Signal users can give a recurring monthly contribution
support.signal.org
support.signal.org
It is kind of beyond me why people would submit to monthly donations to a company which only care about its own interests.
Signal kind of hits a sweet spot of usability and security, but it's incredibly tenuous and I don't trust the company to hold my interests at heart. It seems like we should be able to do better.
I think it was about spam
It doesn't mean these aren't important issues. Until Signal drops the phone number requirement (nothing beats that for efficient user tracking), allows desktop use without requiring a smartphone anywhere in the process, open sources their server code, and allows for third party clients in a reasonable way; I agree with dfkajglag: not yet an ally of user freedom.
I could handle the closed server for enabling me to use IM to talk to people. But these two points are what make it a non-starter for me.
The actual problem with Signal is that they took US State Department funding. That doesn't mean it's an op necessarily, but suspicious nonetheless.
Network effects.
If you’re only findable via custom handle versus the phone number your network already has, you’ve reduced the network’s value to your contacts. Put another way, if I join a messaging service and it says two of my contacts are on it (but many more may be), that’s close to a non-starter.
That’s a private gain at the network’s cost. For a challenger, their decision to bar that albeit limited form of free-riding is perfectly rational. For a dominant network, I am much more sympathetic to the call for anonymity.
Network effects make these virtually indistinguishable. If a network is unusable it doesn’t help anyone.
There may be an argument, however, for charging for the opt out.
Even if that was the case, " it's strictly less usable than WhatsApp" is not true, because other messengers can provide other quality of life features.
" That means in practice, it's unusable." is not true either. Remove "Status" support from WhatsApp and you get strictly less usable than WhatsApp. Still, it is not unusable.
Signal is pretty close to being strictly less usable than WhatsApp btw.
And everyone with a phone has a phone number.
Why should everyone be forced to give away their phone number?
Why should everyone be forced to use the same app including it's limitations?
Why should everyone be forced to make a contract with the same vendor?
It could well be that it's not a requirement, because people don't think about it or take it as given.
Imagine Email or phones would work the same way Signal works (with respect to the above concepts).
Is non profit a requirement for most messaging app users?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10451559/One...
TLDR: people are just not aware of their requirements
https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/privacy-policy
https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/security-and-privacy/end-to...
Concessions have to be made somewhere.
Good reminder for those that don't know, but did anyone ever claim otherwise? From the very start, releasing the source code was meant exclusively as a way to ensure trust == security. It was never about software freedom - the only freedom the devs mentioned was freedom of speech (encryption and censorship-resistence).
In my experience, I don't think so. It's really hard to get users to pay for a free app. If you've gotten them over the activation energy required, it usually works better to ask for more. Users who contribute less also tend to churn more and cause more support burden. So you don't need just to convert 6x more at $10 / yr vs. $60 / yr but more like 10x. And 10x is really, really hard to do, ime. Again, the main thing you fight is getting users to pay anything at all.
For users willing to donate at all, the difference between (say) $2 and $5 might not be that much. Asking for more might therefore actually maximize the return.
All other users probably wouldn't donate regardless of whether it's $1 or less, so why bother considering them in your model. (edit) Offering an $1 option would just get you 0 of these users, and possibly lower the returns of the otherwise-$5-donaters above.
I take that as a lesson.
That being said I do think there's value in a $1/month option, because that shouldn't be hard to rationalize. If something that's ad-free, operationally simple, and provides an improved level of privacy for it's users - one that requires humans and services to operate and be maintained - and still that can't be rationalized at $1/month, then the end user doesn't value what Signal is or can offer. Never mind the tradeoff one makes for "free" alternatives.
In India, Amazon prime is around $1.5/ month. Same $2.5 for Netflix mobile only basic plan.
My point is, $5/month might sound reasonable for most folk in the us but outside that, with purchasing power greatly reduced to a factor of 1:80 for example with India and USA conversion rate, these sound very expensive.
So my question is, should I pay netflix the privilege to enable me to not pirate because its easier or pay double to signal for something like matrix can give for free or self hosted at my own cost?
I don't pay for any of the said services because I find those prices too much so there is no way I could be bothered to use signal and pay for it.
I would rather set up a matrix server at a lowendbox vps, pay for annual subscription and get all my friends over. I pay for fun of learning about stuff, managing it and knowing I control the data
You also state...
> I would rather set up a matrix server at a lowendbox vps
...and my guess here is that you're going to spend roughly $2-5/month doing this anyway. Plus your hours invested. This is squarely why I'm willing to donate to Signal via my contribution. There's value in someone making sure that this works for me and those I communicate with on Signal. I manage and control far too many other things - so I'm also with you on having that control, knowing about alternatives and controlling my data when and where it makes sense. But I don't want to be in the business of owning a messaging platform for friends and family and Signal fills that gap in a great way.
My post was purely a positional statement and not meant to be construed as any sort of guilt trip of those who don't contribute.
my point is, if we are doing apples and apples comparison, old free signal competed with whatsapp/telegram. now, it is competing with netflix and prime in terms of cost because whatsapp/telegram is not paid for now.
my point is, if you are paying, why not go all the way and support matrix? signal is pretty hostile towards foss ideology and building your own servers, clients and such. the idea was "diluting the brand" but now its apparent. they wanted the signal brand to remain with the official services only because then they can charge for it.
can't you pay for matrix https://element.io/personal-plans if you do not plan to deal with the hassle of selfhosting which imo many people enjoy.
i understand the network effect of signal/whatsapp/telegram because the whole number directory thing but other than that, what does it have "better" than matrix? assuming tomorrow ALL your friends and their friends of friends use matrix instead of signal, would you feel the difference?
i am not shilling for matrix in particular. this just seems to be the better free software (foss) alternative to signal shenanigans and their disdain towards foss ideology
> you're going to spend roughly
Good relatively high-performant virtual machines can be had for $0 a month. I know of at least three different ways of getting them (all 100% legal), plus a few that don't work anymore.
> Plus your hours invested
These hours have payed many times over thanks to knowledge and experience gained from them.
> In India, Amazon prime is around $1.5/ month. Same $2.5 for Netflix mobile only basic plan.
> My point is, $5/month might sound reasonable for most folk in the us but outside that, with purchasing power greatly reduced to a factor of 1:80 for example with India and USA conversion rate, these sound very expensive.
They have a currency selector. If you pick Indian rupees, the the base level is 200 rupees a month (which Google says is $2.68).
I have tried and, dude, my group will just not change from their pre-installed messaging apps, except for 2 of them. They don't care that it's more secure (arguably) or that you can pull it up on your computer (my main reason for using it), they just have no interest.
Friends and colleagues are a different tact. I work in a space where Signal makes sense for what I do, people already get it. There are people I work with that I've incented to start using it based on Signal groups they couldn't participate in otherwise. That worked well, but bootstrapping that is the hurdle. Some didn't know what Signal was and didn't question it at all when I suggested it (probably not the best approach). Looking at my Signal "Insights" for the week and I'm at 97% encrypted messaging. The 3% is service messages being delivered via SMS and one person I've texted that I've only recently started interacting with. I've used the "I need to send you this securely" a few times, which has also worked well. In those cases, since the barrier to entry is just installing, it's rarely been met with resistance.
I'm not sure these help. I'd like to think I've trickled Signal out to hundreds of people over the years. Keep in mind when I started with this it was RedPhone/TextSecure, so it's been years. Consistency is a helpful driver.
Software advocacy isn't easy by any means. Most people want to not shake the boat of their current habits especially since it will take effort and time to get accustomed.
How close is your group? It's probably feasible to convince best friends and family to switch, but if your group contains a lot of less close friends and acquaintances, I doubt it's possible for one person to initiate a switch.
Also, it helps if you're willing to be a bit difficult, and refuse to continue to use the old app. But that only works with people who are close enough to care about communicating with you.
I completely agree with you and would give, say, $12/year. But there's no way I'm giving $5/month. Luckily Signal also has a "booster" one-time donation option so I'm just going to "boost" twelve bucks. Maybe I'll remember to give again next February, who knows?
So, ~$5/month gross costs is appropriate when comparing it to deferred "you are the product" and taking into account cryptographers, developers, testers, system administrators, infrastructure administrators, team leads, program leads, and adding in physical infrastructure and network interconnections.
Otherwise you're just valuing against your own perception of "how much is my disposable income", which is different between any economic zone. And that's a poor argument when some people's concept of a steak dinner is a McLaren 720s that's disposable after a month.
Secondly, there are payment processor margins to take into account. At ~$60/year on 12 payments a pre-authorized standpoint, that may be less than on 1 payment of $10. I'm not interested enough to check.
Threema is a better comparison. They offer a commercial, ad-free product with E2E for a one-time fee of 3.99€ in the iOS app store. They also don't sell your address book or other data. They don't even have your phone number.
If you head over to the Apple App store and pull up Threema privacy policy:
Threema has your CONTACT INFO identifiable to you, if you installed their app.
And I don’t know many people who wont put the phone number down for its contact info.
Threema COULD turn that privacy feature around themselves, but … no: it’s a business model. n
Those are defaulted to 4 6 12 25 60 125 but you can enter a custom amount.
The minimum monthly amount is €2,66 here: https://signal.org/donate/
For example with PLN min tier is 12 PLN = 2.64€
I'd bet that they get more by asking this price from more users rather than targeting more subscribers at cheaper prices.
This is from Signal Foundation's Wikipedia. There is a schedule.
Pay $5, get a code that allows creating a single account, enter the code somewhere in the app to allow using a user name in place of the phone. This limits spam and, as this code can also be sent to another person, there is a way to hide the relationship between payer and final user. No need for cryptocoins, NFTs, or other stupid things.
> One challenge has been that if we added support for something like usernames in Signal, those usernames wouldn’t get saved in your phone’s address book. Thus if you reinstalled Signal or got a new device, you would lose your entire social graph, because it’s not saved anywhere else. Other messaging apps solve this by storing a plaintext copy of your address book, social graph, and conversation frequency on their servers. That way your phone can get run over by a car without flattening your social graph in those apps, but it comes at a high privacy price.
Not being forced to add a contact to the phone address book is an extra advantage, as address books are one of the first victims of spyware apps...
Also, with usernames and a desktop app, there is no reason to require a smartphone at all! Seriously, my Android phone is the least secure platform that I use at the moment (lots of proprietary stuff, spyware prone, ...)
Like it's more effort, but not some intractable problem, at least stated like this.
They could even sell existing users UIDs so they could share their contact info without sharing their phone number if they so desired, e.g. via a website. If they charged some nominal fee users could reset their UID. Maybe with escalating prices if done in short succession to make revenue and discourage abuse.
I thought privacy was supposed to be available for free?
Correct. They are asking money already.
Signal justifies not allowing usernames as (partially) an anti-spam measure and I assume they also be doing it to limit the amount of accounts created and, so, the use of server resources for which they pay. Selling these accounts solves both problems.
Also allows us to actually use Signal for groups, I don't like the idea of large groups knowing my phone number.
It seems unlikely that big tech and telecom corporations, whose lifeblood is personal data harvesting, or government, with surveillance states becoming the global norm, are going to agree to adopt a genuinely secure end to end encrypted messaging standard or protocol on the best devices ever to facilitate their practices.
That business model turned out to be acquire critical mass and then be acquired, but I recall people talking about how WhatsApp was hemorrhaging money in the process.
Still to this day no response from Signal support. Every message I send is either ignored or their bot auto-closes the ticket claiming my Signal version is out of date (happened both when sending an email from the BETA version of the app and from their own website without specifying any version at all)
I'd really, really like to support Signal, but unless they distance themselves from MobileCoin again, I can only assume they are in on it to a certain degree.
That’s fine. But don’t ask me for donations on top. Sending donation dollars to fund developers pumping a coin is a strange use of resources.
Is it? Perhaps those developers will come up with a coin that isn't so scummy? Or come at it from a different direction which satisfies your worries.
Is that why Signal has not been banned for these uses yet?
Starting a new blockchain obviously has founder incentives which are great but it only makes sense when people feel like your contributing to the diversity of blockchains not simply copy pasting monero.
>A year ago, Platformer was the first to report that Signal was considering adding cryptocurrency payments to the platform, and it started with MobileCoin. Signal CEO Moxie Marlinspike has served as an adviser to the MobileCoin cryptocurrency, which is built on the Stellar blockchain and is designed to make payments as anonymous as cash.
If you're interested in monero in singal check this project https://ccs.getmonero.org/proposals/vd-molly-payments-stage1...
[1] We want payments in Signal to be fast, private, and work well on mobile devices. The first payments protocol we’ve added support for is a privacy focused payments network called MobileCoin, which has its own currency, MOB. https://signal.org/blog/help-us-test-payments-in-signal/
[2] https://messari.io/asset/mobilecoin/profile/launch-and-initi...
[3] https://www.theverge.com/22872133/signal-cryptocurrency-paym...
Also I’ve recently been back on the App Store for the first time in a long while. WHAT IS GOING ON?! The gall for simple, offline only apps like a little piano keyboard to want monthly fees for continued use. There isn’t even an illusion of continued feature adds or some recurring service.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/4408365318426-S...
All those times when I’ve thought I would pay for service X if it meant not dealing with shitty dark pattern Y. Signal has kept their side of the deal, so now’s the time to pony up the dough.
This and stack exchange would top the list of things I’m willing to pay for.
I like Signal as a product but my opinion of the company making it has soured pretty substantially.
This is true of every app in the history of apps
You seemed to miss the part where Marlinspike got richer off of Mobilecoin, throwing the company's resources at implementing it, instead of working on the product.
then they link this paper - https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1416.pdf which, on one level is great - they're open about the account credential scheme they wish to do.
On the other level, it's a level of complexity.
Yes, "nothing to fear, nothing to hide" and it's on your phone daily - and eh.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360057625692-In...
Then with this in app payment - the only supported crypto is mobilecoin. https://www.mobilecoin.com/
Granted, I don't know much about it, and I do understand the on-ramp for bitcoin/monero/eth/ltc is not as easy and probably as much tracable.
So, after all this banter, it just comes down to being anonymous is a bit hard indeed. :)
Not against paying, not against supporting signal, it's just it is a tricky problem all around.
Is that the only reason why you would like to pay for this service?
It seems irrational to me to justify an expense merely by the existence of other expenses.
I just compare it to other services I pay for that have no free option (e.g. Netflix) but provide less value, so it's a reason for me to pay for Signal because I want them to keep existing and improve the product. Is that irrational?
Did you read the blog post? Not reading it… Seems irrational.
Seeing that the minimum was 5$ left me with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. I know, no one is forced to pay and 5$ for the service is not at all much.
But what can I say. It left a bad taste in my mouth.
I think it's fair enough that Acton would want some return to his $100 million(?) Loan to Signal. But I think more than that this is about creating a business model where users sustain Signal's development and maintenance, rather than Signal sustaining itself through ad tech, just as WhatsApp should have done.
In other words, Acton is creating the app WhatsApp should have been. And that's to be applauded
WhatsApp basically killed interoperable chat by jumping on phones and building a near-monopoly.
Now that I'd happily pay for.
But having such an app would allow law abiding individuals to communicate privately and securely without disclosing their personally identifying data to anyone.
E2EE voice & video conferencing is available in the beta coming in the next release
- Signal killing the whole iPad and iPhone battery in a matter of hours while running in the background, on some days
- terribly slow synchronization between phone and Desktop, catching up on a few hundred messages takes minutes
- awful UX in video calls: microphone button and camera button work in opposite ways (graying out turns one on, the other off)
- awful UX in video calls: if you have multiple people, the camera views are cut into comically wrong letterboxes, often you wont see the person at all anymore
- no giphy on the Desktop client (really, why?)
What would be the best place to voice that these issues are important to me, GitHub issues?
I agree with everything you wrote. In principle, I'd like to support Signal but their UX is terrible for such things. Tried using it for a group and it was so painful. My phone was constantly warning me about it chewing up battery, and message sync between the desktop app was like it was using a 14.4K modem from 1994. I simply could not use it meaningfully for group messaging. Ultimately we went back to Whatsapp. But hey, at least they fixed the Fisher Price background colours for group messages.
Here in India, everyone uses Whatsapp. There was a brief time during the Whatsapp terms of service brouhaha that a bunch of people I know said they'd move to Signal, and they've all slowly moved back to Whatsapp because that's what everyone in the country uses. Seriously, it's practically infrastructure here.
$5/month for a communication app, that is in essence a daily driver, is reasonable for most European/North America users.
Having said that, no-one in my circle uses Signal :/
It’s not a huge cross-section of my friends and family that uses it, but I message a portion of my social network graph every day.
Maybe Mobilecoin will be an alternative in the future that doesn't depend on Google services.
Can someone please explain how come Google/Apple won't be taking a cut in this situation? Is it because they have a special deal with Signal?
I don't like messengers striving for quasi monopolies
> Signal is a nonprofit with no advertisers or investors, sustained only by the people who use and value it.
Wasn't the case that Brian Acton had invested $50 million in Signal?
I guess the salaries are competitive in San Francisco. Spicy!
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
MOXIE MARLINSPIKE (DIRECTOR/CEO OF SIGNAL MESSENGER) $575,275
SCOTT NONNENBERG (SOFTWARE DEVELOPER) $523,376
JOSH LUND (SOFTWARE DEVELOPER) $522,412
TREVOR PERRIN (SOFTWARE DEVELOPER) $514,986
MICHAEL KIRK (SOFTWARE DEVELOPER) $504,466
ARUNA HARDER (CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER) $315,733
-----------
Holy moly, more than half a million bucks each except for the COO.
No."
How?
/s