On November 16th, Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal, published a detailed breakdown of the popular encrypted messaging app’s running costs for the very first time. The unprecedented disclosure’s motivation was simple - the platform is rapidly running out of money, and in dire need of donations to stay afloat. Unmentioned by Whittaker, this budget shortfall results in large part from the US intelligence community, which lavishly financed Signal’s creation and maintenance over several years, severing its support for the app.
  • kpw@kbin.social
    0·
    11 months ago

    This article may be bullshit, but people are still wasting their time on walled gardens like Signal. Organizations like Signal can easily disappear because they run out of money or, arguably worse, sellout because there is no other way to stay afloat. I wouldn’t use any messenger not compatible with the XMPP internet standard at this point.

    • ExpensiveConstant@kbin.social
      0·
      11 months ago

      Isn’t signal open source though? I know being open source doesn’t magically make it interoperable with other services but even if Signal or Whisper systems sell out, someone could just fork the projects

      • ZickZack@fedia.io
        0·
        11 months ago

        You cannot run Signal without “Signal - the company” existing. All of their systems are designed to be attached to one specific backend, namely the signal-run backend, meaning without re-engineering the existing infrastructure you cannot simply swap over.

        As @kpw already mentioned, “Signal - the company” dying would involve a functional reset of everything: No contacts, no servers, no infrastructure. COULD you fork the thing and build you own system? Sure, but it would be functionally unusable since no one else would be using it, since everything relies on specifically the signal servers to function. A post-signal system could re-use some of their code (if it runs outside signal corp - “works on my machine” could be present in this project as well), but would need to rebuild the actual network.

        This is in contrast to something like the matrix protocol: If a specific matrix instance goes kaput, you still have the overall network working. This means that even if an instance implodes, you would have an easy migration path since the matrix network itself persists.