I really wish the EU would put up funds for open source software, like signal, it seems to be something they could get behind for the greater good. My previous job involved creating a graphical programming language for the generation of GPU shaders, which the EU partly funded. I knew it was going nowhere, and it made me slightly sad tax payer money was being used on something I knew, despite my best efforts, would not work.
Not as impactful as a realtime donation but I recently changed my Amazon Smile charity to the Signal Foundation after a few years with my previous selection. I was surprised to learn they were an available option.
I also installed a browser extension to automatically bring me to smile.amazon when buying anything on Amazon - so far it has had no weird glitchiness when not buying something and works exactly as advertised. Highly recommend looking into this option if you're forgetful like me - so far it has helped me donate 4 times that I would have otherwise forgotten.
All my friends are in Signal. One of my favorite group chats is in Signal. My mom is using Signal, I just sent her a message I might need to leave WhatsApp, so she immediately installed Signal all by herself. Now we have video chats that have been working really well.
I mean, this is the first time the mobile app gives trouble. I'd wish the desktop app would be better, like it's been the biggest problem between me and Signal. Otherwise it's an amazing tool and I'm happy to donate for it to be even better.
They could easily add an optional badge to avatars showing that you donated $1 that year via an optional in-app purchase. The subtle social pressure in a lot of group chats would be pretty effective, and it would help raise awareness that it is run by a non-profit foundation.
"...As of June 2020, Signal had more than 32.4 million total downloads, and the app had approximately 20 million monthly active users as of December 2020...." [0]
"...The initial $50M in funding was a loan, not a donation, from Brian Acton to the new nonprofit Signal Technology Foundation. By the end of 2018, the loan had increased to $105,000,400, which is due to be repaid on February 28, 2068. The loan is unsecured and at 0% interest..." [1]
What happens when they add 50M or 100M more users?
This is one of the most frictionless donation buttons ever. I love it.
Patreon, Paypal, SEPA transfer, all those are a hassle, comparatively.
This donation thing used by Signal works exactly as it should be. Enter numbers, hit enter, done. No "please cookie us", no 20 times transfer to other domains, no account creation, and they also don't require stuff like MasterCard 3D secure (which IMNSHO really is useless for donations).
I don't think the problem is money, at least for now. They are either running in a datacenter and can't add capacity fast enough, or have a scale bottlenech in their design, and just weren't designed for this scale.
me too. just donated. please comment below if you also donated. let's keep this thing running! Its personal interest now, because I moved bunch of groups from whatsapp and its not working now! but at the same I love these guys for what they do.
Signal is being used by at least 10 well-paid medical professionals (group chat) that I know of, and one of them proclaimed today that Signal is owned by Elon Musk (probably because he tweeted about it). I did not care to educate them. And this is in a first world country with a rather wealthy population.
Why am I saying this? Users don't give a damn, they expect free things, and they expect things which work. They have been taught to use appstores on their phones where tapping on a button installs an app and everything just works with zero effort on their end, while completely ignoring the work that someone put into creating the very app they depend on. Majority will never, ever, even think about it, let alone click on the developers website to find out who created the miracle they use.
This practice needs to end. I believe that it is time to stop making free products. Developers should unite in this and finally start to value their hard work.
> I just donated to Signal after seeing the error banner in the app.
I've tried to donate, but none of my 3 cards worked, I got "card rejected error" without any info why and none of banking apps notified me about new transactions.
don't forget that you can use the Signal protocol in Skype with Skype Private Conversations and delete your own call metadata afterwards as well.
edit : which presumably drives licensing income from Microsoft to The Signal Foundation, which I am presuming is better than nothing and if like me you can start using Signal protocol for calling your family elders via Skype without friction, and I simultaneously create widespread adoption of the Signal protocol, I can't see any downside myself anyhow.
if you can please consider making a regular recurring payment of a few bucks every month rather than a one-shot lump sum. this is because it's easier for a company to budget and plan with recurring revenue than a one-off donation.
I've been using Signal for a couple years now. Finally deleted WhatsApp this week. This is the first outage of Signal that I noticed. It's a shame, but growing pains do happen.
"We have been adding new servers and extra capacity at a record pace every single day this week nonstop, but today exceeded even our most optimistic projections. Millions upon millions of new users are sending a message that privacy matters. We appreciate your patience."
This is not good. I've moved so many people over in the last week. For purposes of getting them invested, this is a truly inopportune moment for an extended outage.
I'm afraid Signal really dropped the ball on this one. I'd be surprised if any of the new 50M users stick around after this fiasco. Also, this doesn't seem to actually be a scaling/hardware issue like they claim. They're running on AWS so they should be able to throw more hardware at it in a matter of minutes, hours tops. As of now, they've been down for 14 hours! Not sure what's going on but it's the absolute worst time to have this happen :/
Edit: worth noting that I've been a Signal user since ~2015, and I've stood by them through multiple amateur-hour mistakes (including one where the iOS app would simply crash on boot for about a week, rendering it unusable to me and every other iOS user). The app was just starting to get into a non-insanely-buggy state that I was quite happy with, so it's upsetting to know that these sorts of mistakes are still being made.
At least they tell you about it - there's a banner on the top of the app. Last time WhatsApp was having issues, it didn't give any indication - messages just weren't being delivered (but as a user, there's no way to distinguish between "no messages" and "messages not being delivered").
For all of you saying we should switch to Matrix, please outline the user sign up flow in your comment. Be detailed. Your audience is your 50 something aunt who calls her iPad her Facebook.
I fully expect to be downvoted to oblivion for this opinion but it needs to be said. Signal has been down for nine hours. the vast majority of people who turned to this platform today as an alternative to Whatsapp or Facebook probably quit looking into it after the first two minutes of that outage.
for a platform that bills itself after installation as a suitable drop in replacement for your SMS service (and encourages you to shill it to friends as such) this is completely unacceptable and could have easily been avoided with better leadership and architecture.
Cheerleading your users endorsement of privacy on twitter during an outage is insulting.
Most sites and apps monitor things like news sites, twitter and the like for instances where their namesake may be trending. This is done in order to quickly head off DDoS type outages due to things like the slashdot effect. Signal doesnt do this for the same reason Signal is centralized: Moxy writes code like he still lives in 2006.
- Nobody scrambled to bolster capacity after the electric car porn star (Elon Musk) gave a full throated endorsement?
- Nobody raced to improve capacity after Apple looked to be in a position to piss in Facebooks cheerios?
- Nobody even thought to reconsider capacity after Whatsapp showed up in the news JANUARY 6 with a bombshell announcement of privacy changes for users? we waited over a week?
It also needs to be said --yes im aware of my audience-- that centralized services DO NOT scale. Moxys response to this has been cantfix/wontfix, so in traditional dev fashion he throws more hardware at the problem to make it go away instead of looking into a better architecture.
Microservices do not scale. Yes, they scale across the cloud, but they do not scale across support channels. Microservices trade gaming cloud providers for precious pay-by-the-second service for an endless byzantine dumpster fire of almost impossible to diagnose failure conditions. A highly secure end to end encrypted service that expects to replace your SMS needs to be quick to diagnose and fix. Again: NINE HOURS.
A more callous review would suggest that Signal remains centralized because Moxies waiting for an IPO, or an offer from FAANG to buy him out. Im certainly not of that opinion, but FWIW this was a disaster for Signal and most of HN is about to break an arm patting the company on the back.
Whatsapp certainly took notice, and certainly used it as an opportunity to win back some of its detractors.
This is the first big outage I've felt affects me personally in any meaningful way as someone who has tried to stay away from overly depending on cloud services and SaaS like Gmail or slack. I first noticed that a couple of hours ago my messages seemed to be hanging and going through without the typical confirmation. The status page has no more information than the title at this point.
I think it’s because many people from India joined Signal after Dhruv Rathee published a video suggesting people uninstall WhatsApp and install Signal or Telegram. He’s got 1.7M views within a day, and I’m sure he’s bringing lot of new users to Signal [and NordVPN because of the paid promotion].
I am very interested in hearing the postmortem of this extended outage technology/architecture stand point.
Not to be cynical, but I wonder if this is caused by an attack by the company who is losing users!
I'm using Signal from the early days on where a lot of stuff wasn't working properly. I try to comvince people for quite some time now and whenever there was like a privacy issue on WhatsApp or other messaging apps, I saw people discovering and moving to Signal.
Sadly, whenever there was such an opportunities to shine, they ran into technical difficulties.
As a result, many friends tell me on a different messaging app like telegram that they finally tried out signal but moved on because it wasn't working.
This makes me very sad and I hope that the Signal team is able to learn from that and plan ahead.
@Signal please take your opportunities and make a reminder like a big banner in your office reminding you to ask yourself "is there an opportunity?" Or more concrete "did WhatsApp messed up with privacy?"
For me, I will still try to convince more people to switch to signal :-)
I just donated to let them know I'm interested in their continued existence. I feel bad - my wife and I have been a user of Signal 100% for the past 4+ years and we wouldn't want to use anything else.
For some Signal related education, listen to the Security Now! podcast from 2016 - Steve Gibson dives into the protocol underlying Signal, "Open Whisper Systems".
Time to jump ship! Use element / matrix an open, decentralized, end-to-end encrypted chat protocol with slick clients for Android, iOS, Desktop & Web: https://element.io/
Also easy to self-host a server, if you need full control:
Wow, at first I thought "they finally hit their limit with the new signups." but now they've been down for a couple of hours and I'm starting to worry that it might be more severe.
What's the endgame with Signal? It is identical to whatsapp in how it works and what features it has/lacks. Whatsapp has big daddy FB to pay the bills (which would be massive for such an app). I doubt Signal can survive on donations from a few privacy conscious users.
For a free service, intended to survive with very small amounts of donated money, you need a fundamentally different architecture. Whatsapp was not built for this, and since Signal copied them, neither is Signal.
Even if Signal is able to survive on meagre donations, I would think it is a better use of that money to be spent on resilient, distributed architecture than AWS bills. A good architecture ensures sustainability, a large AWS bill just makes Bezos richer.
This is a positive sign - it means there've been so many more signups lately! I did just convert a whole bunch of close friends over to Signal this past week, so I hope they can ride out this temporary outage and not leave the service :'( It took too much 'social effort' to move them all over
One thing on my wishlist for Signal that's curiously still missing is the lack of a Web app.
On desktop at least, I'm generally of the position that messaging apps should need no capability outside of what's available in my browser (i.e. sending notifications), so when the option is available that's the one I tend to go for (usually have my commonly used ones sitting around in a pinned tab).
Pretty much every chat app out there today (including WhatsApp) has a web app. Anyone know why Signal doesn't? Is it just a prioritization/lack of resources thing?
[+] [-] alan5|5 years ago|reply
I realised I was more than happy to pay WhatsApp's yearly charge back in the pre-Facebook days (think it was 70p or so?).
Figured I could give Signal a few quid every now and then, maybe keep a server up for a few seconds :)
Donation link should anyone be interested: https://signal.org/donate/
[+] [-] CodeGlitch|5 years ago|reply
Oh well...
[+] [-] somehnguy|5 years ago|reply
I also installed a browser extension to automatically bring me to smile.amazon when buying anything on Amazon - so far it has had no weird glitchiness when not buying something and works exactly as advertised. Highly recommend looking into this option if you're forgetful like me - so far it has helped me donate 4 times that I would have otherwise forgotten.
[+] [-] pimeys|5 years ago|reply
All my friends are in Signal. One of my favorite group chats is in Signal. My mom is using Signal, I just sent her a message I might need to leave WhatsApp, so she immediately installed Signal all by herself. Now we have video chats that have been working really well.
I mean, this is the first time the mobile app gives trouble. I'd wish the desktop app would be better, like it's been the biggest problem between me and Signal. Otherwise it's an amazing tool and I'm happy to donate for it to be even better.
[+] [-] krrrh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JUjFJE2I9Y|5 years ago|reply
"...The initial $50M in funding was a loan, not a donation, from Brian Acton to the new nonprofit Signal Technology Foundation. By the end of 2018, the loan had increased to $105,000,400, which is due to be repaid on February 28, 2068. The loan is unsecured and at 0% interest..." [1]
What happens when they add 50M or 100M more users?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_%28software%29 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Foundation
[+] [-] eurg|5 years ago|reply
This is one of the most frictionless donation buttons ever. I love it.
Patreon, Paypal, SEPA transfer, all those are a hassle, comparatively.
This donation thing used by Signal works exactly as it should be. Enter numbers, hit enter, done. No "please cookie us", no 20 times transfer to other domains, no account creation, and they also don't require stuff like MasterCard 3D secure (which IMNSHO really is useless for donations).
Zero hassle, 100% great, and with a nice UX.
[+] [-] sgloutnikov|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleaebeling/2020/12/22/new-bi...
[+] [-] chanakya|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbjorklin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atoav|5 years ago|reply
Remember: regular donations are better because they help with long term planning.
[+] [-] earth2mars|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dt3ft|5 years ago|reply
Why am I saying this? Users don't give a damn, they expect free things, and they expect things which work. They have been taught to use appstores on their phones where tapping on a button installs an app and everything just works with zero effort on their end, while completely ignoring the work that someone put into creating the very app they depend on. Majority will never, ever, even think about it, let alone click on the developers website to find out who created the miracle they use.
This practice needs to end. I believe that it is time to stop making free products. Developers should unite in this and finally start to value their hard work.
[+] [-] ossusermivami|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bilal4hmed|5 years ago|reply
Donate to them so they can buy more servers https://signal.org/donate/
* If you work in the US, many corporations will match your donation. Easy double of your donation
* Set https://smile.amazon.com to Signal, so your purchases on Amazon go to Signal
* Use services like Paypal to donate, that sends 100% of the money to the foundation
[+] [-] agilob|5 years ago|reply
I've tried to donate, but none of my 3 cards worked, I got "card rejected error" without any info why and none of banking apps notified me about new transactions.
[+] [-] brylie|5 years ago|reply
Right now is the time for us to invest in Signal to help see it through this groundswell of adoption.
[+] [-] Cullinet|5 years ago|reply
edit : which presumably drives licensing income from Microsoft to The Signal Foundation, which I am presuming is better than nothing and if like me you can start using Signal protocol for calling your family elders via Skype without friction, and I simultaneously create widespread adoption of the Signal protocol, I can't see any downside myself anyhow.
https://az705183.vo.msecnd.net/onlinesupportmedia/onlinesupp...
[+] [-] bilal4hmed|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DyslexicAtheist|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philshem|5 years ago|reply
I've been using Signal for a couple years now. Finally deleted WhatsApp this week. This is the first outage of Signal that I noticed. It's a shame, but growing pains do happen.
[+] [-] aendruk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpaint|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedevc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bgentry|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pamar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danbruder|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonnypotty|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrochkind1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icelancer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slenk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Daniel_sk|5 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1350165610936766464
[+] [-] hcurtiss|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shafyy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superdisk|5 years ago|reply
Edit: worth noting that I've been a Signal user since ~2015, and I've stood by them through multiple amateur-hour mistakes (including one where the iOS app would simply crash on boot for about a week, rendering it unusable to me and every other iOS user). The app was just starting to get into a non-insanely-buggy state that I was quite happy with, so it's upsetting to know that these sorts of mistakes are still being made.
[+] [-] tomp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcMgD2BwE72F|5 years ago|reply
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007321171-Ca...
You'll keep all your message history in Signal that way. Good to know when your contact don't have an Internet connection, too.
[+] [-] chopin24|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markhalonen|5 years ago|reply
I paid for Matrix and got my team on it, working great.
The nice thing about paying for something is you know what it costs.
[+] [-] nimbius|5 years ago|reply
for a platform that bills itself after installation as a suitable drop in replacement for your SMS service (and encourages you to shill it to friends as such) this is completely unacceptable and could have easily been avoided with better leadership and architecture.
Cheerleading your users endorsement of privacy on twitter during an outage is insulting.
Most sites and apps monitor things like news sites, twitter and the like for instances where their namesake may be trending. This is done in order to quickly head off DDoS type outages due to things like the slashdot effect. Signal doesnt do this for the same reason Signal is centralized: Moxy writes code like he still lives in 2006.
- Nobody scrambled to bolster capacity after the electric car porn star (Elon Musk) gave a full throated endorsement?
- Nobody raced to improve capacity after Apple looked to be in a position to piss in Facebooks cheerios?
- Nobody even thought to reconsider capacity after Whatsapp showed up in the news JANUARY 6 with a bombshell announcement of privacy changes for users? we waited over a week?
It also needs to be said --yes im aware of my audience-- that centralized services DO NOT scale. Moxys response to this has been cantfix/wontfix, so in traditional dev fashion he throws more hardware at the problem to make it go away instead of looking into a better architecture.
Microservices do not scale. Yes, they scale across the cloud, but they do not scale across support channels. Microservices trade gaming cloud providers for precious pay-by-the-second service for an endless byzantine dumpster fire of almost impossible to diagnose failure conditions. A highly secure end to end encrypted service that expects to replace your SMS needs to be quick to diagnose and fix. Again: NINE HOURS.
A more callous review would suggest that Signal remains centralized because Moxies waiting for an IPO, or an offer from FAANG to buy him out. Im certainly not of that opinion, but FWIW this was a disaster for Signal and most of HN is about to break an arm patting the company on the back.
Whatsapp certainly took notice, and certainly used it as an opportunity to win back some of its detractors.
[+] [-] robotbikes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] njsubedi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] earth2mars|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GRBurst|5 years ago|reply
Sadly, whenever there was such an opportunities to shine, they ran into technical difficulties.
As a result, many friends tell me on a different messaging app like telegram that they finally tried out signal but moved on because it wasn't working.
This makes me very sad and I hope that the Signal team is able to learn from that and plan ahead.
@Signal please take your opportunities and make a reminder like a big banner in your office reminding you to ask yourself "is there an opportunity?" Or more concrete "did WhatsApp messed up with privacy?"
For me, I will still try to convince more people to switch to signal :-)
[+] [-] dan_linder|5 years ago|reply
For some Signal related education, listen to the Security Now! podcast from 2016 - Steve Gibson dives into the protocol underlying Signal, "Open Whisper Systems".
[+] [-] sean_pedersen|5 years ago|reply
Also easy to self-host a server, if you need full control:
$ mkdir -p ~/synapse
$ pip3.6 install --user jinja2 matrix-synapse
$ cd ~/synapse
$ python3.6 -m synapse.app.homeserver \ --server-name my.domain.name \ --config-path homeserver.yaml \ --generate-config \ --report-stats=no
[+] [-] jandrese|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perryizgr8|5 years ago|reply
For a free service, intended to survive with very small amounts of donated money, you need a fundamentally different architecture. Whatsapp was not built for this, and since Signal copied them, neither is Signal.
Even if Signal is able to survive on meagre donations, I would think it is a better use of that money to be spent on resilient, distributed architecture than AWS bills. A good architecture ensures sustainability, a large AWS bill just makes Bezos richer.
[+] [-] muunbo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eins1234|5 years ago|reply
On desktop at least, I'm generally of the position that messaging apps should need no capability outside of what's available in my browser (i.e. sending notifications), so when the option is available that's the one I tend to go for (usually have my commonly used ones sitting around in a pinned tab).
Pretty much every chat app out there today (including WhatsApp) has a web app. Anyone know why Signal doesn't? Is it just a prioritization/lack of resources thing?