SignalBotOne – Notification Webhooks for Signal | Hacker News Reader

SignalBotOne – Notification Webhooks for Signal

signalbot.one

60 pointsdanslo49 comments

"Houti Alert" is a hilarious sample notification.

Combined with the demo phone being at zero battery, I'm getting a lot of "early April Fools" energy off of this one.

"However, it is not recommended to use the API to send passwords or war plans."

Cease and desist from Signal incoming, from their legal terms:

> "Signal", Signal logos, and other trademarks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Signal Technology Foundation in the United States and other countries (more info here).

This isn’t an official thing from Signal?

it's right on the page linked:

SignalBot was made by gwillem and is free to use.

My SaaS is sending monitoring notifications using signal-cli, and I regularly run into rate limits (enforced by Signal servers, not signal-cli), especially when sending to new numbers/usernames.

To the author--do you have any plans on how to work around that?

Why should the author work around Signal's rate limiting? Are you asking the author to enable spamming?

GP is presumably asking what their plans are once the service gets popular, runs into the ratelinit, and cannot send any notifications at all (or with significant delays) to the clients.

Messaging is internally rate limited and capped per recipient. And it uses a sender pool.

I use per-recipient internal rate limiting too, that alone is not enough, especially for new numbers. I'm not using a sender pool though.

I guess they've hit the limit, because the bot isn't responding for me.

Doesn't signal ban third party clients?

Personal i wouldn't rely on those notifications and just stick with good working notification services.

Doesn't appear to be open source... absolutely not.

Does it matter? It's a SaaS anyways, so if they wanted to go rogue and use it to eavesdrop on your chats open source wouldn't really prevent that. They even specifically recommend using a dedicated group chat for notification purposes. For self-hosted deployments there's already a multitude of projects that expose an API to send signal messages.

Yes - if it were open-source, you could self host it.

Here ya go. I use this for various notifications for my home network, versus using email.

https://github.com/bbernhard/signal-cli-rest-api

Seems interesting but I have already second app linked to my profile.

https://ntfy.sh

https://github.com/caronc/apprise

Apprise is awesome.

I am using apprise for several years. It works but have few drawbacks:

-no login, almost no security

-sometimes it does not works and there are no logs to see what exactly happens.

-secret storage is very bad

Ntfy I will check thanks.

> no login

That's because the goal is to allow you to stick a proper nginx or webserver infront of it if you need this layer.

> Sometimes doesn't work

Please open a ticket and share why since your able to determine this from your logs. Maybe it can be fixed upstream?

> Secret storage is bad

You can create a string (key) that is randomized > 200+ characters. What can be improved to assist you with your concerns?

Seems interesting but it looks like some cli with web server running on someone else's machine, so basically no security, no encryption. Also probably this bot have an access to your entire chat history.

The bot has access to any sent messages to yourself, plus any chatter in group chats if you have enabled that. So don't use it for sensitive stuff, and use a dedicated group. It was developed to relay sensor data and such, not war plans.

I understand the reference and I appreciate that. Though the whole point of using signal is to have privacy. If you need outside person to send you some messages than that privacy is non existent.

Now, I do not plan wars with Yemen but still want to keep my private conversations with my wife about my furniture, well... private. For solving notifications I can just do what I do now: selfhost matrix and apprise.

So the whole solution seems interesting, though I fail to see point of using it whatsoever.

If you could self host it yourself too? Yes but like that? No.

I love the Signal Home Assistant Add-On. Now home assistant delivers all messages.

I use it for RSS news, device notifications, debugging,...

This so good, I'm afraid it might go away.

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/signal_messenger/

What is the advantage of using Signal for notifications compared to just using notifications built-in into Home Assistant mobile app?

Nice! I was considering setting up telegram/slack/discord for personal push notifications of events in personal IT infrastructure, since Signal is fairly undercooked in this department, but this might be a good solution for me.

Unfortunately I did not receive an instant webhook url... presumably the service was crushed to death.

Still waiting for a native bot API for Signal before I can fully start using it :/

Better docs would be appreciated! Can you guide us to use it? I’m not a slack guy because it’s too distracting, but easy secure chat integrations could be big … keep it up!

Maybe I'm just dense but is there a sample curl somewhere for how to send something to the API URL I just got in my signal chat with BotMaster.1000?

The curl command on the homepage?

curl -d 'something' <your url>

The URL that botmaster gave you is a page that lists your API endpoints (multiple if you have invited the bot to any group chats)

> However, it is not recommended to use the API to send passwords or war plans.

Very good

Who is behind this and how does it work?

Why is this information not present on the front page?

And why does somebody who thinks people would start using and relying on it not immediately understand that that's important information?

pretty clear to me.

>Who is behind this

contact (link to a signal group)

>and how does it work?

"Receive messages on Signal via a simple API. Perfect for notifications and alerts."

"curl -d ' Houthi alert' https://signalbot.one/api/..."

If you don't know what "API" or "webhooks" are, then you're probably not the target audience. That's fine. Your aunt probably doesn't know what an "enterprise workload engine"[1] is, but that doesn't mean vmware needs to provide a dumbed down description so everyone can understand.

https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-infrastructure/vsphere

"Receive messages on Signal via a simple API. Perfect for notifications and alerts." is not "how it works" but "how you use it".

This is "hacker news". A hacker is typically interested in how something works (under the hood).

If a hacker asks "how does this mobile phone work?" then they are not looking for "well here you press a button and then here you speak" but something about radio waves and cell towers and mobile operating systems.

> > Who is behind this

When I looked, this information wasn't there. Only the "buy me a coffee" link. Now it is, thanks.

Not working for me. Even with a Houthi alert.

Contact me via the support link?

You built this? Would you like to comment what your future plans are?

Your self-description is "entrepreneur love for automation". Is it fair to assume that if this takes off then you are planning to introduce paid plans (perhaps with some revenue sharing with the signal folks to lift rate limits for you)?

I built this for fun and my own notifications. I don't think there's much commercial value here since there's zero moat. But it would be nice if we could raise funds for Signal.

I'm suprised "privacy conscience" people use Signal.

Like... Sure! let me just give you my PHONE NUMBER THAT LINKS DIRECTLY BACK TO MY REAL-WORLD IDENTITY so that I can send "secure" text messages.

Signal promoters are clowns.

Do you think its possible that they could be optimizing for a different problem domain than the one you judge them for?

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