We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.
I love Signal but this is one of many problems with centralized servers. Not only can they be disabled by the gov but they cost, as seen here, tens of millions of dollars to keep running at scale.
What is the advantage? Why are we not using P2P systems? If I can download a 30GB video problem-free over and over again, shouldn’t it be simple enough to do with a 1mb text file?
A huge part of their costs is just verifying phone numbers, which is something the service does not need and shouldn’t even have.
to do with a 1mb text file
God you must be like my wife and write fucking novels as text messages.
Lol I think they probably mean like an entire chat history (or page of one), but yeah that’s pretty big.
I was just rounding up
If you are curious, you should give XMPP a shot, it’s equivalent to Signal in terms of encryption, but anyone can host their own. Signal is ideologically opposed to anyone but themselves being in control of your account, and because of that I don’t want to trust them.
That’s great except barely anyone I know uses Signal, much less XMPP
And now here I am, nostalgic for the good old days of having one chat app that could connect you to everyone over XMPP/jabber.
Pidgin exists
Please, don’t recommend pidgin, it’s a security hellhole, and a pretty terrible XMPP client at that. If you want something with a similar vibe, check-out https://dino.im/ or https://gajim.org/ if you are more on the “power-user” side of things :)
Yeah you could even communicate between facebook and google easily. The world didn’t have to be full of walled gardens.
Neither XMPP nor Matrix will ever become “the next WhatsApp”: the current internet has seen too much consolidation for the tech majors to permit it (and open and federated protocols can’t compete, do not have the marketing budget nor the platforms to promote their software, but I salute the EU’s Market Act attempt to shake-up the status quo).
But that doesn’t really matter IMO. What (I believe) is important in the grand scheme of things is that such protocols remain alive, maintained and secure, so that:
small-scale instances can flourish and contribute to a more resilient/efficient internet (think of family-/district-level providers ; this is the kind of service I personally offer: family members and friends at large appreciate that the messages and data that we exchange aren’t shared over some cloud or facebook server for no good reason) IM identities can persist over time: if you are a business or an individual, you may want to look into having a stable/lasting contact address, that will survive the inevitable collapse of facebook/whatsapp/instagram/… If you are old enough, your current email address probably existed before facebook. Why not your IM address?And yes, I hear you, this is rather niche, but what got me there (and on XMPP in particular) is having been long-enough on the internet to become tired of the never-ending cycle of migrations from service to service. More and more people will have a similar experience as time goes, so this niche will only grow :)
the current internet has seen too much consolidation for the tech majors to permit it
While that may or may not be true, it’s really not important for several reasons.
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All current XMPP clients I have seen are janky as fuck.
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No one is going to spend the billions of dollars necessary to advertise XMPP clients to end users who aren’t actively looking for them.
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The vast majority obviously doesn’t care about their privacy.
Just seems like a fruitless endeavour.
WhatsApp started is an XMPP client, but they use lots of proprietary extensions (doesn’t matter since they don’t federate). You can build very robust and scalable messengers with it if you want to.
The open source implementations are developed by like 1-2 guys in their spare time and they’re not far behind (and sometimes even ahead) other federated messengers which received tens of millions in venture capital funding.
You can build very robust and scalable messengers with it if you want to.
What about feature-rich and with a nice UI?
Nothing in the XMPP RFCs says you can’t do that. Go ahead.
Which xmpp clients have you used? Conversations and its forks seem far from janky. Movim is nice, Dino is looking good, Kaidan is looking pretty good. Prose could be interesting.
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If you need to convince your friends to use some app it might as well be XMPP compatible instead of another walled garden. If you can get your friends on board, you win, even if nobody else uses it.
Ten years ago sure, the days I’d suggest matrix instead.
I assessed XMPP vs Matrix about 8 years ago, and strikingly, the basis on which it didn’t make the cut still applies today. Here’s what I responded to a sibling post: https://programming.dev/comment/5408356
In short, Matrix dug themselves into a complexity pit with an inadequate protocol, survived for a while on venture capital money (upscaling servers and marketing at all cost), all of it dried up, and now they are in financial trouble. Matrix won’t disappear overnight, but is definitely losing the means to run the managed instances and the client/server ecosystem.
Is Matrix’s problem just the large scale? I thought it worked relatively well if you’re just using it for personal needs like smaller servers and personal bridges.
Matrix problems become unmanageable at scale, but the effects of the underlying complexity can be felt long before: https://telegra.ph/why-not-matrix-08-07
It works great for me for personal use yes.
They’re supporting development of MLS for managing encryption for groups
Yup, like pretty much everyone else :) https://nlnet.nl/project/XMPP-MLS/
Isn’t that why they built matrix 2? Or am I thinking of element 2?
Edit: it’s matrix
If you read between the lines, Matrix 2 is practically about handing the client state over to the server (what they refer to as “sliding sync”). Realistically, this is an admission that the protocol is too complex to be handled efficiently on the user’s devices. I’m not saying there are not clear benefits (and new trade-offs) to the approach, just that in the grand scheme of things the complexity is shifted elsewhere (and admins foot a larger bill).
And Element X as client.
They are kinda shooting themselves in the foot with all their big rewrites though. Like Vector, Riot, Element, Element X (and I think before vector/riot there was another official client). And Synapse/dendrite… It feels like they spread their development over too many fronts.
It’s difficult to maintain privacy in a P2P environment. In naive implementations, your IP address will be visible to all the peers you connect to. This is the case in e.g. BitTorrent.
Signal has this issue with video/voice calls as well; by default they operate on a P2P basis for performance reasons, and they expose your IP address to the second party. Signal has an option in the settings to relay voice/video calls through their servers specifically to mitigate this.
There are some workarounds for anonymizing P2P, like routing through Tor or I2P. Tor, however, has known exploits and is probably not suitable if you need to hide your activity from advanced adversaries like world governments (e.g. political dissidents, journalists, etc.)
I2P sounds interesting but I’m not deeply familiar with it. I understand that I2P clients also act as relay nodes, which puts an additional bandwidth burden on users. I’m not sure if I2P is more resilient against government-level attacks than Tor. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who is more familiar with the protocol.
I am not concerned with the people I’m actively chatting with having my IP address.
If you’re using it for personal correspondence with people you know and trust, that’s probably fine. However, a secure and private communications platform should support more extreme use cases as well.
If you’re a journalist, for example, you might need to communicate with people you do not know or trust. You could realistically be talking to someone who wants to kill you, or who is being monitored by people who want to kill you, particularly if you are covering high-profile political issues or working with whistleblowers (or are yourself a whistleblower). Even revealing information as broad as what city you’re in (which would be revealed by your IP address) could be a risk to your physical safety.
Even though I do not personally face such high-level threats in my life, I feel better using services that allow for the possibility. Privacy is a habit, and who knows what tomorrow might bring?
A MitM sniffer would be able to see the source and destination IP addresses, not just the person you’re chatting with. Even if the data is encrypted, P2P is still vulnerable to a layer 3 attack.
Will the same apply if you’re in a lot of open group chats though?
Depends on who is in the group chats. Primarily I am concerned with keeping them out of the hands of corporations, eg: Google, Meta, MS, AWS, etc. to be added to giant databases and used to profile me or unjustly subpoenaed by the gov.
I‘m not an expert on this topic, so someone correct me if I’m wrong. Signal is only storing stuff temporarily to pass it on, so I’m assuming you’d have the exact same costs even if it weren’t centralized. Maybe even more as it’s probably cheaper to have it managed in one place. I’m assuming all this would do is distribute the cost, but otherwise be the same?
You’re not wrong. Federation would have higher costs but distributed over more people. Even with pure P2P a-la BitTorrent things might not be significantly cheaper because you’d likely still need to host authentication centrally or federally. You’d only eliminate the message bandwidth costs.
The thing is, we already have a way to distribute the costs - people subscribe to support Signal. Some pay more, others less. Whether I run a node that serves 100 people or subscribe for $10/month, it’s somewhat equivalent. So the practical takeaway should be - if you want for Signal to keep signalling - subscribe if you can afford it.
I’m assuming all this would do is distribute the cost, but otherwise be the same?
Exactly. I can locally process the 1-3 messages/day I send on my device rather than having billions of messages processed on a single server.
I can even host my own Matrix or XMPP encrypted server on a $100 machine consuming ~7W and host several hundred users easily.
XMPP maybe. Matrix is a bloated protocol which costs a lot more to host.
The difference is that there’s enough unused capacity on your personal device to handle all the traffic any typical user needs to handle in a day many times over. Likely, that load is so little it won’t even affect your battery life.
Wouldn’t you still need a server in between to temporarily store the messages if the other person isn’t available?
No, P2P = Peer to peer, meaning no servers are required in between.
Wouldn’t that mean both have to have a connection at the same time? What if one is offline?
Wouldn’t that mean both have to have a connection at the same time?
Yes.
What if one is offline?
How do you think you’re going to receive messages offline?
How much time does your phone spend offline?
One device can send a receipt when received. If the other device doesn’t receive that receipt it can just keep pinging periodically until it receives it.
You can also just hook up any old phone or computer, install the app, and let it run as the server.
For more info on how this currently works you can check out Keet.io
You can also just hook up any old phone or computer, install the app, and let it run as the server.
If you have a static IP address, if you want to bother with securing and maintaining it, if you’re willing to deal with downtime when something inevitably breaks, if you’re willing to deal with lost data or also maintaining a backup solution, if… a dozen other things that most people don’t want to deal with.
Funnily enough their biggest expense (sending SMS during registration) is making the accounts less private.
I imagine not paying for it and being overloaded with spam bots would be more expensive (otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it this way!)
There are lots of reasons to want fewer spam bots and verified identities other than cost.
Privacy and anonymity are not the same thing.
Anonymity is a form of privacy. While for most people it’s not necessary to be anonymous to have privacy, it’s essential in some cases, like whistleblowers or people living under dictatorships (or even in some democracies where governments keeps trying to get their paws on all metadata).
They could save a lot on infrastructure costs if they decentralised their network and stopped using phone numbers as unique identifiers.
I’m all for decentralised networks, but they do have their flaws. I use Matrix every day, and there are a lot of times the keys need to be resent, messages don’t get sent or deleted on shaky internet, etc. Issues like this make it seem broken to normies. Signal Just Works™️
Absolutely, and I use Signal for a few things. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s far better than most (looking at you, Facebook’s WhatsApp, with your previous Pegasus attack vector).
Signal Just Works™️
Until you drop your phone in the swimming pool, and every message/photo you’ve ever received is just… gone. Forever.
Sorry but I don’t buy any claim that Signal “just works”. It’s pretty clear they care about security more than anything else even when that means making decisions that are user hostile. And that’s fine - if you feel like you need that level of security I’m glad Signal exists. But it doesn’t really align with the general public and Signal is never going to be a mass market messaging service unless something changes (Signal or the general public).
What’s weird to me is an app that excludes itself from phone backups considers SMS a valid form of authentication when a user links a device to a phone number - especially when you can necessarily link a device to a number that is already tied to someone else’s device. Like how is that ever going to be secure? Spoiler: it’s not. It’d make a lot more sense to me if users simply crated a username and shared it with other people instead of a phone number… and if they forget their password… come up with new username.
Signal provides a backup option. The auto backup for SMS on android is provided by google and likely uses google drive. I don’t know for certain but I would guess the encryption options and security of that route would be impossible to guarantee and the public backlash of signal users knowing their data was being sent to Google’s servers would be massive.
I’ve setup my signal backups to a local folder on my phone. I then have SyncThing running on my phone and home computer so it automatically gets sent once it’s created.
You want SimpleX then. No number needed.
+1 for this. From my tests, SimpleX seems fast, reliable, secure, and private. I haven’t tried daily driving it, though.
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Downside is minor bugs re inviting friends:
Gets confused by invites from Facebook (can’t automatically strip the trailing tracking code from the URL).
Fails scan of QR invite with your maybe camera app. Must scan from app.
November 9th, the verge: Signal tests usernames so you can avoid sharing your phone number
the phone number is still going to be required for making an account, you can just choose to not share it with others and give them your username instead.
Yes but you still need one and you still lose access to your account if you lose your number.
In total, around 50 full-time employees currently work on Signal
[…]
When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year.
That’s 380k/employee on average. Even if half of that went to taxes and other expenses, on average they’re paying their employees around 190k/year.
Bro, as a European dev, that’s triple my salary! They could possibly double or triple their workforce if they hired from outside of the US.
When running a business, you need to budget 3x salary for actual TCO of a staff member:
1x covers their direct salary 2x covers retirement fund, electricity, office space, and infrastructure items unlike server and laptops for corporate use etc.
The 3x multiplier is for when you’re a services company, and that represents a possibly profit margin.
So for signal, your $380k becomes $190k which in my experience is average for a US tech sw dev at a mid to early senior level.
I donate to signal monthly and I have no problems with the costs they’re posting. I work in SV tech and I’ve seen 20x worse numbers.
I’m extremely curious where you get those numbers from, I operate businesses and that doesn’t pass the sniff test.
I’ve used the 3x multiplier for staff planning at services companies since the early 2000s.
Perhaps there are regional differences, but they’ve rung true for planning billable rates of return at every services company I’ve worked at in the last 20 years here in AU.
I realise that the services aspect isn’t relevant, but having the sum of indirect staff costs equivalent to staff salary cost when office space is involved isn’t a massive stretch in my experience. (Indirect costs would include office rent, utilities, infrastructure and a share of shared functions such as IT, HR, facilities etc…)
3x is too much tbh. It’s more like 2x in total, at least going by european points of view - I don’t know what would make the US more expensive though with even less welfare. And office space in these days is a diminishing cost of course with all the hybrid/remote options. Laptops cost is pretty negligible. I think Signal does have a lot of hosting costs though.
As an American dev, you should check out other silicon valley salaries. After hearing what some folks there make 190k doesn’t make me bat an eye.
True, but Signal is choosing to hire such people. There’s talent all over the world and all over the US. There’s absolutely no need to only hire people from one highly expensive region.
I wonder why FAANG companies don’t all do that.
I’m guessing because of the strong worker laws in Europe.
That is indeed a lot. They must have most of these in Silicon Valley.
However it is their choice to do so. They don’t have to be in the most expensive place in the world for developers.
I prefer sponsoring matrix though as it’s really open. Signal is just a slightly nicer walled garden. Also, Matrix doesn’t need to be linked to my mobile number which is a godsend because I tend to change those once in a while and it’s a real nightmare bringing all whatsapp contacts over.
Is it just me or is $19 million per year for 50 full-time employees insane?
Even for US salary standards.
Not at all. That’s $380K per person if everyone is making the same. Engineers with a few years of experience at Meta make $400K+.
Don’t forget the employer taxes, insurance, recruitment costs and so on. It wouldn’t surprise me if the employees are earning on average half that.
Role of thumb is an employee costs roughly twice their base salary, as the employee still needs to cover insurance, taxes, sick time, and other benefits.
That leaves an average salary of 190K for the 50 employees. That isn’t much for tech.
My guess: People who can be as competent with security as they need are very expensive.
For the current distribution I quote from the linked source :
Current Infrastructure Costs (as of November 2023): Approximately $14 million dollars per year.
- Storage: $1.3 million dollars per year.
- Servers: $2.9 million dollars per year.
- Registration Fees: $6 million dollars per year.
- Total Bandwidth: $2.8 million dollars per year.
- Additional Services: $700,000 dollars per year.
Yes, but I was talking about the salary part, which is separate from the costs you mentioned.
It’s 19 million just for people.
Yhea no worries, I was just trying to get all the budgets together. I agree it seems quite an high budget
Also from the source:
To sustain our ongoing development efforts, about half of Signal’s overall operating budget goes towards recruiting, compensating, and retaining the people who build and care for Signal. When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year.
Would be interesting to see how this compares to XMPP or Matrix. Obviously the development costs something for each of those, but the hosting costs are spread out across each of those hosting an instance.
Yup, that’s a big reason why centralized protocols aren’t sustainable. XMPP is 25 years old (which is older than almost anything else on the contemporary internet) and thriving. Unfortunately, judging by the cycle of messengers coming and dying, and people still being eagerly part of that, this isn’t something that people value very much.
this isn’t something that people value very much.
More likely something people don’t even know about since no one is out there spending billions of dollars singing the song of XMPP.
Forgive the ignorance but does xmpp have the same features as signal, particularly around e2e encryption?
They should do a charity stream event or something. Do Q&A stuff, get interest of more people, and raise money?
