I was searching for the place of Signal’s headquarter and i found that
Signal’s revenue (2020)
$14,860,292
And its expenses (2020)
$21,272,520
So how are they covering the gap between their revenue and their expenses??
Source: Signal Foundation - Wikipedia
I am not very well versed in their revenue spendings, I thnks many companies and organisations give them grants and help Signal cover their costs.
Also Signal is a great project and I think most would agree on that front.(except some snake oil Bros on Reddit who claim the centralisation of Signal is a bad thing and/or requirement of ph number is a “selling out to NSA” without any understanding of the slightest in cryptography/ITSec)
Please consider donating them: Signal >> Donate to Signal Private Messenger
Well I occasionally donate so maybe that’s it?
I kid but seriously for people who can do so, please donate. You even get a neat rocket flare on your username.
The real reason is that Signal started with a large amount of cash from wealthy donors. Thus it can run negative revenue for a long time without running dry.
to get the biggest amount of answers
Centralization and a phone number requirement are legitimate criticisms. So much so that the Signal team is working on introducing usernames at the very least.
Signal became popular because it used the phone number backbone to easily expand on contact lists. Signal started out as an SMS app, though they’ve since discontinued SMS support which is somewhat unfortunate since that was what made it seamless for users to “upgrade” their SMS conversations.
With the removal of SMS support and the introduction of usernames, there’s little reason to recommend Signal over Matrix. The only thing it has going now is whatever network effect it currently has as well as the ease of discovering contacts using Signal because of the phone number requirement.
As for centralization, Matrix is nice in that it is decentralized, though might have some concerns of its own. The issues in that article can be mitigated/fixed, however.
I agree that Signal is good, but that doesn’t dismiss the validity of its centralized nature, security, privacy, and anonymity concerns.
I agree that both are valid criticism, but decentralization is too complicated for an average user (aka your parents). It would be nice if you could run your own Signal server, tho.
EDIT: To elaborate - it’s already quite difficult to convince people to switch even if it’s “just” - Install Signal. It works the same like WhatsApp.
Many argue decentralisation is a bad thing for security.
Also Signal is the only IM messaging service that have a proven track record for protecting user data. All of the others have had some form of data breaches major vurnerabilities of some kind of the other.
Also phone number requirement is necessary since not having it would mean an influx of bots and spammers. There needs be an good solution to replace the current potentially bad solution.
Identify verification would be a problem. All of these are already thought by Signal. A flawed implementation benefits nobody.
Signal does have stronger encryption than Matrix, to be fair.
Signal is awesome and “Just Works!” but downplaying the concerns about its centralization and phone number requirement seems to be a joke or a bad faith argument.
Love Signal, we should donate and keep getting others on board but other projects like matrix are awesome as well!
We saw with Iran how they can block signal so easily which shuts everything down
Please note P2P networks can just as easily be shut down.
I am not downplaying the “issues” Signal has. If phone number requirement is something that bugs you, by all means, use an alternative.
As for the decentralisation issue, there are no good e2e decentralised cryptographic protocols as of now. Signal protocol, which encrypts messages of billions of people worldwide( WhatsApp, Google, FB uses it, albeit they modify the protocol to collect metadata) is at a much mature stage than any other.
I just want to say that I REALLY COMPLETELY AGREE.
All fair and as I said, I love signal just think it is important to consider.
Also, about letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Rather than someone using discord whatsapp, or sms, being able to use matrix is something to aim for.
