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.

    • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.comEnglish
      36·
      1 year ago

      to do with a 1mb text file

      God you must be like my wife and write fucking novels as text messages.

    • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      19·
      1 year ago

      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.

        • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          11·
          1 year ago

          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?

        • I_am_10_squirrels@beehaw.org
          3·
          1 year ago

          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.

    • fer0n@lemm.eeOP
      13·
      1 year ago

      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?

      • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
        9·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • admiralteal@kbin.social
        6·
        1 year ago

        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, for simple messaging. Likely, that load is so little it won’t even affect your battery life.

        • fer0n@lemm.eeOP
          5·
          1 year ago

          Wouldn’t you still need a server in between to temporarily store the messages if the other person isn’t available?

            • fer0n@lemm.eeOP
              13·
              1 year ago

              Wouldn’t that mean both have to have a connection at the same time? What if one is offline?

                • Kaldo@kbin.social
                  9·
                  1 year ago

                  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.

                  • admiralteal@kbin.social
                    1·
                    1 year ago

                    Sure, but you also just… don’t have to do that. None of that is necessary fore core functionality of a messaging service, IF you stipulate that both devices must be online at the same time to ping each other.

                    The only thing you need is some very basic addressing service so they can find each other, and there are entirely P2P solutions for this that already exist and work without issue. See: bittorrent.

                    The ONLY drawback of having no server, fundamentally, is that the two devices need synchronicity. If they both aren’t online at once, messages won’t get delivered. Which is not a big deal for a modern smartphone given that most of them are online close to all of the time.