’t imagine the workflow for most people
Yes and yes
out of curiosity: what duration do you have?
My default is set to 1 week.
Enough for conversational context
Though the same I like my conversations disappear when I need to reinstall Signal.
History search is great when you have a lot of friends and poor memory. Perhaps not your use case ?
Most Whatsapp users (my parents) want to keep logs of everything, its become normalised.
.
Yes, and yes. But most of it’s because I’ve moved all communication over to it.
If I have anything that shouldn’t stick around it doesn’t stick around, If I need my grocery list from last month it’s there though.
That said, I really don’t have any interest in backups. It’s an ephemeral stream at best that is there when I need it. And there are parts of it disappear when they’re no longer needed.
The days where we presumed we could safely bitch about things to our friends over social media are clearly gone and privacy is of ultimate importance.
Pretend it’s 1984, and you won’t get yourself in trouble.
My grocery list is its own signal group chat with other members of the household
Same, We do more than groceries though, It’s kind of fun anybody that needs anything just pops it in there
You are right, I don’t really search my messages that much. Most important conversion is going by email for most people still.
I have never searched for a message ever.
Me and my wife and wife sends information, pictures , whatever. I often search my messages for stuff
I never set auto expiry and often search messages. Sometimes it’s because I want to find a specific fact or datum from two years ago; other times it’s just for a reminder of a memory. On occasion, if the history wasn’t there, people might remember something important differently.
Yes, and yes.
“I said this was happening 3 weeks ago. Here’s the literal text of me sending it to you and you saying ‘Okay thanks’ in reply.”
Shuts down an argument real quick.
Finally a good approach at raising money (other than donations)
Like cloud backup on their server or a subscription just to export the files to store offline?
I think it’s cloud backups.
In the GitHub commit it’s called Renew your Signal Backups subscription.
I don’t mind paying a fair price, for a service, so they should go for it. I use both Signal and Telegram, and I would pay for Telegram too, if the price was more fair…
Price is fair but features aren’t worth it.
You contradict yourself. You can’t say that the price is fair, for something that doesn’t have the features that the price should cover.
Doing use Telegram, let alone pay for it. So many red flags with Telegram.
Feel free to list them - with evidence and not just prejudice…?
There’s end-to-end encryption. It’s fine that you can chose what needs to be private, and what doesn’t need to be.
There could be several reasons as to why the servers are not OS. Why do you need that part to be OS? Seriously, why?
Oh, so your problem with Telegram is, that it had some issues in the past, just like EVERY other app in the beginning? Nice one. :-)
So, let’s summarize.
Woot?! (not op),
Its totally fine that you like telegram, but you can do that while acknowledging others preferences
So far, don’t you think that you really would know, if government was involved in any way that didn’t involve crime fighting? Do you prefer an app, where crime roam free? Is that your issue? That it doesn’t?
AFAIK it’s you and two others, who don’t acknowledge my preferences… So please consider following your own advice!
That is not what I said. Please take a deep breath, maybe go outside for a minute, and read my reply again.
First of all, you injected yourself in my debate with another person. You do it by answering for that person, which mean, you lie by default, since you don’t know that persons answers. Then you say there are no end-to-end encryption by default, but that depends on what you use it for. Calls are encrypted by default.
But nice to know that you really didn’t have any serious red flags. Now it would be nice to hear from the person I was originally debating with…
Ah sorry. I thought you were here on lemmy for an open discussion and polite, good-faith arguments, not just trolling and name-calling. My bad.
So, where did I use name-calling?
An open discussion is always welcome. Someone hijacking a conversation is not. So yeah… your bad.
Sorry, I don’t talk to liars.
Being one yourself, that would make sense. You’d have a strange conversation.
That’s a pretty good idea for monetization.
Completely fine with that, I agree
Cloud backups, for security!
If anyone is actually going to get that right in a mainstream product, it will probably be Signal.
Year according to a wiki page on the unofficial Signal wiki the backup will not be directly linked to the user “It appears that backups will not be directly linkable to a user. Authentication for operations against a given backup will use zero-knowledge proofs.”.
Nice. I don’t think I need this but its good to have options