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 due to the US intelligence community, which lavishly financed Signal’s creation and maintenance over several years, severing its support for the app.
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.
The “XMPP internet standard” has not approved end-to-end encryption. Their OMEMO standard has been languishing for the past 8 years as not even a draft.
Signal has something going that XMPP does not: it’s a finished product. XMPP hasn’t even started thinking about Sealed Sender messages yet.
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
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.
“No contacts”
What are phone numbers?
Signal has been forked already, including the back ends. Session is demonstration of this. They changed the architecture. But there’s no reason you yourself could not stand up your own independent signal compatible back ends
Signal the protocol is not going to die. It’s very open source and resilient. Anyone can stand up their own signal compatible servers today and reproduce the network. It’s a critical mass problem, so you would need some reason for a bunch of people to switch signal networks.
Signal the foundation, and the signal foundation servers may die at any time it’s unlikely but it’s possible.
Could some project like Molly.im stand up their own signal servers, and federate with normal signal for people who aren’t on the Molly servers? Absolutely. They could make the signal clients network agnostic, talking to different contacts on different networks. They could do this today. But, running those servers is going to cost money.
All your contacts will still be gone when their servers shut down.
So? Data permanence isn’t the main idea of Signal.
Now everyone is using WhatsApp again and all energy that went towards convincing everyone to use Signal is lost. A better use of that energy would have been be to promote provider independent internet standards.
Not in my social circles.
All your XMPP contacts will be gone from their respective servers if they shut down too. Case in point: DuckDuckGo
Using the current server distribution of my contacts, I would never loose more than 13% of my contacts if a single server shuts down. Federated systems are much more resilient against providers shutting down as well as takeovers. Think Reddit vs Lemmy, Twitter vs Mastodon, Signal vs XMPP.
I tried XMPP. It was a nightmare.
Finding clients for all the platforms that support all of the extensions that make it a viable alternative to something like WhatsApp or Signal…
Here is what I found works pretty good
Android: Conversations Linux: Dino Apple: Monal Windows: Gajim