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u_tamtam

@ u_tamtam @programming.dev

Posts
30
Comments
611
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

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  • 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).

  • Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

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  • Decentralisation would just spread the costs

    ...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

  • Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

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  • Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

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  • Well, if SMS is dead then RCS is what we get instead, and there's no difference to us (and probably higher costs for Signal & al.)

    And there are wayyyy too many things that depend on SMS for it to be dead any time soon, too :)

  • Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

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  • 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

  • Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

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  • 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

  • Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

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  • I cannot really root for threema here because of its centralized nature, although I do appreciate that it has a saner business model than Signal

  • Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

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  • Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

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  • 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.

  • Signal tests usernames that keep your phone number private

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  • but it seems likely that the best way for me to get more people on board is to set up a family server. That way it's not so much about "here's a new way to communicate" but "here's a small, private space to plan family reunions and keep everyone up-to-date on family events."

    This was a convincing argument in my case :)

    Also, I have some other projects that I've been putting off because of the need to figure out self-hosting. Running something for the extended family might be the push I need :)

    Good motivator at least! The downside/risk in your situation might be that you will expose them to quite a bit of downtime and instability initially. If you are new to this, you can probably start small, off of a raspberry pi for instance, and work out a way to always have a backup/working config on a "B" SD card while performing updates and maintenance on the "A" card (or even have two raspberries), it should help in times of doubt :) (you can just slide the other card and deal with it later)

    Snikket looks like it checks off a few boxes. It looks pretty simple. It uses Docker (not that I care, exactly, but it seems that Docker is something I will have to come to terms with in general for other things on my self-hosting roadmap).

    You don't necessarily have to use docker. I deploy my own instance (of ejabberd, another server software) without docker, and have been at it for about a decade now. My (hot?) take is that it trades a tiny bit of convenience at the start for more clunky tooling and abstraction getting in the way after. An XMPP server isn't that complicated to warrant docker (IMO). And you can get help from here, as I'm pretty sure many other admins deploy without docker and would be keen on helping you with that:https://prosody.im/discuss#chatroom. https://chat.snikket.org/

    The Android app is available through F-Droid, something that only I care about, but I do care about that.

    As I wrote earlier, snikket is merely a packaged and preconfigured version of prosody & some popular clients, this is as generic and compatible an XMPP setup as you can think of. Any maintained XMPP client would work (but sticking with the ones branded as "snikket" guarantees that you won't accidentally pick an old/unmaintained one), for instance, in my case, I use Conversations and Siskin which you can find on Google/Apple stores, just so you know those are options as well.

  • Signal tests usernames that keep your phone number private

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  • At that scale, you could even consider self-hosting so your data never escapes your "digital home", and look into https://snikket.org/

    Edit: snikket is a packaged version of XMPP based around prosody on the server

  • Signal tests usernames that keep your phone number private

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  • Please let us know how that goes! And in case you want the "phone number based" onboarding experience of Signal & al. on XMPP, you can recommend https://quicksy.im (I personally find it a terrible and short slighted idea to irrevocably associate one's online identity and presence to a phone number, but at least the option is there!)

  • WhatsApp head confirms ads in the messaging app are still in the works

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  • 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.

  • Top U.S. general doubts China's Xi planning to take Taiwan by force

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  • 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!

  • Signal tests usernames that keep your phone number private

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  • I don't understand why nobody seems to be building nice apps using interoperable protocols and encryption. (Well, I do understand the greed, whether for money, power, or fame, I just don't like it.)

    Just join the bunch of us using XMPP then, nothing to miss from Signal.

  • Top U.S. general doubts China's Xi planning to take Taiwan by force

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  • 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").

  • Top U.S. general doubts China's Xi planning to take Taiwan by force

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  • 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.

  • Top U.S. general doubts China's Xi planning to take Taiwan by force

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  • 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.

  • Top U.S. general doubts China's Xi planning to take Taiwan by force

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  • 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.